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The alphabet is the singlemost important and
enduring contribution the Canaanite culture has
given to later civilization. The simple phonetic
alphabet enabled the spread of literacy to the
masses, rather than keeping it in the hands of the
educated scribes.
The earliest writing, dating to the end of
the 4th millennium BCE, has been found in
Mesopotamia and Egypt. Writing involves the use of
a system of signs or symbols to represent the
spoken language. In Mesopotamia, scribes recorded
commercial transactions on clay tablets. In Egypt,
hieroglyphics were inscribed in stone and written
on papyrus. The earliest writing took the form of
pictographic signs in which pictures were used to
represent words and objects.
In Mesopotamia, the pictographs became more
stylized over time and eventually developed into
wedge-shaped linear signs known today as cuneiform.
The word cuneiform means "wedge-form" and is used
to describe the wedge-shaped script formed by
pressing a rectangular-ended stylus -- a writing
stick made out of reed, wood, metal or bone -- into
wet clay. Cuneiform signs could represent either
whole words or phonetic syllables consisting of
vowel-consonant groupings.
The cuneiform script was first developed by
the Sumerians, but in the 3rd millennium BCE the
Akkadians began using the script to write their
language. The Akkadian language and the cuneiform
script were used by the Babylonians and the
Assyrians. Cuneiform continued to be used into the
first century CE. In Egypt, writing took the form
of hieroglyphics which, like cuneiform, began as a
pictographic script and later developed into a
system of syllables. Unlike cuneiform, however, the
hieroglyphic pictographs were never stylized into
linear symbols and use of hieroglyphics continued
until the late 1st millennium BCE. At the same
time, though, the Egyptians developed a cursive
style of writing called hieratic in the earlier
periods and demotic in later times.
Throughout Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan,
writing was primarily rendered on stone, clay
tablets or papyrus. Writing could be inscribed on
almost any material, however, including potsherds,
metal or wax pressed over a wooden board to form a
writing tablet. One other important medium for
writing was the cylinder seal. Cylinder seals were
cylinders made of a hard material like stone or
baked clay, which were engraved with a design. When
the seals were rolled over wet clay, they created
an impression of the engraving. Cylinder seals were
used to mark door locks and closed containers of
goods, and were also used to seal legal documents
or the clay envelopes containing the documents.
They were generally associated with specific
individuals and often carried inscriptions
containing the name of their owner.
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