1. Rosemarie T. Tayos
What is a brief description of old stone age rock painting?
Painting and Watercolors Supervisor
Doditov
The hike is mild, and the scampering to the In addition to the game drives, you can take a hike to
see ancient rock paintings. The paintings are the earliest evidence of human habitation in the
Waterberg region and can be traced back to the Stone Age.
paintings is minimal. The only real concern is running into ill-tempered buffalo. Our guide was
carrying a rifle just in case. While not sure how I felt about a poor buffalo getting shot because we
had the urge to scamper about, it certainly made us feel safer. Thankfully, this outing was free of
animal encounters.
The paintings are well preserved in shades of ochre and white. Even the most abstract are easily
identifiable. We spotted animals and human forms, some hunters and possibly shamans The only
real hindrance to deciphering what the ancients are trying to represent is te ahbundance of
paintings piled on top of each other.

2. Cuneiform Writing
The art of writing is clearly one of the most important intellectual tools discovered by man. Writing
enables people to keep records, codify laws, and transmit knowledge from one generation to
another. We do have evidence of some earlier attempts at writing but it was the Sumerians who
developed the art in an efficient form. Their language was pictographic -- each sign was a simplified
picture of an article that the scribe had in mind. Eventually the scribes reduced the complexity of a
pictographic system by combining several pictures into one.
Sumerian texts were written on clay tablets by using a reed stylus pressed into wet clay -- the
resulting wedge-shaped marks are called "cuneiform" (from the Latincuneus, "wedge-shaped").

3. Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics was a way of writing formed
by Ancient Egyptians during their
development stages. Ancient Egyptians
used pictures that stood for different
letters. Hieroglyphs formed the basic
writing system of Ancient Egypt, took
shape around 3000 BC, and reached an
accepted form as early as the First Dynasty.
There were thousands of signs, described
by the Egyptian as "divine words."
Writing texts are concerned with
everything intended to be captured in
writing for eternity, in particular religious
texts, historical and political inscriptions,
and biographies.
Hieroglyphs were carved or painted on the
walls of temples and tombs, on burial
equipment, on pieces of Egyptian jewelry,
and on false doors.
Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing symbols
Each symbols in Egyptian Writing alphabet represented an actual thing that existed in ancient
Egyptian life, plants, geometric figures, body parts, and birds. These signs could be used either

4. to write the words they depicted, called ideograms,
or to spell out the sounds of the words, called
phonograms. Scribes had
to learn more than 700 signs representing ideas and
objects; others representing sounds. Because the
language was so complex, young scribes- almost
always boys from wealthy or royal families- would
attend school for years to become adept at writing and
reading. And the training was rigorous. Boys as young as six or seven would practice writing on
ostraca-flat stones or broken pieces of clay pottery or cartouche . Archaeologists have found
many ostraca with texts of amusing animal tales or stern moral
tracts that were dictated by the scribal teachers. Students
also had to learn mathematics so that a number of high- level
professions would be open to them: tax collector, treasurer,
quartermaster or architect.
Rosetta stone
Rosetta stone The meaning of the Egyptian Symbols comes from
the discovery of the a basalt rock inscribed with a message
written in three languages: Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Egyptian
Demotic and Greek. The Rosetta stone founded by Napoleonic soldiers in 1799
the stone is a compact slab of basalt with dimension of (114x72x28 cm) ,and found in July
1799 in the Egyptian village called Rosette (Raschid), located in the western delta of the Nile.
the stone is kept at the British Museum in London.
Greek alphabet, writing system that was developed in Greece about 1000 BC. It is the direct or indirect
ancestor of all modern European alphabets. Derived from the North Semitic alphabetvia that of the Phoenicians, the

