We use ink every day in our printers and pens, but do you know who invented it? The Chinese inventor Tien-Lcheu is considered to be the 
inventor of ink, but the Egyptians were also using ink from very early times. At first, ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with glue. The ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu about 5000 years ago, became common by the year 1200 BC. Other cultures developed inks using the natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meaning attached to each color. Did you know that the Greeks and Romans made ink from the ink sac of the cuttle fish? The first pens ever used were made of reeds. Later, pens made of quills were invented. It was a British lock-smith, Samuel Harrison, who first made pens with nibs made of metal. By the twentieth century, fountain pens flooded the market… and today pens have become so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted!
found that they could make an excellent writing material from papyrus plants.Papyrus is a plant that grows by the river Nile. Papyrus sheets are made from the stem of the plant, but making it is quite a lengthy process. Scribes would make the papyrus sheets into long rolls, and write the text in narrow columns that could be easily read. In ancient China, thin bamboo strips were used as writing material. The Chinese also used silk for important documents. In many parts of the ancient world people used small tablets with a waxed surface. After being written on, the wax can be warmed and smoothed over for use on another occasion. So they had a kind of renewable notebook! Later on, people started using parchment which is made from animal skins. Parchment was usually made from the skin of a goat, sheep or calf, but it was treated to make it soft and smooth for writing. In fact, until the invention of paper, parchment was the most important writing material. Parchment had the great advantage in that it was strong and flexible enough for separate pages of a manuscript to be sewn together to make a book.
invented suddenly on one fine day. It probably evolved gradually from earlier forms of writing. It is generally felt that the people living around Syria and Palestine were the first to use the alphabet. The origins of the English alphabet can be traced back to the Semitic alphabets developed by the people who lived on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. A 3600 year old sandstone sphinx has letters of the Semitic alphabet inscribed on it. When joined together, the letters from the name of the goddess Baalat. A 3000 year old tablet excavated in Syria proves that the people living there during that time developed an alphabet that represented the sounds of their own language. This alphabet has 30 letters, and a special sign to divide one word from the next.The Phoenicians also developed an alphabet of 22 letters, and since they were great traders, their alphabet influenced the development of writing in different parts of the ancient world.
as a system of pictographs. Over time, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract. Cuneiforms were written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed called a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped. This gave rise to the name cuneiform, which means ‘wedge shaped’.The records in cuneiform script that were kept by priests of this time have helped us to learn a lot about this ancient civilization.
temples, tombs and other sacred monuments. A hieroglyphic symbol is a picture of an object that stands for a word, idea or sound used by the ancient Egyptians. There are over 700 hieroglyphic symbols. For example, the hieroglyph for ‘writing’ or ‘scribe’ is formed as a brush, a pigment bag, and a palette. For everyday work, scribes used a more joined-up version like handwriting. It is called hieratic, and it was written quickly. Later, an even faster form of writing called demotic was developed.Writing in Egypt was done by scribes, who were trained professionals. They wrote on paper made of papyrus reed, and used thin reed brushes or reed pens to write. These pens were split at the end to hold ink. Making papyrus was a long and laborious process, so student scribes learnt the art of writing on bits of pottery. They were very cheap, and required no special preparation.Scribes were very important people in ancient 
Egypt, since only a few people could write. They held positions of great honour, and were well rewarded for their work.
events. The first step towards inventing writing was when man began to draw pictures of things he saw… mostly animals and birds, trees and flowers, the sun and moon.A giant step forward was taken when man learned to make pictures that represented not just an object, but a word in spoken language. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia were the first to do this over 5000 years ago. Later, the ancient Egyptians and Chinese also developed a form of picture writing.The next step was when each picture or sign stood for a single sound instead of for a whole word. This was the beginning of the alphabet. The Mediterranean people, the Hebrews and Phoenicians were the first to use an alphabet. In fact, the word ‘alphabet’ comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’.The Phoenicians were great sea traders, and they needed a simple
and efficiency way of keeping accounts. So about 3000 years ago, they developed a system of 22 pictures that stood for the sound of consonants in their language … sound like ‘k’. ‘b’ or ‘f’. The Greeks later added signs that represented the vowel sounds like ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, and ‘u’. Over 2000 years ago, the Romans developed the Roman alphabet which is still in use. Man first started to write on stones or trees using sharp objects. Later, he used reeds to write on clay tablets. The ancient Egyptians also made a kind of paper from reeds called papyrus. During the middle Ages in Europe, people wrote on parchment which was made by splitting animals skin into thin layers. They used quills made with goose or turkey feathers to write. Paper and ink as we know them today, came much later
memory of an ancient Greek soldier, who made a heroic long distance run just to communicate a message. It happened in BC 490. In that year Greece fought with Persia at the town of Marathon. The mighty Persians were miraculously defeated by the comparatively weak Greek army. A Greek soldier named Pheidippides was sent from Marathon to Athens (capital of Greece) to announce the victory. It is said that he ran the entire distance of 40 km without stopping, but moments after proclaiming his message to the city he collapsed dead, from exhaustion.
to the ‘Yo Heave Ho’ theory, language arose from the noises made by people who were engaged in a joint effort to do something like lifting a rock or moving a tree trunk.The people who put forward this theory say that as people worked together in a group, their physical effort produced rhythmic grunts, which over time, became chants, and then language.
log are not of the same thickness throughout. Different sounds are produced by hitting the log at different places. Sometimes, the slit gong is placed on a stand so that it vibrates more freely. The bigger the log, the louder the sound. Sometimes, the sound can be heard 8 kms away! The slit gong was also one of the earliest instruments of communication. Messages sent from one village to another, would often be passed on by the drummer in the second village to another village further away. These ‘talking drums’ could therefore send messages for kilometres and kilometres in every direction.[custom_search_and_filter]