history of speech writing

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How Speech Began

Research into the development of human language.

Word and gesture are inextricably linked in this grave marker from the Kwakiutl tribe in the Pacific Northwest. Over the centuries, competing theories have arisen among linguists as to how, when, and even why language originated. On one point there is agreement: The highly nuanced systems humans have developed to communicate are primarily what separate  Homo sapiens  from animals.

—The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo

Picture a human being before the dawn of language. They are returning to camp one afternoon. Walking along the beach, they stop to listen to the sounds of waves. Maybe they’ve never stopped like this before, or maybe it’s the tenth or the hundredth time, but they decided the waves make a pleasing sound—one they’d like to imitate.

And so, they try producing something like  fwwwos , bwwwos , fwosbwos . None of these is quite right and they know it. They keep trying.

Now, jump ahead thousands of years to Homer’s  Iliad —traditionally dated to the eighth century BCE—where the priest Chryses, harshly dismissed by Agamemnon, goes “in silence along the shore of the loud-roaring ( polufloisboio ) sea.” Polu- is a common Greek and English prefix (as in polyglot). But  -floisboio  is not so common, and much more remarkable: It strikes the ear like, well, a crashing wave—or a lackluster imitation of one.

This noun from ancient Greek,  polufloisbos  (here, in the nominative case), is onomatopoeic: a word that somehow imitates or suggests the sound it references. We tend to like such words. Think of  sizzle ,  hiss , or  cuckoo .

But they’re not just fun to say. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have wondered whether they offer a clue to the origins of language. The truth, however, may not be so simple.

Scholars across the globe have been engaged for centuries in a lively, and sometimes quite funny, debate over the origins of human language. Important work in this field continues today, drawing on disciplines from anthropology to biology, from psychology to linguistics, and from philosophy to literature.

The issue is complicated. Spoken language doesn’t leave behind many fossils, so it’s difficult to refute any one theory. A polymath-like knowledge of many disciplines is required for scholars to make headway, especially today.

Dorit Bar-On is one of these scholars, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and director of the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning research group. In 2020, she received an NEH fellowship to complete a book on the origins of language, drawing on studies of creatures other than humans that are minded as a foundation through which to investigate the subject.

Bar-On became interested in linguistics through earlier philosophical work on self-knowledge and what is called “theory of mind,” a problem that plagues scholars in these debates. We’ll return to the theory of mind after surveying the spirited history of the language-origins debate.

So how did our ancestors go from, say, an errant cry of pain or pleasure to the robust, organized system of language we know today?

Early Western Theories

In the eighteenth century, German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder had a radical idea, one that ran contrary to the popular notion that language was a divine gift.

Herder’s proposition was that vocal imitation—mimicry of the natural environment—could be the spark that, over time, led to fully developed language. Because nearby groups of humans share similar environments, the meaning of these imitations could be intuitively understood among them.

The idea was dismissed because most words are not onomatopoeic. But Herder was actually suggesting a first step, what scholars call a protolanguage—a foundation from which non-onomatopoeic words could later develop.

Another radical theory from the time, which Herder disputed in his  Essay on the Origin of Language , suggested human language was derived from cries of pain: “I cannot conceal my astonishment at the fact that philosophers . . . can have arrived at the idea that the origins of human language [are] to be found in . . . emotional cries,” he wrote. “All animals, even fish, express their feelings by sounds; but not even the most highly developed animals have so much as the beginning of true human speech.”

A harsh dismissal, perhaps, but both the onomatopoeic and cry-of-pain theories shared a willingness to consider language as evolved rather than divinely received. Pugnacious rhetoric would be right at home among linguistics scholars, especially when Oxford’s Friedrich Max Müller entered the ring a century later.

A powerful and respected linguist, Müller dismissed both theories out of hand as the “bow-wow” and “pooh-pooh” theories of language origin, establishing a long tradition of name-calling in linguistics scholarship—sometimes, as here, to criticize opponents, and sometimes bestowed by scholars on their own theories to avoid an inevitable nickname of someone else’s choosing.

An expert in Proto-Indo-European—a theorized common ancestor of many languages still spoken today, as well as of Latin and ancient Greek—Müller believed in a single origin point for all modern languages.

“Language is the Rubicon which divides man from beast,” wrote Müller, “and no animal will ever cross it. . . . The science of language will yet enable us . . . to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.”

At the deepest roots of the linguistic tree, Müller thought we would find one shared language, the defining characteristic of the human soul bestowed by God. Müller’s theory was widely critiqued even by his contemporaries, who, in an act of poetic justice, dubbed it the “ding-dong” theory.

Though Müller, in attacking the so-called “bow-wow” and “pooh-pooh” theories, took aim at what he believed was the influence of Charles Darwin, it was not until later—in 1871, to be exact—that Darwin offered his own account on the origin of language in  The Descent of Man.

Like Herder, Darwin envisioned a protolanguage, coinciding with an increase in intelligence—which modern science has confirmed through studies of hominid brain size. But Darwin’s protolanguage was, in contrast, musical and motivated by sex. In his vision, protolinguistic humans who could sing well were appealing to potential mates and frightening to rivals.

Alternative Protolanguages: Musical and Gestural

Today, most scholars accept the likelihood of a protolanguage and have adapted Darwin’s theory in interesting ways. We know from studies of modern languages that, historically, they can lose what is called tonality—where the pitch of musical notes plays a defining role in articulating meaning. And even those who listen casually to music know that songs can translate a depth of emotion—despair, joy, triumph—without words at all.

The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who developed a model for musical protolanguage, reflected on this in his 1922 book,  Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. “The mere joy in sonorous combinations . . . no doubt counts for very much,” he wrote.

Jespersen imagined human protolanguage as holistic. A group of musical notes or a short song might become tied to a particular act, like going on a hunt or shucking clams. Slowly, perhaps a specific song could evolve to signify not only being on the hunt but a desire to go hunting, as when food is in short supply.

Yet another theory advocates for gestural protolanguage as our intermediary step. Modern sign language—a fully developed communication system in ways simple gestures are not—provides some of the best evidence both for and against this theory. Sign shares all the same levels as spoken language, because it crafts nuance through movement and shape instead of tone and inflection. We know, then, that gestural communication is effective.

But if sign language shares virtually every advantage with spoken language, and the only difference is medium, why did we need to evolve spoken language at all? Maybe speech could have evolved to allow us to communicate under the cover of darkness. But gestural language has strengths as well, allowing people to talk about someone nearby without their hearing it. For every advantage of spoken language, there comes a disadvantage.

Perhaps emitting a sound was never an advantage at all and was selected for unintentionally.

British scientist Richard Paget conducted some amateur investigations into this subject, which led him to promote in his 1930 book a “mouth gesture” theory: “Originally man expressed his ideas by gesture, but as he gesticulated with his hands, his tongue, lips and jaw unconsciously followed suit in a ridiculous fashion, ‘understudying’ . . . the action of the hands.”

Paget’s idea was little believed even then. American psychologist E. L. Thorndike quipped in reply: “Personally, I do not believe that any human being before Sir Richard Paget ever made any considerable number of gestures with his mouth parts in sympathetic pantomime.”

Some scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have advocated, nonetheless, for an unconscious transition from gesture to speech, including an intermediary step where limited vocalizations—perhaps onomatopoeic or related to pain or pleasure—accompanied gesture.

The prevalence of both gesture and speech cautions against selecting one to the exclusion of the other. Studies have shown that significant effort is required to not gesture, even in circumstances where gesture is clearly unnecessary, like talking to a friend on the telephone. It seems possible that, while gestural communication served our progenitors well in most scenarios, there were still times when imitative speech was necessary.

