Language detective

When the Egyptian civilization ended, the use of hieroglyphs was forgotten—that is, until 1822, when French scholar Jean-Franęois Champollion ■ studied the Rosetta Stone. a granite slab engraved with the same text written in three ■L different Scripts w (hieroglyphs, a version of hieratic called H demotic, and Greek). B Champollion used the Greek script to JM crack the codę.

Chinese

writing

The earilest Chinese gr writing was on oracie bones—pieces of ox bonę or tortoise Shell that were used to    '¹

communicate with the gods.

By 500 bce Chinese scribes were writing gr with ink and brushes on bamboo strips tied together to form a roli. They also wrote on silk cloth. Paper was invented in 104 ce.

Chinese is written with characters gr known as hanzi.

Indus

The people who lived in the Indus Valley (Southern Asia) in around 2600 bce wrote on tiny stone seals engraved with carvings of animals. No one has ever deciphered the script.

/y Twelve basie strokes are used to form gr the characters, and a character may consist of between 1 and 64 strokes.

Ho w to: make a sheet of papyrus

Etruscan

The Etruscans lived in Italy before the Romans. They used a form of the Greek alphabet and left thousands of stone inscriptions. Their language is unrelated to any known European language.

Rongorongo

This script was used by the people of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean. It has remained a mystery sińce its discovery in the 1860s.

Cover with

a piece of linen and put in a wooden press to release the sticky sap. This will bind the strips together. Hang out in the sun to dry.

Out the stems into lengths about 20 in (50 cm) long and peel away the outer skin.

r"* WEIRD ™ | OR WHAT?

The Inca of Peru never learned to write, but they used Quipu (“talking knots”) to record and send Information. Each duipu was madę up of hundreds and sometimp.c: th™    ’

The oldest-known work of literaturę is , Epic of Gilgamesh

mg poem from Sumeria lat dates from around 2000 bce.

First writing 266|267