Communication

Cuneiform was the most wide speared and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East.

Its active history comprising the last 3000 year before the Common Era.

The origin of cuneiform may be traced as far back as the end of the 4th millennium BCE.

During the 3rd millennium BCE the writing became successively more cursive, and the pictographs developed into conventionalized linear drawings.

Due to the prevalent use of clay tablets as writing materials (stone, metals or woods)

The earliest type of Semitic cuneiform in Mesopotamia

The Neo Assyrian period was the great ear of Assyrian power , and the writing culminated in the extensive record from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh(650 BCE)

Cuneiform was sometimes adapted, as in the consonantal script of the Canaanite city of Ugarit on the Syrian cost (1400 BCE)n

The Assyrian and Babylonian kingdom in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, when Aramaic had become the general popular language

Babylonian and Assyrian survived as written language in cuneiform almost down to the time of Christ.

Papyrus as a writing material resembles paper

Pliny the elder, the Roman savant and author from the 1st century CE, gave an account of the manufacture of paper from papyrus

Egyptian texts included scientific writings and a large number of myths, stories, and tales

Papyrus was continuously in use in Greece from the 6th century BCE

Objects called books are mentioned by Greek writers as having been in use in the 5th centuries

Practically was a mark of the Greek book. The alphabet although not invented by the Greeks, was adapted and stabilized by them as an instrument of verbal communication rather than of decorative purpose.

THE GREEK AN LATIN ALPHABETS

The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of western culture

The main achievement of the Greek was to provide representation s of for vowel sounds

The Greek alphabet derived from North Semitic script in the 8th century BCE

Greek inscriptions written from left to right

By the middle of the 4th century BCE almost all local alphabet had been replaced by the Ionic , which became the common , classical Greek alphabets of 24 letters                                                                                            The adaption of the Etruscan alphabet to the Latin language probably took place some times in the 7th century BCE

The original Etruscan alphabet consisted of 26 letters, of which the Roman adopted by 21 

After the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BCE, a large number of Greek words were borrowed by the Latin language.

PARCHMENT AND VELLUM 

Parchment and vellum are materials prepared from the skin of animals.

 the Egyptian sources  to documents written on leather as early as 2450 BCE

Egyptian leather was scroll of the 24th century BCE survives

For 400 year the scroll and the codex existed side by side.

The vellum of most early manuscripts through the 6th century CE, was a good quality 

A Greek text of the Bible that probably was produced in the 5th century and now preserved in the British Library, London.

PAPER

Paper , which for more than 500 years has been the basic material used for written communication and the dissemination of the information, is actually a felted sheet of cellulose formed from water suspension on a wire screen.

Modern paper is frequently traced to about 105 CE, an official attached to the Imperial court of China

In 793 the first paper was made in Baghdad during the time of HARUN AR RASHID, with the golden age of Islamic culture that bought papermaking to the frontier of Europe.

Paper mills proliferated from the end of the 8th century to the 13th century, from Bagdad and then on to Spain, then under Arab domination

Papermaking center grew up in Italy after 1275 and in France and Germany during the 14th century

The invention of printing in the 1450 brought a vastly increased demand for paper.

In 1800 a book was published that launched development of practical methods for manufacturing paper from wood pulp and vegetables pulp.

Ground wood pulp was first made in Germany in 1840, but process did not come into extensive use until about 1870.

Soda pulp was first made in 1852 in England, and in 1867 a patent was issued in the United States for the sulfite pulping process.

In 1800 Moritz in the Germany discovered that paper could be sized in vats with rosin and alum.

In 1798 Nicolas Louis Robert in France constructed a moving screen belt that would receive a continuous flow of stock and deliver an unbroken sheet of wet paper to a paper of squeeze rolls.

A cylinder paper machine was devised by John Dickinson, an English papermaker. 

THE PRINTING PRESS

Few single invention have had such far reaching consequence as the 15th century of printing with movable metal type.

The first large scale printing workshop was established by the Gutenburg and was producing a sufficient quantity of accurate type to print a  Bible about 1455.

By 1500 almost 40,000 record editions of books had been printed in 14 European countries, with Germany and Italy accounting for two- thirds.

By the end of the 22nd century CE, the Chinese apparently had discovered printing

In Japan about 764-770, Buddhist incantations ordered by Empress Shotoku.

In china 868, the first known book, the diamond sutra and beginning in 932, a collection of Chinese classic in 130 volumes ,at the initiative of Fong Tao ,a Chinese minister

About 1041-48 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appear to have conceived of movable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking

In the first half of the 15th century small, genuine books of several pages, religious works or compendiums of Latin grammar by Aelius Donnatus and called donats,were published by a method identical to that of the Chinese 

The admirable art of typography was invented by the ingenious Johan Gutenberg at in Mainz in 1450 

 The first complete book extant in the west and the earliest printed rom movable type is a BIBLE, named after its printer, Gutenberg, who completed it about 1455.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography has aptly been called the most important invention since printing press

The principle was probably known to the Chinese and ancient Greek such as Aristotle more than 2000 years ago

Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer Giambattista della porta described in detail the use of a camera obscura with lens

In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a phenomenon known since the 16th century 

Niepce succeeded from 1822 onward in copying oiled engraving onto lithography stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates

In 1826-27, using a camera obscura fitted with a pewter plates, Niepce produced the first successful photograph fom nature, a view of the courty yard of his country state , grass, from an upper window of the house 

 In 1839 niepce’s son and Daguerre sold full right to daguerreotype and the heliograph to the French government