One theory, proposed by American linguist Derek Bickerton, imagines an early human hunter coming across an animal far too large for him to kill alone. Returning to his camp, in desperation to signal that an enormous source of meat looms nearby, he mimics the beast’s cry. (Bees and ants are capable of doing something similar by producing pheromones.) In Darwinian terms, such a situation models environmental pressure, and it leads to one more question: Why communicate in the first place?

At its simplest, theory of mind is our ability to grasp that others have a mental state just as we do. It’s typically been seen as an either-or issue: You have full theory of mind, or you have none. Psychologists have created tests for measuring it in children, who, around the age of four, begin to demonstrate awareness of other minds. We need something like theory of mind to desire to speak in the first place, hence the problem it causes in origin-of-language debates.

What theory of mind in adults looks like is familiar enough, says Professor Bar-On.

— Eric Hampton

“You go to a bar, and you have an empty glass in front of you, and you’re deliberately catching the eye of the barwoman, and you tap your empty glass,” Bar-On explains. “The barwoman is going to recognize that you’re drawing her attention to that because you want it filled, and because she recognizes that’s what you want, she’s going to do it. So there is a kind of mutual song-and-dance.

“Your communicative act essentially depends on your relying on what she will be able to infer about your intention. Okay, so we now have—depends on the analysis—three or four levels of intention. That’s called meta-representation; it’s a representation of somebody else’s representation.

“And that’s what you have to have before you can do anything like communicate using language. And here is my worry about this: Look at the structure of the thought that you have to have in order to engage in utterances with speaker meaning. It’s very much the structure of language. The thought is: I want her to recognize that I want her to understand what I’m doing. All this embedding, right?

“It raises the question: How could such thought arise before language? And aren’t we assuming that now we have a psychological Rubicon where before we had a language Rubicon? In order to cross the psychological Rubicon, you have to have this language-like thought. And then our puzzle is exactly the same: How could language-like thought arise where it didn’t exist before?”

Bar-On proposes an alternative way of looking at the problem, one that assumes theory of mind could evolve in parts. This approach draws on research that young children are still developing fuller theory of mind past age four, as well as studies of high-functioning persons with autism, who conventionally fail theory-of-mind tests but nevertheless have highly developed language.

If theory of mind can come in degrees and have various components—a theory that more psychologists espouse today—many of our problems are, if not solved, then certainly easier. We can imagine certain types of communication—both gestural and lexical, even musical—that don’t require such a sophisticated level of meta-representation. Mimicking a laugh to signal your own happiness does not require as deep a level of speaker meaning as signaling to get your beer refilled.

Perhaps, as human communication evolved, so too did mindedness; as one grew more complex, more capable of organizational structure, so did the other.

This both-and approach can guide how we think about lexical, musical, and gestural theories of language evolution. “Everybody at one point or another thought about the question, How did language come to be?” Bar-On says. “And so it’s not surprising that there have been all these different myths, all these just-so stories.”

After centuries of philosophical debate and scientific investigation, no one theory has succeeded in solving all the problems encompassing all the modes of communication needed to get through a day.

But Bar-On remains optimistic, including about past theories of bow-wowing and pooh-poohing our way to spoken language. “My hunch would be that they all have something to offer. . . . Each suggests one possible element in the toolkit of our ancestors.”

As we imagine the many distinct tasks performed by our progenitors on a daily basis—hunting large prey, instructing and caring for young, even just pausing to listen to waves—we can imagine equally many ways to gesture, sing, and mimic our way toward sharing those experiences with others. And though the fossils are hard to find, scholars like Bar-On continue charting new paths, weaving disciplines together, striking out on this mysterious Rubicon.

Matt Phillips, a former NEH intern, is a student at Georgetown University.

Funding information

Over the decades, NEH has funded hundreds of projects relating to linguistics, including a $339,411 Preservation and Access grant to the University of Maine System, Orono, for digitizing an unpublished dictionary manuscript of Penobscot, an Algonquin language, and another Preservation and Access grant , for $260,000, to the American Museum of Natural History, to digitize tens of thousands of pages in the Charles Darwin Library and from the Charles Darwin Evolution Papers. Since 1975, NEH has also funded a number of grants relating to American Sign Language. In January of this year, Dorit Bar-On of the University of Connecticut received a fellowship grant from the Division of Research, totaling $60,000, to complete a book on the origins of language. In 1995, the Division of Research awarded $4,000 to Corey Washington of the University of Washington for a summer stipend on thought experiments in the philosophy of language. Educational Programs awarded two grants for Summer Institutes for College and University Teachers on experimental philosophy, including the philosophy of language, first, to Ronald Jerry Mallon of the University of Utah in 2008 for $182,448 , and the second, to Ron Mallon and Shaun Nichols of the University of Arizona in 2011 for $197,939 .

Republication statement

The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “How Speech Began: Research into the Development of Human Language” in the Spring 2021 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at @email if you are republishing it or have any questions.

The Evolution of Language  by W. Tecumseh Fitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010);  Why Only Us?  by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017); “The Relation Between Language and Theory of Mind in Development and Evolution,” by B. F. Malle, T he Evolution of Language out of Prelanguage, T. Given and B. F. Malle (eds.) (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2002); “Animals, Mimesis, and the Origin of Language” by Kári Driscoll (OpenEdition Journals, 2015); “The Origin of Language” by E. L. Thorndike ( Science , vol. 98, no. 2538, 1943), pp. 1–6.

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Denise Schmandt-Besserat

The evolution of writing.

Published in James Wright, ed., INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Elsevier, 2014

Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 BC, was first. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin. This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.

Introduction

The three writing systems that developed independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica, shared a remarkable stability. Each preserved over millennia features characteristic of their original prototypes. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script can be traced furthest back into prehistory to an eighth millennium BC counting system using clay tokens of multiple shapes. The development from tokens to script reveals that writing emerged from counting and accounting. Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. The evolution from tokens to script also documents a steady progression in abstracting data, from one-to-one correspondence with three-dimensional tangible tokens, to two-dimensional pictures, the invention of abstract numbers and phonetic syllabic signs and finally, in the second millennium BC, the ultimate abstraction of sound and meaning with the representation of phonemes by the letters of the alphabet.

Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. In what concerns this last script, it is still obscure how symbols and glyphs used by the Olmecs, whose culture flourished along the Gulf of Mexico ca 600 to 500 BC, reappeared in the classical Maya art and writing of 250-900 AD as well as in other Mesoamerican cultures (Marcus 1992). The earliest Chinese inscriptions, dated to the Shang Dynasty, c. 1400–1200 BC, consist of oracle texts engraved on animal bones and turtle shells (Bagley 2004). The highly abstract and standardized signs suggest prior developments, which are presently undocumented.

Of these three writing systems, therefore, only the earliest, the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, invented in Sumer, present-day Iraq, c. 3200 BC, can be traced without any discontinuity over a period of 10,000 years, from a prehistoric antecedent to the present-day alphabet. Its evolution is divided into four phases: (a) clay tokens representing units of goods were used for accounting (8000–3500 BC); (b) the three dimensional tokens were transformed into two-dimensional pictographic signs, and like the former tokens, the pictographic script served exclusively for accounting (3500–3000 BC); (c) phonetic signs, introduced to transcribe the name of individuals, marked the turning point when writing started emulating spoken language and, as a result, became applicable to all fields of human experience (3000–1500 BC); (d) with two dozen letters, each standing for a single sound of voice, the alphabet perfected the rendition of speech. After ideography, logography and syllabaries, the alphabet represents a further segmentation of meaning.