5. Greek alphabet was modified to make it more efficient and accurate for writing a non-Semitic language by the addition
of several new letters and the modification or dropping of several others. Most important, some of the symbols of the
Semitic alphabet, which represented only consonants, were made to represent vowels: the Semitic consonants ʾalef,
he, yod, ʿayin, and vav became the Greek letters alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron, and upsilon, representing the
vowels a,e,i,o, and u, respectively. The addition of symbols for the vowel sounds greatly increased the accuracy and
legibility of the writing system for non-Semitic languages.
Before the 5th century BC the Greek alphabet could be divided into two principal branches, the Ionic(eastern) and
the Chalcidian (western); differences between the two branches were minor. TheChalcidian alphabet probably gave
rise to the Etruscan alphabet of Italy in the 8th century BC and hence indirectly to the other Italic alphabets, including
the Latin alphabet, which is now used for most European languages. In 403 BC, however, Athens officially adopted
the Ionic alphabet as written in Miletus, and in the next 50 years almost all local Greek alphabets, including the
Chalcidian, were replaced by the Ionic script, which thus became the classical Greek alphabet.
The early Greek alphabet was written, like its Semitic forebears, from right to left. This gradually gave way to
the boustrophedon style, and after 500 BC Greek was always written from left to right. The classical alphabet had 24
letters, 7 of which were vowels, and consisted of capital letters, ideal for monuments and inscriptions. From it were
derived three scripts better suited to handwriting: uncial, which was essentially the classical capitals adapted to
writing with pen on paper and similar to hand printing; and cursive and minuscule, which were running scripts similar
to modern handwriting forms, with joined letters and considerable modification in letter shape. Uncial went out of use
in the 9th century AD, and minuscule, which replaced it, developed into the modern Greek handwriting form.
Roman alphabet
The Roman or Latin alphabet is the alphabet used for many modern-day languages.

6. The alphabet is a writing system which evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet. It was
the Etruscans who first developed it, and the Romans developed it further. The sounds of some letters changed,
some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ('hands') developed. Two such styles were
combined into one script with upper and lower case letters ('capitals' and 'small letters'). Modern uppercase
letters differ only slightly from their Roman counterparts. There are few regional variations.
Letters of the alphabet[change | change source]
Original Latin alphabet[change | change source]
The Latin alphabet used by the Romans:
Symb
ol
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
Latin
name
of
letter
ā bē kē dē ē ef gē hā ī kā el em en ō pē qū er es tē ū ex
ī
Graeca
zēta
Latin
name
(IPA):
[aː
]
[be
ː]
[ke
ː]
[de
ː]
[eː
]
[ɛf
]
[ge
ː]
[ha
ː]
[iː
]
[ka
ː]
[ɛl
]
[ɛm
]
[ɛn
]
[oː
]
[pe
ː]
[ku
ː]
[ɛr
]
[ɛs
]
[teː
]
[uː
]
[ɛk
s]
[iː 'graɪk
a]
['zeːt
a]

7. ,lModern alphabet[change | change source]
The modern version of the alphabet is used for writing many languages. European languages are mostly written
with the Latin alphabet. These languages include German, English, and Spanish. Some languages,
like Việtnamese, use an extended Latin alphabet, includingdiacritics for things such as tones. It uses the
following letters:
Uppercase A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Lowercase a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Other versions
Sign in Portuguese, which uses ç
Some other languages have different characters based on this alphabet. A few are: ă, â, á, é, í, î, ó, ẹ, ị, ọ, ụ, ã, ả,
ẻ, ỉ, ỏ, ủ, ñ, č, ď, ě, í, ň, ř, š, ș, ť, ț, ú, ů, ž and đ. Some languages that use these characters
are Esperanto, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Igbo.
Many languages changed their writing systems to the Roman alphabet. In
many countries, European settlers have made native people use the Latin alphabet. When the Soviet
Union broke up, many Eastern European countries began using the Roman alphabet instead of theCyrillic
alphabet. After World War II, many Turkish countries changed their original alphabets (Arab, Persian or Cyrillic)
to the Latin alphabet. The Latin Alphabet in Turkish countries started to be used by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. It
is now used in Turkmenistan,Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan.[source?