Dinesh's photos with the keyword: The Story of Writing

During the 19th century the nationalist sentiments that sprang up throughout Europe provided a ideological impetus for several rebellions against existing imperial powers. This plate depicts a scene from 1848 revolution in Berlin

Bengal Script, a modern descendant of Brahmi script, on a film poster designed by Satyajit Ray, 1960 The title is Devi (The Goddess). The Bengall script uses a mixture of syllabic letters and vowels arranged in an order based on the determined by Indian phoneticians well over 2000 years ago. Some 200 Indian scripts used today derive from the Brahmi script. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Brahmi_script

This inscription, cut in limestone by Ralph Beyer in the 1980s, is from "Sadhana: The realisation of Life by Rabindranath Tagore (1913) www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6842 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Beyer

The Scholar prepares to write. his paperweight is a carved lion; before him is a bowl of water with a ladling spoon, inkstick and inkstone with ink ground in it; on his left is a juge of wine, cup and a citron in a blow.

Runes are very old letters which Germanic people used before they started using Latin letters in the Middle Ages. In its broadest sense, the word runes can mean any cryptic letters, but it usually means the alphabets used by Scandinavian people from about the year 150 CE to the Middle Ages.

Runes (Proto-Germanic *rūnō 'rune'; *rūna-stabaz 'runic letter') are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets, which were used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialised purposes thereafter.

Etruscan ‘bucchero’ jug, 6th century BC, Inscribed with the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans borrowed the alphabets from the Greeks, altered it, and transmitted it to the Romans. Today most nations use an alphabet

The Rock at Behistun, Iran, showing the inscription that led to the decipherment of cuneiform. They are located more than 300 feet (100 metres) above the road en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great

The Rock at Behistun, Iran, showing the inscription that led to the decipherment of cuneiform. They are located more than 300 feet (100 metres) above the road

Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), the first man to draw accurately the cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis. Niebuhr was an indefatigable traveller and scholar, who returned alone from India to Denmark, via Persepolis. He published his first drawings in 1772. Careful study enabled him to show that there were three different cuneiform scripts at Persepolis

Little info on the letter "X"

“four score and seven years ago” After DeFrancis, 1989 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeFrancis

. . . Writing and reading are intimately and inextricably bound to speech, whether or not we move our lips. Chinese characters do not speak directly to the mind without the intervention of osund, despite centuries of claim to the contrary by the Chinese and by many western scholars. Nor do Egyptian hieroglyphs, notwithstanding the beauty of their symbols and the fact that we can recognize people, animals, objects and natural world depicted in them. ~ Andrew Robin ~ Page 17

The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning "general education" from enkyklios(ἐγκύκλιος), meaning "circular, recurrent, required regularly, general and paideia (παιδεία), meaning "education, rearing of a child" it was reduced to a single word due to an error by copyists of Latin manuscripts. Together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge". (Source Wikipedia) . . . first published in France between 1751 and 1765 and best known as the “Encyclopedie,’ which endeavored to summarize all human knowledge in its 18,000 pages of text, 75,000 different entries, and 20 million words. Its primary editor, Denis Diderot, was one of the heroes of the Enlightenment and indeed the ‘Encyclopedie’ reprsents a culmination of Enlightenment thought which valued reason, science and progress what we know -- above all else . . . Page 5 “HOMO MYSTERIOUS” Author David P. Barash, Phd

Probably the ultimate symbol of this obsession of physical control was the so called 'talantograph' a ligature use to tie the hand into proper writing position. Thus bound it was impossible rest the hand and arm as they executed a long series of character-strengthening exercises. Victorians were drawn to binding to all manner of problems,. . . . . as a literal rendering of their obsession with the mastery of the body. . . . . . Excerpt: "Handwriting in America - A Cultural History ~ Tamera P.Thornton