1. Tokens as Precursor of Writing

The direct antecedent of the Mesopotamian script was a recording device consisting of clay tokens of multiple shapes (Schmandt-Besserat 1996). The artifacts, mostly of geometric forms such as cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and ovoids, are recovered in archaeological sites dating 8000–3000 BC (Fig. 1). The tokens, used as counters to keep track of goods, were the earliest code—a system of signs for transmitting information. Each token shape was semantic, referring to a particular unit of merchandise. For example, a cone and a sphere stood respectively for a small and a large measure of grain, and ovoids represented jars of oil. The repertory of some three hundred types of counters made it feasible to manipulate and store information on multiple categories of goods (Schmandt-Besserat 1992).

The token system had little in common with spoken language except that, like a word, a token stood for one concept. Unlike speech, tokens were restricted to one type of information only, namely, real goods. Unlike spoken language, the token system made no use of syntax. That is to say, their meaning was independent of their placement order. Three cones and three ovoids, scattered in any way, were to be translated ‘three baskets of grain, three jars of oil.’ Furthermore, the fact that the same token shapes were used in a large area of the Near East, where many dialects would have been spoken, shows that the counters were not based on phonetics. Therefore, the goods they represented were expressed in multiple languages. The token system showed the number of units of merchandize in one-to-one correspondence, in other words, the number of tokens matched the number of units counted: x jars of oil were represented by x ovoids. Repeating ‘jar of oil’ x times in order to express plurality is unlike spoken language.

2. Pictography: Writing as Accounting Device

After four millennia, the token system led to writing. The transition from counters to script took place simultaneously in Sumer and Elam, present-day western Iran when, around 3500 BC, Elam was under Sumerian domination. It occurred when tokens, probably representing a debt, were stored in envelopes until payment. These envelopes made of clay in the shape of a hollow ball had the disadvantage of hiding the tokens held inside. Some accountants, therefore, impressed the tokens on the surface of the envelope before enclosing them inside, so that the shape and number of counters held inside could be verified at all times (Fig. 1). These markings were the first signs of writing. The metamorphosis from three-dimensional artifacts to two-dimensional markings did not affect the semantic principle of the system. The significance of the markings on the outside of the envelopes was identical to that of the tokens held inside.

About 3200 BC, once the system of impressed signs was understood, clay tablets—solid cushion-shaped clay artifacts bearing the impressions of tokens—replaced the envelopes filled with tokens. The impression of a cone and a sphere token, representing measures of grain, resulted respectively in a wedge and a circular marking which bore the same meaning as the tokens they signified (Fig. 2). They were ideograms—signs representing one concept. The impressed tablets continued to be used exclusively to record quantities of goods received or disbursed. They still expressed plurality in one-to-one correspondence.

Pictographs—signs representing tokens traced with a stylus rather than impressed—appeared about 3100 BC. These pictographs referring to goods mark an important step in the evolution of writing because they were never repeated in one-to-one correspondence to express numerosity. Besides them, numerals—signs representing plurality—indicated the quantity of units recorded. For example, ‘33 jars of oil’ were shown by the incised pictographic sign ‘jar of oil’, preceded by three impressed circles and three wedges, the numerals standing respectively for ‘10’ and ‘1’ (Fig. 3). The symbols for numerals were not new. They were the impressions of cones and spheres formerly representing measures of grain, which then had acquired a second, abstract, numerical meaning. The invention of numerals meant a considerable economy of signs since 33 jars of oil could be written with 7 rather then 33 markings.

In sum, in its first phase, writing remained mostly a mere extension of the former token system. Although the tokens underwent formal transformations from three- to two-dimensional and from impressed markings to signs traced with a stylus, the symbolism remained fundamentally the same. Like the archaic counters, the tablets were used exclusively for accounting (Nissen and Heine 2009). This was also the case when a stylus, made of a reed with a triangular end, gave to the signs the wedge-shaped ‘cuneiform’ appearance (Fig. 4). In all these instances, the medium changed in form but not in content. The only major departure from the token system consisted in the creation of two distinct types of signs: incised pictographs and impressed numerals. This combination of signs initiated the semantic division between the item counted and number.

3. Logography: Shift from Visual to Aural

About 3000 BC, the creation of phonetic signs—signs representing the sounds of speech—marks the second phase in the evolution of Mesopotamian writing, when, finally, the medium parted from its token antecedent in order to emulate spoken language. As a result, writing shifted from a conceptual framework of real goods to the world of speech sounds. It shifted from the visual to the aural world.

With state formation, new regulations required that the names of the individuals who generated or received registered merchandise were entered on the tablets. The personal names were transcribed by the mean of logograms—signs representing a word in a particular tongue. Logograms were easily drawn pictures of words with a sound close to that desired (for example in English the name Neil could be written with a sign showing bent knees ‘kneel’). Because Sumerian was mostly a monosyllabic language, the logograms had a syllabic value. A syllable is a unit of spoken language consisting of one or more vowel sounds, alone, or with one or more consonants. When a name required several phonetic units, they were assembled in a rebus fashion. A typical Sumerian name ‘An Gives Life’ combined a star, the logogram for An, god of heaven, and an arrow, because the words for ‘arrow’ and ‘life’ were homonyms. The verb was not transcribed, but inferred, which was easy because the name was common.

Phonetic signs allowed writing to break away from accounting. Inscriptions on stone seals or metal vessels deposited in tombs of the ‘Royal Cemetery’ of Ur, c. 2700–2600 BC, are among the first texts that did not deal with merchandise, did not include numerals and were entirely phonetic (Schmandt-Besserat 2007) The inscriptions consisted merely of a personal name: ‘Meskalamdug,’ or a name and a title: ‘Puabi, Queen’ (Fig. 5). Presumably, these funerary texts were meant to immortalize the name of the deceased, thereby, according to Sumerian creed, ensuring them of eternal life. Other funerary inscriptions further advanced the emancipation of writing. For example, statues depicting the features of an individual bore increasingly longer inscriptions. After the name and title of the deceased followed patronymics, the name of a temple or a god to whom the statue was dedicated, and in some cases, a plea for life after death, including a verb. These inscriptions introduced syntax, thus bringing writing yet one step closer to speech.

After 2600–2500 BC, the Sumerian script became a complex system of ideograms mixed more and more frequently with phonetic signs. The resulting syllabary—system of phonetic signs expressing syllables—further modeled writing on to spoken language (Rogers 2005). With a repertory of about 400 signs, the script could express any topic of human endeavor. Some of the earliest syllabic texts were royal inscriptions, and religious, magic and literary texts.

The second phase in the evolution of the Mesopotamian script, characterized by the creation of phonetic signs, not only resulted in the parting of writing from accounting, but also its spreading out of Sumer to neighboring regions. The first Egyptian inscriptions, dated to the late fourth millennium BC, belonged to royal tombs (Baines 2007). They consisted of ivory labels and ceremonial artifacts such as maces and palettes bearing personal names, written phonetically as a rebus, visibly imitating Sumer. For example, the Palette of Narmer bears hieroglyphs identifying the name and title of the Pharaoh, his attendants and the smitten enemies. Phonetic signs to transcribe personal names, therefore, created an avenue for writing to spread outside of Mesopotamia. This explains why the Egyptian script was instantaneously phonetic. It also explains why the Egyptians never borrowed Sumerian signs. Their repertory consisted of hieroglyphs representing items familiar in the Egyptian culture that evoked sounds in their own tongue.

The phonetic transcription of personal names also played an important role in the dissemination of writing to the Indus Valley where, during a period of increased contact with Mesopotamia, c. 2500 BC, writing appears on seals featuring individuals’ names and titles (Parpola 1994). In turn, the Sumerian cuneiform syllabic script was adopted by many Near Eastern cultures who adapted it to their different linguistic families and in particular, Semitic (Akkadians and Eblaites); Indo-European (Mitanni, Hittites, and Persians); Caucasian (Hurrians and Urartians); and finally, Elamite and Kassite. It is likely that Linear A and B, the phonetic scripts of Crete and mainland Greece, c. 1400–1200 BC, were also influenced by the Near East.

