With writing, ancient history is easier for modern people to grasp and understand.
Chinese characters are one of the oldest scripts in the world, with a history of about 6,000 years. There are three main types of ancient scripts found elsewhere in the world: pictorial hieroglyphs, which were widely used by the Egyptians around 3500 BC. There are also cuneiform scripts used by the Sumerians and Babylonians, which also came about 3500 BC. The strokes of this kind of writing are thick and thin, like wooden wedges, so it is called cuneiform. Then there is the alphabet script invented by the Phoenicians more than 1000 years ago.
Initially, the Egyptians wrote the characters like simple drawings, and later most of the writing became symbols. What do these symbols mean? Thousands of years later, people have not figured it out for a long time.
In 1799, the French army that invaded Egypt found a black stele at the mouth of the Roseda River in the Nile Delta. After washing the dirt off, you can clearly see that there are three kinds of characters engraved on it. This is the famous "Rosetta Stone", which is now preserved in the Museum of London, England.
At that time, there was a young scholar in France named Champollion. He specialized in the language, writing, history and culture of ancient Egypt. The Rosetta Stone aroused the interest of Chambollion, who wanted to understand the reading of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs based on this stele.
On the stele, the upper two are ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs inscribed in different fonts, and the lower one is Greek. The Greek-speaking Champollion knew that the stele was erected in the 2nd century BC and that it read the egyptian kings singing praises and praises. However, he is not very clear when asked how these ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are read.
Later, Champoryan discovered that when ancient Egyptians wrote the names of kings, they had to add boxes or draw thick lines under the names. On the Rosetta Stone, there are also some words framed with lines, is this the name of the king? After some further exploration, Champolym recognized the names of the ancient Egyptian king Ptolemy and the queen Cleopatra from the hieroglyphs in comparison with the Greek script. In this way, he knew the pronunciation of the 12 hieroglyphs.
On the basis of this discovery, Champollion continued his efforts, and finally unveiled the mystery of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. Originally, in this kind of text, some symbols represent a word, and some represent the combination of letters. There are also 24 symbols, which have the meaning of the modern alphabet, all of which have more than 700 symbols.
Chambollion understood hieroglyphs, giving people a real understanding of the history of ancient Egypt.
The homeland of cuneiform is in the two river basins of western Asia (present-day Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East), which is one of the cradles of ancient human culture. The Sumerians used not paper but clay tablets. At that time, they didn't know how to make paper. The Two Rivers Valley lacks stones and cannot carve words on stones like the ancient Egyptians did. The Sumerians made rectangular clay plates out of clay, cut them into triangular tips with reeds or bone rods and carved them on them, and then dried the clay plates or dried them with fire. This becomes a clay tablet document. Some clay tablets are also divided into two layers, inside and outside, with the same words engraved and sprinkled with dry ash in the middle. If the outer layer of handwriting is damaged or tampered with, it can be corrected with the inner layer of text. For more than 100 years, hundreds of thousands of such mud tablets have been excavated in the Two Rivers Valley.
There is also something similar to the "Rosetta Stone" in the identification of cuneiform scripts, which historians call "Beheston Rock".
On a cliff near the ruins of the village of Behiston in western Iran, there is a rock on which three scripts are also inscribed: Babylonian cuneiform handed down from the Sumerians, Neo-Elamese and Ancient Persian. People read cuneiform through Ancient Persian. Inscribed on the rock is the suppression of the rebels by the Persian king Darius I in 522 BC.
Around 1500 BC, cuneiform became the universal script for international exchanges. Countries often sign treaties or exchange letters in cuneiform script, as in English today. Because at that time, cuneiform scripts had the characteristics of rich vocabulary and beautiful glyphs. However, the reading and writing of this kind of writing is very complicated and not easy to master, and it is gradually replaced by alphabetic writing.
The first to invent the alphabet were the Phoenicians. They lived in the area where today's fence can be. The Phoenicians were mainly engaged in commerce, often traveling by boat to various places to do business. When they keep accounts, they feel that cuneiform is cumbersome, inconvenient, and needs a simple writing. Thus, around 1300 BC, references to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs created a script represented by 22 consonant letters. Almost all of the phonetic anagrams in modern European countries come from the Phoenician alphabet. Therefore, the Phoenician alphabet can be called the ancestor of the European pinyin script.
The ancient Greeks added some vowel letters to the Phoenician alphabet, creating the ancient Greek language. They attributed the credit for inventing the alphabet to the Phoenicians. Greek legend goes: There was a clever Phoenician carpenter named Cadmus. Once, he was working in someone else's house and needed a tool that he just forgot to bring. He built a piece of wood and wrote something on it for a slave to send home to his wife. His wife looked at the wood and, without saying a word, took the tools to the slaves. The slave was stunned, thinking that the wood had spoken in a mysterious way of what his master needed. It is said that the wood was written on it with the first letters of Phoenicia.
The alphabet was, of course, not invented by Kadrmus alone, but was collectively created and gradually formed by many Phoenicians in their long-term practice.
In short, when the ancient writing was produced, the history of human society also entered the slave society, and they established a splendid ancient civilization. In addition to China, these splendid ancient civilizations include Egypt in the Nile River Basin in Northeast Africa, Babylon in the Two Rivers Basin in West Asia, and India in the Indus River Basin in South Asia. In addition, there are Persia, Assyria, Judea and other countries. To tell this history, we must start from these countries.