HOME



picture info

Clay Tablet
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian language, Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of Reed (plant), reed (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were either deliberately fired in hot kilns, or inadvertently fired when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict, making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the first archives. They were at the root of the first library, libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East. Most of the documents on tablets that survive from the Minoan civilization, Minoan and Mycenaean ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Tablet Rimush Louvre AO5476
Tablet may refer to: Medicine * Tablet (pharmacy), a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar, colloquially called a "pill" Computing * Tablet computer, a mobile computer that is primarily operated by touching the screen * Graphics tablet or digitizing tablet, a computer input device for capturing hand-drawn images and graphics * Tablet, a section of columns in a range of rows in Google's Bigtable NoSQL database Confectionery * Tablet (confectionery), a medium-hard, sugary confection from Scotland * Tableting, a confectionery manufacturing process * A type of chocolate bar * Energy tablets Inscription, printing, and writing media * Clay tablet, one of the earliest known writing mediums * Wax tablet, used by scribes as far back as ancient Greece * Notebook of blank or lined paper, usually bound with glue or staples along one edge * Stele, slab of stone or wood erected as a monument or marker * ''Tabula ansata'', tablets with handles * Vindolanda t ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Scribe
A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of Printing press, automatic printing. The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as secretarial and administrative duties such as the taking of dictation and keeping of business, judicial, and historical records for kings, nobility, nobles, temples, and City, cities. The profession of scribe first appears in Mesopotamia. Scribes contributed in fundamental ways to ancient and medieval cultures, including Ancient Egyptian literature, Egypt, Chinese culture#Calligraphy, China, Sanskrit#Writing system, India, Persian literature, Persia, the Roman Empire#Literacy, books, and education, Roman Empire, and Illuminated manuscript, medieval Europe. #Judaism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islamic manuscripts, Islam have important scribal traditions. Scribes have been essential in these cultures for the preservation of legal codes, religiou ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Debate Between Bird And Fish
The "Debate between bird and fish" is an essay written in the Sumerian language on clay tablets, dating back to the mid to late 3rd millennium BC. It belongs to the genre of Sumerian disputations, Sumerian disputation. Genre Six Sumerian disputations are known from Sumerian literature, falling into the literary genre of disputations. Aside from ''Bird and Fish'', other examples include: * Debate between Winter and Summer * Debate between sheep and grain * Debate between tree and reed * Debate between silver and copper These appeared a few centuries after writing was established in Sumerian Mesopotamia. The debates are philosophy, philosophical and address humanity's place in the world. Description The bird and fish debate is a 190-line text of cuneiform script. It begins with a discussion of the gods having given Mesopotamia and dwelling places for humans; for water for the fields, the Tigris River, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and the marshes, marshland, grazing lands for h ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Epic Of Gilgamesh
The ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' () is an epic poetry, epic from ancient Mesopotamia. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian language, Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh (formerly read as Sumerian "Bilgames"), king of Uruk, some of which may date back to the Third Dynasty of Ur (). These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian language, Akkadian. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates back to the 18th century BCE and is titled after its incipit, ''Shūtur eli sharrī'' ("Surpassing All Other Kings"). Only a few clay tablet, tablets of it have survived. The later Standard Babylonian version compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni dates to somewhere between the 13th to the 10th centuries BCE and bears the incipit ''Sha naqba īmuru'' ("He who Saw the Deep(s)", ). Approximately two-thirds of this longer, twelve-tablet version have been recovered. Some of the best copies were d ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Plimpton 322
Plimpton 322 is a Babylonian clay tablet, believed to have been written around 1800 BC, that contains a mathematical table written in cuneiform script. Each row of the table relates to a Pythagorean triple, that is, a triple of integers (s,\ell,d) that satisfies the Pythagorean theorem, s^2+\ell^2=d^2, the rule that equates the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle to the square of the hypotenuse. The era in which Plimpton 322 was written was roughly 13 to 15 centuries prior to the era in which the major Greek discoveries in geometry were made. At the time that Otto Neugebauer and Abraham Sachs first realized the mathematical significance of the tablet in the 1940s, a few Old Babylonian tablets making use of the Pythagorean rule were already known. In addition to providing further evidence that Mesopotamian scribes knew and used the rule, Plimpton 322 strongly suggested that they had a systematic method for generating Pythagorean triples as some of the tripl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Tablet Describing Goddess Inanna's Battle With The Mountain Ebih, Sumerian - Oriental Institute Museum, University Of Chicago - DSC07117
Tablet may refer to: Medicine * Tablet (pharmacy), a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar, colloquially called a "pill" Computing * Tablet computer, a mobile computer that is primarily operated by touching the screen * Graphics tablet or digitizing tablet, a computer input device for capturing hand-drawn images and graphics * Tablet, a section of columns in a range of rows in Google's Bigtable NoSQL database Confectionery * Tablet (confectionery), a medium-hard, sugary confection from Scotland * Tableting, a confectionery manufacturing process * A type of chocolate bar * Energy tablets Inscription, printing, and writing media * Clay tablet, one of the earliest known writing mediums * Wax tablet, used by scribes as far back as ancient Greece * Notebook of blank or lined paper, usually bound with glue or staples along one edge * Stele, slab of stone or wood erected as a monument or marker * ''Tabula ansata'', tablets with handles * Vindolanda t ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Syllabogram
Syllabograms are graphemes used to write the syllables or morae of words. Syllabograms in syllabaries are analogous to letters in alphabets, which represent individual phonemes, or logograms in logographies, which represent morphemes. Syllabograms in the Maya script most frequently take the form of V (vowel) or CV (consonant-vowel) syllables of which approximately 83 are known. CVC signs are present as well. Two modern well-known examples of syllabaries consisting mostly of CV syllabograms are the Japanese kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ..., used to represent the same sounds in different occasions. Syllabograms tend not to be used for languages with more complicated syllables: for example English phonotactics allows syllables as complex as CCCVCCCC (as in ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Chinese Character Classification
Chinese characters are generally logographs, but can be further categorized based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs, but the vast majority are what are called ''phono-semantic compounds'', which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning. A traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Overview Chinese characters have been used in several different wri ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.In total, there were about 1,000 graphemes in use during the Old Kingdom period; this number decreased to 750–850 during the Middle Kingdom, but rose instead to around 5,000 signs during the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for Ancient Egyptian literature, religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic (Egyptian), demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreov ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower Egypt were amalgamated by Menes, who is believed by the majority of List of Egyptologists, Egyptologists to have been the same person as Narmer. The history of ancient Egypt unfolded as a series of stable kingdoms interspersed by the "Periodization of ancient Egypt, Intermediate Periods" of relative instability. These stable kingdoms existed in one of three periods: the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age; the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age; or the New Kingdom of Egypt, New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age. The pinnacle of ancient Egyptian power was achieved during the New Kingdom, which extended its rule to much of Nubia and a considerable portion of the Levant. After this period, Egypt ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Logogram
In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a ''logography''. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are ''phonemic'': their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language. Types of logographic systems Some of the earliest recorded writing systems are logographic; th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Pictograms
A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a writing system which uses pictograms. Some pictograms, such as hazard pictograms, may be elements of formal languages. In the field of prehistoric art, the term "pictograph" has a different definition, and specifically refers to art painted on rock surfaces. Pictographs are contrasted with petroglyphs, which are carved or incised. Small pictograms displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate are called '' icons''. Historical Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (symbols which represent ideas). Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese civilizations began to adapt such symbols to represent concepts, developing them into logographic writing systems. Pic ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]