Importance of Writing

Importance of writing

Initially writing was invented for early men to keep track of cattle, grains and other properties; eventually they found many other uses for writing. Writing was also used to mark territory in order to warn others of dangers. The most important use of writing has to be documenting events in order to share with others and these stories would be told to other generations, which are the first glimpse into recorded history. The writing and reciting of these event or history to the new generations is a way of establishing traditions and culture, through these writings we gain knowledge and understanding of the past, can we make improvements on the future. By keeping records we can see just how far we have evolved from the past to the future.
Writing styles however have made tremendous changes over the years, early writing can actually be dated in about forty-thousand years ago, starting with the cave drawings, these drawings were pictures, this early style of writing is called pictograph, the use of pictures to tell a story, and sometimes these writings are just writings. The ancient Egyptians also used and still used a more refined version of this style of writing; we can see evidence of this in art effects such as vases and tombs. Different symbols had specific meanings; some were to show the wealth, status and role in society. Early Egyptians also started a new more modern style of writing, which was called acrophony, this was the beginning of what we now used today this style which is the alphabet. The early version of the alphabet had a lot of characteristics of pictographs, letters were still being represented by symbols now instead of these pictures meaning a whole story, now with this new style each of these symbols represent a letters. There are countries that are still using hieroglyphics as their writing style; such cultures are Iraq, china, Japan and most Middle Eastern and Asian countries. The only countries that use the alphabetic system are mostly Europeans and countries that have European influences.
Without the invention of writing we would have never known our history and cultures, in order to establish a civilized culture. History played a major role in preserving ways of life of their ancestors.