First Writing Paper Egypt Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

The word 'paper' comes from the egyptian word 'papyrus' which means that which belongs to the house. The inner layer of the plant was sliced into long strips and placed side by side with a second layer on top at a right angle. Then the whole thing was soaked in water and pressed under a heavy rock for 21 days.

Early cylinder seal depicting beer production it's tempting to claim that the development of a writing system was necessitated by the need to keep track of beer, but perhaps we can be satisfied that it was just part of it. the signs of the sumerians were adopted by the east semitic peoples of mesopotamia and akkadian became the first semitic language and would be used by the babylonians and assyrians. The akkadian characters continued to represent syllables with defined vowels. for the next step toward the development of an alphabet, we must go to egypt where picture writing had developed sometime near the end of the 4th millennium bc. One of the earliest examples is the name of nar mer, either the first or second pharoah of an united egypt in 3100 bce. The name appears as two syllabic figures between the cows' heads on the kings cosmetic pallete. first glyph nar egyptian monster fish, cuttle fish.

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Second glyph mar is a pictograph of a drill or borer unlike akkadian, the egyptian syllabic system had no definitive vowels. Others were determinatives that at the end of the word gave a sense of the word and others were idiographs. Eventually, however, certain egyptian hieroglyphs such as which was pronounced r'i meaning mouth became the pictograph for the sound of r with any vowel. The pictograph for water pronounced nu became the symbol for the consonantal sound of n.

This practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an alphabet or the one sign one sound system of writing. The egyptian consonants were: the word paper comes from the ancient egyptian writing material called papyrus, which was woven from papyrus plants. Papyrus was produced as early as 30 bce in egypt, and in ancient greece and rome.

Further north, parchment or vellum, made of processed sheepskin or calfskin, replaced papyrus, as the papyrus plant requires subtropical conditions to grow. In china, documents were ordinarily written on bamboo, making them very heavy and awkward to transport. The chinese court official ts rsquo ai lun described the modern method of papermaking in ad 105 he was the first person to describe how to make paper from cotton rags. Other sources trace the invention of this type of papermaking to china in 150 bce. It spread slowly outside of china other east asian cultures, even after seeing paper, could not figure out how to make it themselves. Instruction in the manufacturing process was required, and the chinese were reluctant to share their secrets. The technology was first transferred to korea in 600 and then imported to japan around 610 by a buddhist priest, dam jing from goguryeo, where fibres called bast from the mulberry tree were used.

After further commercial trading and the defeat of the chinese in the battle of talas, the invention spread to the middle east, where it was adopted in india and subsequently in italy in about the 13th century. The oldest known paper document in the west is the missal of silos from the 11th century. Some historians speculate that paper was the key element in global cultural advancement. According to this theory, chinese culture was less developed than the west in ancient times because bamboo, while abundant, was a clumsier writing material than papyrus. Chinese culture advanced during the han dynasty and preceding centuries due to the invention of paper and europe advanced during the renaissance due to the introduction of paper and the printing press.

Paper remained a luxury item through the centuries, until the advent of steam driven papermaking machines in the 19th century, which could make paper with fibres from wood pulp. Although older machines predated it, the fourdrinier machine became the basis for most modern papermaking. This machine worked by a continuous process: pulp was fed onto a belt of wire cloth that was continually moving, so that the sheet was left on the surface while the water drained through the wire. The paper was smoothed on rotating heated cylinders, or calendars, and on to the reel.

This was cut up into the appropriate length of sheets, which were then traditionally counted into reams. The fourdrinier brothers were able to increase their production of paper ten fold, from 60 to 100 lbs. Fifty years after the mechanization of the process, the price of paper had dropped by almost one half. Together with the invention of the practical fountain pen and the mass produced pencil of the same period, and in conjunction with the advent of the steam driven rotary printing press, wood based paper caused a major transformation of the 19th century economy and society in industrialized countries. Before this era, a book or a newspaper was a rare luxury object, and illiteracy was the norm.

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