4. The Alphabet: The Segmentation of Sounds

The invention of the alphabet about 1500 BC ushered in the third phase in the evolution of writing in the ancient Near East (Sass 2005). The first, so-called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which originated in the region of present-day Lebanon, took advantage of the fact that the sounds of any language are few. It consisted of a set of 22 letters, each standing for a single sound of voice, which, combined in countless ways, allowed for an unprecedented flexibility for transcribing speech (Powell 2009). This earliest alphabet was a complete departure from the previous syllabaries. First, the system was based on acrophony—signs to represent the first letter of the word they stood for—for example an ox head (alpu) was ‘a,’ a house (betu) was b (Fig. 6). Second, it was consonantal—it dealt only with speech sounds characterized by constriction or closure at one or more points in the breath channel, like b, d, l, m, n, p, etc. Third, it streamlined the system to 22 signs, instead of several hundred.

The transition from cuneiform writing to the alphabet in the ancient Near East took place over several centuries. In the seventh century BC the Assyrian kings still dictated their edicts to two scribes. The first wrote Akkadian in cuneiform on a clay tablet; the second Aramaic in a cursive alphabetic script traced on a papyrus scroll. The Phoenician merchants established on the coast of present day Syria and Lebanon, played an important role in the diffusion of the alphabet. In particular, they brought their consonantal alphabetic system to Greece, perhaps as early as, or even before 800 BC. The Greeks perfected the Semitic alphabet by adding letters for vowels—speech sounds in the articulation of which the breath channel is not blocked, like a, e, i, o, u. As a result the 27-letter Greek alphabet improved the transcription of the spoken word, since all sounds were indicated. For example, words sharing the same consonants like ‘bad,’ ‘bed,’ ‘bid,’ ‘bud,’ could be clearly distinguished. The alphabet did not subsequently undergo any fundamental change.

5. The Modern Alphabets

Because the alphabet was invented only once, all the many alphabets of the world, including Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Brahmani and Cyrillic, derive from Proto-Sinaitic. The Latin alphabet used in the western world is the direct descendant of the Etruscan alphabet (Bonfante 2002). The Etruscans, who occupied the present province of Tuscany in Italy, adopted the Greek alphabet, slightly modifying the shape of letters. In turn, the Etruscan alphabet became that of the Romans, when Rome conquered Etruria in the first century BC. The alphabet followed the Roman armies. All the nations that fell under the rule of the Roman Empire became literate in the first centuries of our era. This was the case for the Gauls, Angles, Saxons, Franks and Germans who inhabited present-day France, England and Germany.

Charlemagne (800 AD) had a profound influence on the development of the Latin script by establishing standards. In particular a clear and legible minuscule cursive script was devised, from which our modern day lower case derives. The printing press invented in 1450 dramatically multiplied the dissemination of texts, introducing a new regularity in lettering and layout. The Internet catapults the alphabet into cyberspace, while preserving its integrity

6. Writing: Handling Data in Abstraction

Beyond the formal and structural changes undergone by writing in the course of millennia, its evolution also involved strides in the ability to handle data in abstraction. At the first stage, the token system antecedent of writing, already abstracted information in several ways. First, it translated daily-life commodities into arbitrary, often geometric forms. Second, the counters abstracted the items counted from their context. For example, sheep could be accounted independently of their actual location. Third, the token system separated the data from the knower. That is to say, a group of tokens communicated directly specific information to anyone initiated in the system. This was a significant change for an oral society, where knowledge was transmitted by word of mouth from one individual to another, face to face. Otherwise, the token system represented plurality concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of oil were shown by three tokens, as it is in reality. At the same time, the fact that the token system used specific counters to count different items was concrete—it did not abstract the notion of item counted from that of number. (Certain English numerical expressions referring to particular sets, such as twin, triplet, quadruplet and duo, trio or quartet, are comparable to concrete numbers.)

When tokens were impressed on the envelopes to indicate the counters enclosed inside, the resulting markings could no longer be manipulated by hand. In other words, the transmutation of three-dimensional counters into two-dimensional signs constituted a second step in abstraction. By doing away with tokens, the clay tablets marked a third level of abstraction since the impressed markings no longer replicated a set of actual counters. The invention of numerals, which separated the notion of numerosity from that of the item counted, was a crucial fourth step in abstraction. The signs expressing the concept of oneness, twoness, etc., allowed plurality to be dealt with in fully abstract terms. In turn, the phonetic units marked a fifth step of abstraction, since the signs no longer referred to the objects pictured, but rather the sound of the word they evoked.

Phonetics allowed writing to shift from a representational to a conceptual linguistic system. That is to say it enabled writing to leave the realm of real goods in order to enter the world of words and the ideas they stand for. Finally, the process that started with ideograms expressing concepts and phonetic signs referring to the sound of monosyllabic words reached the ultimate segmentation of meaning with letters. As Marshall McLuhan (1997) defined it, the alphabet consists of semantically meaningless letters corresponding to semantically meaningless sounds. The alphabet brought data handling to a final double-stepped abstraction.

7. Conclusion: The Stability of Writing Systems

The origin of the Chinese script and the development of Mesoamerican writing are still obscure. The Mesopotamian script, however, offers a well-documented evolution over a continuous period of 10,000 years. The system underwent drastic changes in form, gradually transcribed spoken language more accurately, and handled data in more abstract terms. The most striking universal feature of all writing systems, however, is their uncanny endurance, unmatched among human creations. The Chinese script never needed to be deciphered because the signs have changed little during the 3400 years of its recorded existence (Xigui 2000). It also always remained ideographic, merely inserting rebus-like phonetic complements in some characters. The Mesoamerican Maya phonetic glyphs preserved the symbolism initiated by the Olmecs in the previous millennium (Coe and Van Stone 2005). Finally, when the last clay tablet was written in the Near East, c. 300 AD, the cuneiform script had been in use for three millennia. It replaced an age-old token system that had preceded it for over 5000 years; it was replaced by the alphabet, which we have now used for 3500 years.

Bagley, R. W. (2004). Anyang writing and the Origin of the Chinese writing system. In S.D. Houston (Ed.). The First Writing (pp. 190-249). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baines, J. (2007). Visual and Written culture in Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Black, J. (2008) The Obsolescence and Demise of the Cuneiform Writing in Elam. In J. Baines, J. Bennet, S. Houston (eds). The Disappearance of Writing Systems (pp.45-72). London: Equinox.

Bonfante, G., Bonfante, L. (2002) The Etruscan Language (revised edition). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Coe, M. D. and van Stone, M. (2005) Reading the Maya Glyphs, Thames and Hudson, London.

Malafouris L, (2010) Grasping the concept of number: How did the sapient mind move beyond approximation, in: I. Morley & C. Renfrew (eds.), The Archaeology of Measurement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp.35-42)

Marcus, J. (1992). Mesoamerican Writing Systems. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moos, M. A. ed., (1997) Marshall McLuhan Essays, Media Research. Amsterdam:Overseas Publishers Association.

Nissen, H. J., & Heine, P. (2009). From Mesopotamia to Iraq. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Parpola, A. (1994) Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Powell, B. B. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization. London: Wiley Blackwell.

Rogers, H. (2005). Writing Systems, A Linguistic Approach. London: Blackwell.

Salomon, R. (2012). Some Principles and Patterns of Script Change. In S.D. Houston (ed). The Shape of Script. (pp. 119-133) Santa Fe: Sar Press.

Sass, B. (2005) The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium, The West Semitic Alphabet ca. 1150-850 BC – The Antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian Alphabets, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2007) When Writing Met Art. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How Writing Came About. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992). Before Writing. (2 vols). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Xigui, Q. (2000) Chinese Writing, The Institute of East Asian Studies, The University of California, Berkeley.

