Archaeologists and historians claim that early Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia invented some of the earliest forms of writing using wedge-shaped characters on small clay tablets known as “cuneiform” as a form of communication around 3200 BC. What they cannot fully prove is whether cuneiform influenced a style of communication written a hundred years later between the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Chinese who used pictographs two thousand years later. While the Sumerians were developing their written language, the Phoenicians created the first alphabet made up of 22 distinct characters that influenced the way most other ancient civilizations wrote, although other cultures used picture forms to communicate ideas. The Roman civilization borrowed a form of the alphabet that flourished and is even today known as our alphabet in most Western countries.
Numerous cultures in the distant past employed a peculiar method of writing called “scriptio continua” or “scriptura continua”. Both Latin terms mean “continuous writing,” or writing without spaces between capital letters and words. The ancient Greeks used this same script as the ancient Romans, who wrote in capital letters on parchments or stone monuments. The style also lacked punctuation, accents, and small type, none of which had yet been developed. However, the further back we go in time, the earliest Latin and Greek inscriptions used word breakers, which appeared to be dots called “interpuncta” to separate words in sentences; however, pure scriptio continua without interpuncta thrived mainly in Classical Greek (400–500 BCE) and Classical Latin (100 BCE–300 CE) when both empires were at the height of power .
The Romans adopted this style of writing from the Etruscans, the earlier tribe that inhabited Italy, who lived long before Rome became a dominant world power. In fact, many ancient people communicated in more primitive ways, such as images. Since the Etruscan alphabet was limited, they used fewer letters that were only written in upper case. Later, the Romans modified their alphabet with lowercase letters, punctuation, and word breaks, which the Western world now recognizes.
An example in English, written using scriptio continua, looked something like this: UNITED STATES HISTORY GOES BACK MORE THAN FOUR CENTURIES which reads: “The history of the United States goes back more than four centuries.” Obviously, this sentence seems cumbersome and somewhat difficult to read, but writing scriptio continua had several advantages. Roman scribes kept expensive ink and papyrus, as well as the stone on which they carved their language. It also saved space for more words and expanding ideas. The biggest requirement for Roman scribes was a thorough knowledge of their uppercase alphabet, which simplified the writing process for them.
Eventually, scribes in Europe who copied Old Latin manuscripts began spacing between words while using small or “minuscule” letters which arose in Ireland in the 7th and 8th centuries AD in the same way. Of course, writing in Western civilization today followed the same pattern, which is a much easier method than writing continuously. Also, this new way of copying made the continuous reading of Latin letters much easier to understand. Europeans were now becoming scholars who read silently, which is quite different from the ancients who never considered reading for information or pleasure as an art form.
For more than a millennium, most of the Western world stopped using continuous scripts until computers became popular in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, the Internet, or World Wide Web, introduced forms of communication. newer and faster. But today’s characters incorporate much more than capital letters. After all, language has developed since the Romans and today it has become much more complicated.
The continuous script is the common denominator between the Latin language and the current “machine language” when typing passwords, web addresses, email addresses, domain names, using the full range of symbols available, such as: Roman letters large and small mixed with Arabic numerals ( 1,2,3,4, etc.) and symbols that can be accessed using the Shift key commands and number keys. Spaces are not included because in machine language they cause a gap or break in memory. For example, a password might look like this: D5v27WfIO. Emails display a user’s name. A web address might look like this: http://www.amazon.com.
Today, we are close to being as dependent on the use of “scriptio continua” as the ancient Greeks and Romans. Every day we visit the internet powering up our computers and mobile devices that rely on a form of continuous scripting language. In today’s world, no one can communicate without continuous scripts that are used as codes that allow computers to receive, store, and execute important digital information. So it seems ironic that one of today’s best technologies was influenced by one of the oldest known writing patterns in the ancient world.