Our alphabet is called the Roman alphabet, as compared with the Cyrillic and other alphabets. All of these come from the ancient Greek alphabet, which dates back to about 1100 to 800. The Greek alphabet was probably developed from the Phoenician script, which appeared somewhat earlier, and had some similar letter-shapes.
The Phoenician language was a Semitic language, often called Canaanite. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic, Maltese, Hebrew and also Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. We do not know much about how the alphabetic idea arose, but the Phoenicians, a trading people, came up with letters which were adapted by the early Greeks to produce their alphabet. The one big difference is that the Phoenician script had no pure vowels. Arabic script has vowels which may be shown by diacritics (small marks above or below the line). The oldest Qu'ran manuscripts had no diacritics. Israeli children today use texts with vowel 'dots' added, to about the third grade.
No ancient script, alphabetic or not, had pure vowels before the Greeks. The Greek alphabet even has two vowels for 'e' and two for 'o', to distinguish between the long and short sounds. It is fairly clear from this that careful thought went into both the Phoenician invention and the Greek adaptation. However, no details survive of either process.
Semitic scripts apparently derive from "Proto-Sinaitic", a script of which only 31 inscriptions (plus 17 doubtful) are known. It is thought by some researchers that the original source of this script was the Egyptian hieratic script. By the late Middle Kingdom (about 1900) hieratic had added some alphabetic signs for representing the consonants of foreign names. Egyptian activity in Sinai was at its height at that time. A similar idea had been suggested many years before.
There are a number of scripts which have never been deciphered, despite much effort. Perhaps the most famous are the script of the Indus Valley civilization, and Etruscan. The Indus River civilisation predates other literate civilisations on the Indian subcontinent, going back to about 2500. Their cities of Mohenjo-Daru and Harappa were well-planned, with good drainage. The script is found on seal stones, terracotta, bronze, bone and ivory. All are brief, and the language is unknown.
The Etruscan language used Greek letter-forms, and is found mainly on Etruscan tombs, from Tuscany through to Venice. They were an empire before the Romans, who defeated them, and absorbed their ideas. All knowledge of their language was lost, except that some of the names on tomb memorials can be read from the Greek letters.
The Tărtăria tablets are three tablets discovered in 1961 in the village of Tărtăria (Hungarian: Alsótatárlaka). This is about from Alba Iulia in Romania. The tablets, dated to around 5300 BC, have symbols in clay: the "Vinča symbols". Some claim they are a yet undeciphered language. If this is so, they would be the earliest known form of writing. In 1908 similar symbols were found during excavations, by Miloje Vasić (1869–1956) in Vinča. This is a suburb of Belgrade (Serbia), some 300 km from Turdaș. Later, more were found in another part of Belgrade. Since 1875 over one hundred and fifty Vinča sites have been found in Serbia alone. Many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated. The culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture. Although some of these symbols look exactly the same as some letters in Etruscan, Greek, and Aramaic, they are generally regarded as an original, independent development.
It is only in the last 150 years that most people have been able to read and write in Europe and North America. In many other parts of the world this did not happen until the 20th century. Until then, literacy was mainly for clerics, that is, people who had training as priests. Even wealthy people were often illiterate, and used scribes to write for them. The invention of printing came before mass literacy. Before 1500, each book had to be created by hand, so there were few books available compared to the billions in the world today. Mass literacy needed cheap books.
Even now, there is still widespread illiteracy.
The ordinary use of writing by means of a pen and paper. Can refer to writing for oneself, as in a diary, but mostly it refers to sending letters. Once it was almost the only means of communication between people who were separated. Now, the telephone and e-mail are the most common means of distance communication.
Rock
Rock has several meanings:
Plato
Plato was one of the most important classical Greek philosophers. He lived from 427 BC to 348 BC. A wealthy man, he owned at least 50 slaves and created the first university school, called "The Academy". Plato was a student of Socrates (who did not write) and the teacher of Aristotle, who founded another university, known as the Lyceum. Plato wrote about many ideas in philosophy that are still talked about today. He wrote about ideas of deductive reasoning. One modern philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that all philosophy since Plato has just been comments on his works.
Plato wrote his books in the form of dialogues with two people or more talking about ideas, and sometimes disagreeing about them. The "Laws" is Plato's longest dialogue and probably his last.
Socrates is usually the main person in Plato's dialogues. Usually, Socrates talks with people about their ideas, and tries to see if they believe anything that is illogical. Other people in the stories often become angry with Socrates because of this. People who study Plato argue about whether Socrates really said the same things that Plato makes him say, or whether Plato just used Socrates as a character, to make the ideas he was talking about seem more important.
Plato opposed the rhetorics of sophism and insisted on true justice and equality in his work "Gorgias", and on immortality of soul in "Phaedo".
One of Plato's most famous works is "The Republic" (in Greek, "Politeia," or 'city'). In that work, he describes Socrates's vision of an "ideal" state. The method of questioning in this dialogue, called the Socratic method, is as important as the content. "The Republic" contains ideas of Socrates: "Socrates said it, Plato wrote it."
There are many dialogues that were supposed to be written by Plato. This list includes those he probably did write.
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Book
A book is a set of printed sheets of paper held together between two covers. The sheets of paper are usually covered with a text, language and illustrations. The book is a more flexible format than the earlier idea of the scroll. The change from scrolls to books began in the Roman Empire, and took many centuries to become complete.
A writer of a book is called an author. Someone who draws pictures in a book is called an illustrator. Books can have more than one author or illustrator.
A book can also be a text in a larger collection of texts. That way a "book" is perhaps written by one author, or it only treats one subject area. Books in this sense can often be understood without knowing the whole collection. Examples are the Bible, the Quran all of them consist of a number of “religious books” in this sense of the word. Encyclopedias often have separate articles written by different people, and published as separate volumes. Each volume is a book.
"Hardcover" books have hard covers made of cardboard covered in cloth or leather and are usually sewn together. "Paperback" books have covers of stiff paper and are usually glued together. The words in books can be read aloud and recorded on tapes or compact discs. These are called "audiobooks".
Books can be borrowed from a library or bought from a bookstore. People can make their own books and fill them with family photos, drawings, or their own writing. Some books are empty inside, like a diary, address book, or photo album. Most of the time, the word "book" means that the pages inside have words printed or written on them.