Abstraction: Consider the property of an item dissociated from any specific instance.

Abstract counting: When numbers are considered separately from the items counted.

Alphabet: A writing system based on a set of letters, each standing for a single spoken sound.

Concrete counting: the use of different sets of numbers to count different set of items.

Cuneiform: The writing system developed in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC. The script was written with a triangular stylus, which gave the stroke their characteristic angular shape.

Logography: a sign refers to one word.

Numeral: a sign to write a number.

Pictograph: A character in the form of a picture representing either the sound of the word it evokes or the object represented.

Syllabary: A writing system based on characters each representing a syllable, or unit of spoken language consisting of at least a vowel with, sometimes, additional vowels or consonants. Tablet a lump of clay prepared in a cushion shape to support a written document.

Writing : A system of human communication by the mean of arbitrary visual signs.

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Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life. These images suggest a language because, in some instances, they seem to tell a story (say, of a hunting expedition in which specific events occurred) rather than being simply pictures of animals and people.

Written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in Sumer , southern Mesopotamia , c. 3500 -3000 BCE. This early writing was called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed implement. The writing system of the Egyptians was already in use before the rise of the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 BCE) and is thought to have developed from Mesopotamian cuneiform (though this theory is disputed) and came to be known as heiroglyphics.

The phoenetic writing systems of the Greeks ("phoenetic" from the Greek phonein - "to speak clearly"), and later the Romans, came from Phoenicia . The Phoenician writing system, though quite different from that of Mesopotamia, still owes its development to the Sumerians and their advances in the written word. Independently of the Near East or Europe , writing was developed in Mesoamerica by the Maya c. 250 CE with some evidence suggesting a date as early as 500 BCE and, also independently, by the Chinese.

Writing & History

Writing in China developed from divination rites using oracle bones c. 1200 BCE and appears to also have arisen independently as there is no evidence of cultural transference at this time between China and Mesopotamia. The ancient Chinese practice of divination involved etching marks on bones or shells which were then heated until they cracked. The cracks would then be interpreted by a Diviner. If that Diviner had etched `Next Tuesday it will rain' and `Next Tuesday it will not rain' the pattern of the cracks on the bone or shell would tell him which would be the case. In time, these etchings evolved into the Chinese script .

History is impossible without the written word as one would lack context in which to interpret physical evidence from the ancient past. Writing records the lives of a people and so is the first necessary step in the written history of a culture or civilization . A prime example of this problem is the difficulty scholars of the late 19th/early 20th centuries CE had in understanding the Maya Civilization , in that they could not read the glyphs of the Maya and so wrongly interpreted much of the physical evidence they excavated. The early explorers of the Maya sites, such as Stephens and Catherwood, believed they had found evidence of an ancient Egyptian civilization in Central America.

This same problem is evident in understanding the ancient Kingdom of Meroe (in modern day Sudan), whose Meroitic Script is yet to be deciphered as well as the so-called Linear A script of the ancient Minoan culture of Crete which also has yet to be understood.

The Invention of Writing

The Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long-distance communication which was necessitated by trade. With the rise of the cities in Mesopotamia, and the need for resources which were lacking in the region, long-distance trade developed and, with it, the need to be able to communicate across the expanses between cities or regions.

The earliest form of writing was pictographs – symbols which represented objects – and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples. These pictographs were impressed onto wet clay which was then dried, and these became official records of commerce. As beer was a very popular beverage in ancient Mesopotamia, many of the earliest records extant have to do with the sale of beer. With pictographs, one could tell how many jars or vats of beer were involved in a transaction but not necessarily what that transaction meant. As the historian Kriwaczek notes,

All that had been devised thus far was a technique for noting down things, items and objects, not a writing system. A record of `Two Sheep Temple God Inanna ' tells us nothing about whether the sheep are being delivered to, or received from, the temple, whether they are carcasses, beasts on the hoof, or anything else about them. (63)

In order to express concepts more complex than financial transactions or lists of items, a more elaborate writing system was required, and this was developed in the Sumerian city of Uruk c. 3200 BCE. Pictograms, though still in use, gave way to phonograms – symbols which represented sounds – and those sounds were the spoken language of the people of Sumer. With phonograms, one could more easily convey precise meaning and so, in the example of the two sheep and the temple of Inanna, one could now make clear whether the sheep were going to or coming from the temple, whether they were living or dead, and what role they played in the life of the temple. Previously, one had only static images in pictographs showing objects like sheep and temples. With the development of phonograms one had a dynamic means of conveying motion to or from a location.

Further, whereas in earlier writing (known as proto-cuneiform) one was restricted to lists of things, a writer could now indicate what the significance of those things might be. The scholar Ira Spar writes:

This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the Third Millennium B.C., cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political, literary, and scholarly documents.

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Writing & literature.

This new means of communication allowed scribes to record the events of their times as well as their religious beliefs and, in time, to create an art form which was not possible before the written word: literature. The first writer in history known by name is the Mesopotamian priestess Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), daughter of Sargon of Akkad , who wrote her hymns to the goddess Inanna and signed them with her name and seal.

The so-called Matter of Aratta , four poems dealing with King Enmerkar of Uruk and his son Lugalbanda, were probably composed between 2112-2004 BCE (though only written down between 2017-1763 BCE). In the first of them, Enmerkar and The Lord of Aratta , it is explained that writing developed because the messenger of King Enmerkar, going back and forth between him and the King of the city of Aratta, eventually had too much to remember and so Enmerkar had the idea to write his messages down; and so writing was born.

The Epic of Gilgamesh , considered the first epic tale in the world and among the oldest extant literature, was composed at some point earlier than c. 2150 BCE when it was written down and deals with the great king of Uruk (and descendent of Enmerkar and Lugalbanda) Gilgamesh and his quest for the meaning of life. The myths of the people of Mesopotamia, the stories of their gods and heroes, their history, their methods of building, of burying their dead, of celebrating feast days, were now all able to be recorded for posterity. Writing made history possible because now events could be recorded and later read by any literate individual instead of relying on a community's storyteller to remember and recite past events. Scholar Samuel Noah Kramer comments:

[The Sumerians] originated a system of writing on clay which was borrowed and used all over the Near East for some two thousand years. Almost all that we know of the early history of western Asia comes from the thousands of clay documents inscribed in the cuneiform script developed by the Sumerians and excavated by archaeologists. (4)

So important was writing to the Mesopotamians that, under the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (r. 685-627 BCE) over 30,000 clay tablet books were collected in the library of his capital at Nineveh . Ashurbanipal was hoping to preserve the heritage, culture, and history of the region and understood clearly the importance of the written word in achieving this end. Among the many books in his library, Ashurbanipal included works of literature, such as the tale of Gilgamesh or the story of Etana, because he realized that literature articulates not just the story of a certain people, but of all people. The historian Durant writes:

Literature is at first words rather than letters, despite its name; it arises as clerical chants or magic charms, recited usually by the priests, and transmitted orally from memory to memory. Carmina , as the Romans named poetry, meant both verses and charms; ode , among the Greeks, meant originally a magic spell; so did the English rune and lay , and the German Lied . Rhythm and meter, suggested, perhaps, by the rhythms of nature and bodily life, were apparently developed by magicians or shamans to preserve, transmit, and enhance the magic incantations of their verse. Out of these sacerdotal origins, the poet, the orator, and the historian were differentiated and secularized: the orator as the official lauder of the king or solicitor of the deity; the historian as the recorder of the royal deeds; the poet as the singer of originally sacred chants, the formulator and preserver of heroic legends, and the musician who put his tales to music for the instruction of populace and kings.

