Evolution of reading and writing

Reading and writing has been the nature of mankind from the very ancient period. Earlier human beings living in jungles, and fighting with wild animals each and every moment for survival, invented symbols for expressing their emotions. They started writing on cave walls. Those  writings were mostly paintings depicting their day-to-day life story and sometimes nature’s events. After this, with civilisation, man’s thirst for knowledge increased, they wanted to study & communicate with others more precisely. Several forms of writing material were invented. Man started writing on stone tablets, tortoise shells,metal plates, small pieces made of clay, wooden panels using sharp objects like stone, wood or bone as stylus. These writing were used for reading after preparation. Egyptian colourful hieroglyphs were carved in stone for glorified display dedicated to royalty and deities.  

Tortoise shell writing

Hieroglyphs

Stone tablet inscription

source: flickr.com 

Writing became widespread with the invention of papyrus  in Egypt. It was durable and long lasting  than all previous writing material. Soon it became popular & costly. It was being exported to all parts of the world. Ancient documents & books in Egypt and some other countries were written on papyrus .

Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

                                                        source: lessing-photo.com

After that other materials were being used as a writing material, such as leather,  parchment (using sheepskins). These were sometimes cheaper than papyrus. Ancient Indians quoted down their knowledge on palm leaves or 'bhoorja-patra', abundantly available in tropical lands. A peacock feather and black soot from lamps were often used as pen and ink, respectively. All the ancient Indian books(including Veda) were written in this method. Ancient Tibet scripts were written with gold on handmade paper. 

                                                      source : http://www.coolbuzz.org

                   

With the invention of  wood-pulp paper the cost of writing material began to decline. After that printer and type-writer were invented. Books printed on paper came into the society. Later Computer was invented and writing or reading became more easy and modernised.Till date all the books are being printed on paper. 

source: flickr.com

 

But the best quality of mankind  is that they cannot stop inventing. There have been problem carrying heavy books to places where needed. In childhood we used to read books made up of paper and we just could not imagine that books can be read by any other way. But some genius imagined, and E-books were invented. A whole book is being converted to e-book in different formats like .pdf, .chm, .pdb . With this invention, one can take all his necessary books with him/her in own laptop, palmtop, tablet, mobile and even in DVD. The whole encyclopedia Britannica can be carried in few DVDs. Huge paper books became easily available for reference at any time with this e-book format. 

 The latest addition to reading material is kindle, which is light-weighted and easily carriable. Many publishers are publishing their books in kindle format. Even if you do not have a kindle, you can easily read books in kindle format by downloading the kindle software to your PC, tablet or smartphones. It has inbuilt dictionary also, so you don’t need to search for words whose meaning you do not know in another dictionary. From stone tablet to kindle, the journey has been so long and  so versatile. Looking forward to another method of reading & writing books, I believe someone will definitely imagine and invent it someday. 

source: amazon.com