This cover has four stamps issued by the erstwhile
Republic of Venda which depict four different styles in The History of
Writing as described in the following paragraphs.
(10c) stamp showing the Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing, distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for
a stylus. The name cuneiform itself simply means "wedge
shaped", from the Latin cuneus "wedge" andforma "shape," and came into
English usage "probably from Old
French cunéiforme."
Emerging in Sumer in the late 4th millennium BC (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a
system of pictographs. In the
third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more
abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller, from about 1,000 in
the Early Bronze Age to about 400 in Late Bronze Age (Hittite
cuneiform).
The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of
the Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian languages, and it inspired
the Ugaritic and Old
Persian alphabets. Cuneiform
writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician
alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian
Empire. By the 2nd century AD, the script had become extinct, and all knowledge
of how to read it was lost until it began to be deciphered in the 19th century.
Between half a million and two million
cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times. Of
these, only approximately 100,000 have been published.
(20c) Evolution of Chinese Characters. Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文; pinyin: zhōngwén)
comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language, and
the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. Chinese characters do not
constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary.
Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character
generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word
on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are
often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or
pronunciation.
Various current Chinese characters have been traced
back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the
process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After
a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under
the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). Over the millennia, these
characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.
Some Chinese characters have been adopted as part of
the writing systems of other East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean.
Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: Educated Chinese
know about 4,000; educated Japanese perhaps about 3,000. The large
number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western
alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese. Chinese speakers
in disparate dialect groups are able to communicate through writing, because
standard written Chinese is based on a standard spoken language ("Mandarin").
Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there is a
well-developed Written Cantonese tradition.
(25c) Cretan
hieroglyphs are undeciphered hieroglyphs found on artefacts of early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. It predates Linear A by about a century, but continued to
be used in parallel for most of their history.
In addition to the
possible evolution of the hieroglyphs into the linear scripts, relations to Anatolian hieroglyphs have been suggested.
(40c) Egyptian hieroglyphs (god's words) were a formal writing system used by the ancient
Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive
hieroglyphs for religious
literature on papyrus and wood. Less formal variations of the script, called hieratic and demotic, are technically not hieroglyphs.
Thank you very much Maria for this interesting FDC with
these four wonderful stamps.