Book of the Dead Papyrus Mark Cartwright (CC BY-NC-SA) {"@context":"https://schema.org","@id":"https://www.worldhistory.org/image/722/book-of-the-dead-papyrus/#imageobject","@type":"ImageObject","acquireLicensePage":"https://www.worldhistory.org/image/722/book-of-the-dead-papyrus/","caption":"A detail from a Book of the Dead, on papyrus showing hieratic writing of Hornefer, Ptolemaic Period, provenance unknown. (Museo Castello Sforzesco, Milan)","contentUrl":"https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/722.jpg","copyrightNotice":"Mark Cartwright - CC BY-NC-SA - This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included.","creator":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https://www.worldhistory.org/user/markzcartwright/#person","name":"Mark Cartwright","url":"https://www.worldhistory.org/user/markzcartwright/","sameAs":["https://twitter.com/MCartwrightWHE"],"image":"https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/profile_photos/150-markzcartwright.JPG","description":"Mark is a full-time writer, researcher, historian, and editor. Special interests include art, architecture, and discovering the ideas that all civilizations share. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy and is the WHE Publishing Director.","jobTitle":"Publishing Director","worksFor":"https://www.worldhistory.org#organization"},"creditText":"Mark Cartwright / World History Encyclopedia","dateModified":"2024-08-15T00:37:10+0000","datePublished":"2012-06-28T06:53:49+0000","encodingFormat":"image/jpeg","headline":"Book of the Dead Papyrus","height":"2592","isAccessibleForFree":true,"isFamilyFriendly":true,"isPartOf":"https://www.worldhistory.org#website","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","mainEntityOfPage":"https://www.worldhistory.org/image/722/book-of-the-dead-papyrus/","publisher":"https://www.worldhistory.org#organization","representativeOfPage":false,"url":"https://www.worldhistory.org/image/722/book-of-the-dead-papyrus/","width":"3888"}

The alphabet.

The role of the poet in preserving heroic legends would become an important one in cultures throughout the ancient world. The Mesopotamian scribe Shin-Legi-Unninni (wrote 1300-1000 BCE) would help preserve and transmit The Epic of Gilgamesh . Homer (c. 800 BCE) would do the same for the Greeks and Virgil (70-19 BCE) for the Romans. The Indian epic Mahabharata (written down c. 400 BCE) preserves the oral legends of that region in the same way the tales and legends of Scotland and Ireland do. All of these works, and those which came after them, were only made possible through the advent of writing.

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The early cuneiform writers established a system which would completely change the nature of the world in which they lived. The past, and the stories of the people, could now be preserved through writing. The Phoenicians ' contribution of the alphabet made writing easier and more accessible to other cultures, but the basic system of putting symbols down on paper to represent words and concepts began much earlier. Durant notes:

The Phoenicians did not create the alphabet, they marketed it; taking it apparently from Egypt and Crete, they imported it piecemeal to Tyre , Sidon , and Byblos , and exported it to every city on the Mediterranean ; they were the middlemen, not the producers, of the alphabet. By the time of Homer the Greeks were taking over this Phoenician – or the allied Aramaic – alphabet, and were calling it by the Semitic names of the first two letters, Alpha , Beta ; Hebrew Aleph , Beth .

Early writing systems, imported to other cultures, evolved into the written language of those cultures so that the Greek and Latin would serve as the basis for European script in the same way that the Semitic Aramaic script would provide the basis for Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly Sanskrit . The materials of writers have evolved as well, from the cut reeds with which early Mesopotamian scribes marked the clay tablets of cuneiform to the reed pens and papyrus of the Egyptians, the parchment of the scrolls of the Greeks and Romans, the calligraphy of the Chinese, on through the ages to the present day of computerized composition and the use of processed paper.

In whatever age, since its inception, writing has served to communicate the thoughts and feelings of the individual and of that person's culture, their collective history, and their experiences with the human condition, and to preserve those experiences for future generations.

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Bibliography

• Black, J. , et. al. The Literature of Ancient Sumer. Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Coe, M. D. The Maya. Thames & Hudson, 2015.
• Durant, W. Our Oriental Heritage. Simon & Schuster, 1954.
• Ebrey, P. B. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Kramer, S. N. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. University of Chicago Press, 1971.
• Kriwaczek, P. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. St. Martin's Griffin, 2012.
• Scarre, C. & Fagan, B.F. Ancient Civilizations. Pearson, 2007.
• The Origins of Writing by Ira Spar , accessed 1 Dec 2016.
• Van De Mieroop, M. A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC, 2nd Edition. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
• Wise Bauer, S. The History of the Ancient World. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

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• Introduction

Traditional and modern rhetoric

Elements of rhetoric, rhetoric of or in a discourse.

• Ancient Greece and Rome
• The Middle Ages
• The Renaissance and after
• Toward a new rhetoric
• The rhetoric of non-Western cultures
• Nature of the new rhetoric
• Personal relations with the audience
• Basis of agreement and types of argumentation
• Scope and organization of argumentation
• Significance of the new rhetoric

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rhetoric , the principles of training communicators —those seeking to persuade or inform. In the 20th century it underwent a shift of emphasis from the speaker or writer to the auditor or reader. This article deals with rhetoric in both its traditional and its modern forms. For information on applications of rhetoric, see the articles broadcasting , communication , and propaganda .

Rhetoric in literature

The nature and scope of rhetoric.

The traditional rhetoric is limited to the insights and terms developed by rhetors, or rhetoricians, in the Classical period of ancient Greece, about the 5th century bc , to teach the art of public speaking to their fellow citizens in the Greek republics and, later, to the children of the wealthy under the Roman Empire. Public performance was regarded as the highest reach of education proper, and rhetoric was at the center of the educational process in western Europe for some 2,000 years. Institutio oratoria (before ad 96; “The Training of an Orator”), by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian , perhaps the most influential textbook on education ever written, was in fact a book about rhetoric. Inevitably, there were minor shifts of emphasis in so long a tradition, and for a long time even letter writing fell within the purview of rhetoric; but it has consistently maintained its emphasis upon creation, upon instructing those wishing to initiate communication with other people.

Modern rhetoric has shifted its focus to the auditor or reader. Literary criticism always borrowed from rhetoric—stylistic terms such as antithesis and metaphor were invented by Classical rhetoricians. When language became a subject of sustained scholarly concern, it was inevitable that scholars would turn back to Classical theories of rhetoric for help. But modern rhetoric is far more than a collection of terms. The perspective from which it views a text is different from that of other disciplines . History, philosophy, literary criticism , and the social sciences are apt to view a text as though it were a kind of map of the author’s mind on a particular subject. Rhetoricians, accustomed by their traditional discipline to look at communication from the communicator’s point of view, regard the text as the embodiment of an intention, not as a map. They know that that intention in its formulation is affected by its audience. They know also that the structure of a piece of discourse is a result of its intention. A concern for audience, for intention, and for structure is, then, the mark of modern rhetoric. It is as involved with the process of interpretation, or analysis, as it is with the process of creation, or genesis.

Rhetorical analysis is actually an analogue of traditional rhetorical genesis: both view a message through the situation of the auditor or reader as well as the situation of the speaker or writer. Both view the message as compounded of elements of time and place, motivation and response. An emphasis on the context automatically makes a rhetorician of the literary critic or interpreter and distinguishes that approach from the other kinds of verbal analysis. Critics who have insisted upon isolating, or abstracting, the literary text from the mind of its creator and from the milieu of its creation have found themselves unable to abstract it from the situation of its reader. Certain modern critics have joined with rhetoricians in denouncing the folly of all such attempts at abstraction. In interpreting any text—say a speech by Elizabeth I of England at Tilbury, Essex, or a play by the great Hindu poet of the 5th century, Kālidāsa—the rhetorician must imaginatively re-create the original situation of that text as well as endeavor to understand those factors that condition a present understanding.

