Survey 1

How language began in Mesopotamia:

Learning all about ancient civilizations that discovered and made the alphabet made me realize the importance of history and the struggle our ancestors would go through without a common language. It seems impossible to spend even a waking hour of our day without language. Language is integral and everywhere, on signs, websites, movie titles, books, places, clothing tags… it’s everywhere!

Mesopotamia located on the map
image source: https://www.thoughtco.com/introduction-to-ancient-mesopotamia-171837

Way back in time, around 4000 – 3500 BCE, Sumerian and Harappan proto-writing began to take form. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerian people needed to maintain records of production and trade that led to them using shaped reeds to make triangular marks on clay. This came to be known as cuneiform. They would go on to use this for another three millennia!

Cuneiform is one of the most complicated and difficult texts to decipher. A combination of over 1000 symbols that are a part of a long-extinct language! Mesopotamia, which is current-day Iraq and eastern Syria, is not the only place where proto-writing had been developing. The Harapan civilization had a form of proto-writing that is much more complicated and remains undeciphered as of today.

Plimpton 322 tablet containing trigonometry equations
*Image source:* https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/ancient-babylonian-tablet-may-contain-first-evidence-trigonometry

Mesopotamia had five different civilizations, the Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian civilizations. Babylon was the capital city and, at one point, considered the largest city in the world as well.

The Babylonians in Mesopotamia were so advanced that a study conducted in 2017 shows that they might have discovered trigonometry way before Hipparchus, the Greek Mathematician. The clay tablet Plimpton 322 is stored at Columbia University.

Aramaic scripts
image source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic

Mesopotamia had elaborate trade relationships with many places such as Egypt and the Indus valley civilization (or Harapan civilization.) Indus valley became extinct in 1800 BCE but was present during the Bronze age and had advanced in many ways. One of the cities (Mohenjo-Daro) is still present today in Pakistan as an archaeological site.

Cuneiform was succeeded by the Aramaic, in about 900 BC. Aramaic has 22 letters and was the language used in several verses of the bible as well. In 700 AD, Arabic gradually replaced Aramaic and is still spoken widely today.

I was surprised to see the depth and history of language. After reading about the advanced developments in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilizations, I have a lot of respect and understanding of how we reached here today. Although the amount I read only scratched the surface of it, I still feel inspired and fascinated by the history of writing.