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Topic outline
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Forum
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What happened 7000 years ago?
How did an agricultural society that existed 5000 years before common era suddenly developed an interest in the written record and developed the Cuneiform?
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Session one
Traces the invention of the first recorded communication system at the dawn of history during the Bronze Age in 5000 BCE in Sumer with the creation of the Cuneiform. The journey continues to the land of Pharos to examine the Sacred Writings of Gods and attempts to decipher Hieroglyphs. The session raises questions on the relationship between the word and the thought and engages learners in exercises that develop their understanding of the sign, signifier and signified. Differences in how languages tackle concepts like gender, number and case are examined in order to introduce notions of functionality, purpose and representation to our study of the alphabet.
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What role did cultural exchange and trade play in the spread of the alphabet?
Investigating the interactions between different cultures and the transmission of writing systems through trade routes can illuminate the interconnectedness of ancient civilizations and introduce the concept of language development as a result of contact between civilizations.
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Why were early forms of pictographic representation like Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs, replaced by the Phoenician alphabet?
The exercises engage the learners in discovering the similarities between the sounds of the Phoenician alphabet and present day alphabet. The journey continues with explorations of how the early alphabet of consonants was injected with vowel sounds and symbols by the Greeks to become a fully-fledged language system. Comparisons with present day languages that developed out of the Phoenician alphabet draw learners’ attention to concepts of phonologic representation, directionality, grapheme to phoneme relation, within a wealth of contextual, historical and linguistic narrative.
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The narrative traces the pictorial concept associated with early Semitic representation, the transformations employed by multiple users and the present day shape. A wealth of symbols survived from Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs and are used in our contemporary script. The Odyssey of 7000 years delivered the global language that we employ today in education, transactions, mass media and international communication.
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