All discourse now falls within the rhetorician’s purview. Modern rhetoricians identify rhetoric more with critical perspective than with artistic product. They justify expanding their concerns into other literary provinces on the basis of a change in thinking about the nature of human reason . Modern philosophers of the Existentialist and Phenomenologist schools have strongly challenged the assumptions whereby such dualities as knowledge and opinion , persuasion and conviction , reason and emotion, rhetoric and poetry , and even rhetoric and philosophy have in the past been distinguished. The old line between the demonstrable and the probable has become blurred. According to these modern philosophers, a person’s basic method of judgment is argumentation, whether in dialogue with others or with a text, and the results are necessarily relative and temporal. Such modern philosophers use legal battles in a courtroom as basic models of the process every person goes through in acquiring knowledge or opinion. For some, philosophy and rhetoric have become conflated , with rhetoric itself being a further conflation of the subject matter Aristotle discusses not only in his Rhetoric but also in his Topics , which he had designed for dialectics , for disputation among experts. According to this view, philosophers engage in a rhetorical transaction that seeks to persuade through a dialogic process first themselves and then, by means of their utterances, others. It is in this “argumentative” light that a rhetorically trained reader or auditor interprets all texts and justifies their inclusion within the province of rhetoric.

Rhetoric has come to be understood less as a body of theory or as certain types of artificial techniques and more as an integral component of all human discourse. As a body of discursive theory, rhetoric has traditionally offered rules that are merely articulations of contemporary attitudes toward certain kinds of prose and has tended to be identified with orations in which the specific intent to persuade is most obvious. But modern rhetoric is limited neither to the offering of rules nor to studying topical and transient products of controversy. Rather, having linked its traditional focus upon creation with a focus upon interpretation, modern rhetoric offers a perspective for discovering the suffusion of text and content inhering within any discourse. And for its twin tasks, analysis and genesis, it offers a methodology as well: the uncovering of those strategies whereby the interest, values, or emotions of an audience are engaged by any speaker or writer through his discourse. The perspective has been denoted with the term situation; the methodology, after the manner of certain modern philosophers, may be denoted by the term argumentation. It should be noted at the outset that one may study not only the intent, audience, and structure of a discursive act but also the shaping effects of the medium itself on both the communicator and the communicant. Those rhetorical instruments that potentially work upon an audience in a certain way, it must be assumed, produce somewhat analogous effects within the writer or speaker as well, directing and shaping his discourse.

For the tasks imposed by the rhetorical approach some of the most important tools inherited from antiquity are the figures of speech: for example, the metaphor , or comparison between two ostensibly dissimilar phenomena, as in the famous comparison by the 17th-century English poet John Donne of his soul and his mistress’s to the legs on a geometer’s compass in his “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” ; another is the allegory , the extended metaphor, as in John Bunyan’s classic of English prose Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), wherein man’s method of earning Christian salvation is compared to a road on which he journeys, and the comparison is maintained to such an extent that it becomes the central structural principle of the entire work. Such figures may be said to pertain either to the texture of the discourse, the local color or details, or to the structure, the shape of the total argument . Ancient rhetoricians made a functional distinction between trope (like metaphor , a textural effect) and scheme (like allegory , a structural principle). To the former category belong such figures as metaphor, simile (a comparison announced by “like” or “as”), personification (attributing human qualities to a nonhuman being or object), irony (a discrepancy between a speaker’s literal statement and his attitude or intent), hyperbole (overstatement or exaggeration) or understatement, and metonymy (substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it is in some way related—as part to whole, sometimes known as synecdoche ). To the latter category belonged such figures as allegory, parallelism (constructing sentences or phrases that resemble one another syntactically), antithesis (combining opposites into one statement—“ To be or not to be , that is the question”), congeries (an accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the same thing), apostrophe (a turning from one’s immediate audience to address another, who may be present only in the imagination), enthymeme (a loosely syllogistic form of reasoning in which the speaker assumes that any missing premises will be supplied by the audience), interrogatio (the “rhetorical” question, which is posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer), and gradatio (a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved). However, a certain slippage in the categories trope and scheme became inevitable, not simply because rhetoricians were inconsistent in their use of terms but because well-constructed discourse reflects a fusion of structure and texture. One is virtually indistinguishable from the other. Donne’s compass comparison, for example, creates a texture that is not isolable from other effects in the poem; rather, it is consonant with a structural principle that makes the comparison both appropriate and coherent . Above all, a modern rhetorician would insist that the figures, like all elements of rhetoric, reflect and determine not only the conceptualizing processes of the speaker’s mind but also an audience’s potential response. For all these reasons figures of speech are crucial means of examining the transactional nature of discourse.

In making a rhetorical approach to various discursive acts, one may speak of the rhetoric of a discourse—say, Robert Browning ’s poem “ My Last Duchess ” (1842)—and mean by that the strategies whereby the poet communicated with his contemporaries, in this case the Victorians, or with modern man, his present readers; or one may speak of the rhetoric in a discourse and mean by that the strategies whereby the persona , the Duke of Ferrara who speaks Browning’s poem in dramatic-monologue fashion, communicates with his audience in the poem, in this case an emissary from the father of Ferrara’s next duchess. The two kinds of rhetoric are not necessarily discrete: in oratory or in lyric poetry , for example, the creator and his persona are assumed to be identical. To a degree Aristotle’s distinction between the three voices of discourse still holds. A poet, according to Aristotle, speaks in his own voice in lyric poetry, in his own voice and through the voices of his characters in epic (or narrative), and only through the voices of his characters in drama . Thus, the speaker of oratory or of most nonfictional prose is similar to the lyric speaker, with less freedom than the latter either to universalize or to create imaginatively his own audience.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The origins of writing.

Proto-Cuneiform tablet with seal impressions: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars

Cuneiform tablet: administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats

Cylinder seal and modern impression: three "pigtailed ladies" with double-handled vessels

Ira Spar Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The alluvial plains of southern Mesopotamia in the later half of the fourth millennium B.C. witnessed a immense expansion in the number of populated sites. Scholars still debate the reasons for this population increase, which seems too large to be explained simply by normal growth. One site, the city of Uruk , surpassed all others as an urban center surrounded by a group of secondary settlements. It covered approximately 250 hectares, or .96 square miles, and has been called “the first city in world history.” The site was dominated by large temple estates whose need for accounting and disbursing of revenues led to the recording of economic data on clay tablets. The city was ruled by a man depicted in art with many religious functions. He is often called a “ priest-king .” Underneath this office was a stratified society in which certain professions were held in high esteem. One of the earliest written texts from Uruk provides a list of 120 officials including the leader of the city, leader of the law, leader of the plow, and leader of the lambs, as well as specialist terms for priests, metalworkers, potters, and others.

Many other urban sites existed in southern Mesopotamia in close proximity to Uruk. To the east of southern Mesopotamia lay a region located below the Zagros Mountains called by modern scholars Susiana. The name reflects the civilization centered around the site of Susa. There temples were built and clay tablets, dating to about 100 years after the earliest tablets from Uruk, were inscribed with numerals and word-signs. Examples of Uruk-type pottery are found in Susiana as well as in other sites in the Zagros mountain region and in northern and central Iran, attesting to the important influence of Uruk upon writing and material culture. Uruk culture also spread into Syria and southern Turkey, where Uruk-style buildings were constructed in urban settlements.

Recent archaeological research indicates that the origin and spread of writing may be more complex than previously thought. Complex state systems with proto-cuneiform writing on clay and wood may have existed in Syria and Turkey as early as the mid-fourth millennium B.C. If further excavations in these areas confirm this assumption, then writing on clay tablets found at Uruk would constitute only a single phase of the early development of writing. The Uruk archives may reflect a later period when writing “took off” as the need for more permanent accounting practices became evident with the rapid growth of large cities with mixed populations at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Clay became the preferred medium for recording bureaucratic items as it was abundant, cheap, and durable in comparison to other mediums. Initially, a reed or stick was used to draw pictographs and abstract signs into moistened clay. Some of the earliest pictographs are easily recognizable and decipherable, but most are of an abstract nature and cannot be identified with any known object. Over time, pictographic representation was replaced with wedge-shaped signs, formed by impressing the tip of a reed or wood stylus into the surface of a clay tablet. Modern (nineteenth-century) scholars called this type of writing cuneiform after the Latin term for wedge, cuneus .

Today, about 6,000 proto-cuneiform tablets, with more than 38,000 lines of text, are now known from areas associated with the Uruk culture, while only a few earlier examples are extant. The most popular but not universally accepted theory identifies the Uruk tablets with the Sumerians, a population group that spoke an agglutinative language related to no known linguistic group.

Some of the earliest signs inscribed on the tablets picture rations that needed to be counted, such as grain, fish, and various types of animals. These pictographs could be read in any number of languages much as international road signs can easily be interpreted by drivers from many nations. Personal names, titles of officials, verbal elements, and abstract ideas were difficult to interpret when written with pictorial or abstract signs. A major advance was made when a sign no longer just represented its intended meaning, but also a sound or group of sounds. To use a modern example, a picture of an “eye” could represent both an “eye” and the pronoun “I.” An image of a tin can indicates both an object and the concept “can,” that is, the ability to accomplish a goal. A drawing of a reed can represent both a plant and the verbal element “read.” When taken together, the statement “I can read” can be indicated by picture writing in which each picture represents a sound or another word different from an object with the same or similar sound.

This new way of interpreting signs is called the rebus principle. Only a few examples of its use exist in the earliest stages of cuneiform from between 3200 and 3000 B.C. The consistent use of this type of phonetic writing only becomes apparent after 2600 B.C. It constitutes the beginning of a true writing system characterized by a complex combination of word-signs and phonograms—signs for vowels and syllables—that allowed the scribe to express ideas. By the middle of the third millennium B.C. , cuneiform primarily written on clay tablets was used for a vast array of economic, religious, political, literary, and scholarly documents.

Spar, Ira. “The Origins of Writing.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrtg/hd_wrtg.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Glassner, Jean-Jacques. The Invention of Cuneiform Writing in Sumer . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Houston, Stephen D. The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Nissen, Hans J. "The Archaic Texts from Uruk." World Archaeology 17 (1986), pp. 317–34. n/a: n/a, n/a.

Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Walker, C. B. F. Cuneiform . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Additional Essays by Ira Spar

• Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Creation Myths .” (April 2009)
• Spar, Ira. “ Flood Stories .” (April 2009)
• Spar, Ira. “ Gilgamesh .” (April 2009)
• Spar, Ira. “ Mesopotamian Deities .” (April 2009)
• Spar, Ira. “ The Gods and Goddesses of Canaan .” (April 2009)

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The History of Writing is the History of Humanity

Walter stephens on lost books, rediscovery, and ancient wisdom.

Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no “social media”; and without binary code—strings of ones and zeroes that create computer programs—no viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that were difficult or impossible to accomplish without it; at some level, it is now essential for anything that human societies do, except in certain increasingly threatened cultures of hunter-gatherers. Without writing, modern civilization has amnesia; complex tasks need stable, reliable, long-term memory.

My new book, How Writing Made Us Human: 3000 BCE to Now , is about Homo scribens , Man the Writer, because whatever else they said about “man,” most writers in the Western tradition have assumed that writing made Homo fully human. Am I suggesting that writing is the only skill that makes “us” human? Of course not. Yet historically the idea was often implied and occasionally explicit. According to a late sixteenth-century treatise on penmanship, “Plato says that the difference which divides us humans from the animals is that we have the power of speech and they do not. I, however, say that the difference is that we know how to write but they do not.”

Throughout Western history, there have been other shorthand definitions of humanity in terms of some single, overarching, inherent trait. The most laudatory definition was devised by a botantist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, who dubbed us Homo sapiens , Man the Wise; later we were promoted to Homo sapiens sapiens . This flattering label has stuck, peremptorily declaring our superiority to all the hominins that went extinct. By enshrining the epithet in anthropology and other sciences, we continue to imply that some definition of wisdom is entwined with our species’ evolution.

Whether Neanderthals or others of our relatives laughed or played is unprovable (precisely because they did not write). But it seems likely; archaeology tells us they made things, as hominins had done since Paleolithic times. Yet writing is the one accomplishment we do not share with Neanderthals and our other ancestors.

Every age had its own ideas of how writing came about, what it was for, and what human life would be without it. For thousands of years, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Latins, Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared two projects, the creation and refinement of writing, and the attempt to understand its history and meaning. Other cultures, notably in China and Central America, have long traditions of writing, to be sure, and scholars have studied them for centuries. But to do them justice here would risk tangling the emotional thread that connects the history of Homo scribens from Babylon to our own time. That affective evolution is coherent and compelling, from myth to method, from fireside legends of gods and heroes to scientific excavation and decryption.

Throughout recorded history, humans have regarded the art of writing with awe and even reverence. To imagine humanity without writing was not impossible, but it was in many ways difficult. Prehistory , defined by the absence of written records, only entered the English language in 1836. A few years previously, in 1828, a North American schoolgirl praised writing as miraculous, “the wondrous, mystic art of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes.” This synesthetic quality, the capacity to translate information from one sense to another, had been a source of enthusiasm since the most ancient times, yet its appeal remained undiminished. Then, within twenty years, the electromagnetic telegraph expanded the definition of writing, by retranslating “painted speech” into a binary system of audible pulses capable of spanning continents and oceans.

Two centuries after the marveling schoolgirl, we can hardly imagine her degree of enthusiasm. Throughout five millennia, the art of writing has always been paradoxical, as mundane and practical as a pencil, yet miraculous, more stupefying in its way than end products like Paradise Lost , the Divine Comedy , the Iliad , or, ultimately, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh .

As if echoing the nineteenth-century schoolgirl, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and from its beginnings writing seemed indeed magical, even god-given. Praise for letters as the foundation of civilized life developed in ancient societies as soon as records progressed beyond bare lists and inventories. On clay, papyrus and parchment, paper, stone, and metals, men—and a very few women until the Renaissance—marveled at the art of writing and celebrated its awesome magnification of memory and imagination.

For most of history, the epithet scribens would have been grossly inappropriate to describe the genus Homo ; writing was a skill limited to a tiny elite of scribes and scholars. As the specialized technology of a guild, the art acquired a prestige, an aura, a mystique that made it seem magical, sometimes in the fullest sense of the word. Until nineteenth-century archaeology, anyone interested in the history of writing had scarcely better evidence than the Sumerians. Lacking historical perspective, but immensely proud of their craft, early scribes imagined its origin and development as superhuman, the gift of gods and heroes. Would-be historians inherited, transmitted, and embellished mythical tales about heroic or divine individuals who single-handedly invented an art imbued with a power that was sometimes tangible—that is, magical—as well as political, religious, or symbolic. Although these stories became steadily less mythical, their leitmotifs remained remarkably stable.

Writing as “The Wondrous, Mystic Art” The conviction that writing was worthy of the highest admiration, a marvel so astonishing that only a god or godlike human could have invented it, permeated countless stories about it before 1800. Writing enabled memory to outlast the human voice and transcend the individual person; written thoughts could remain stable over generations or centuries. By bridging space as well as time, writing abolished isolation and created community. It could even enable interaction between the ephemeral human world and the invisible society of gods, demons, and spirits. Writing was so central to definitions of humanity that, as I note above, the concept of prehistory only emerged around 1800, while the notion that Adam, Moses, or another biblical patriarch had invented writing lingered among the religious.

Inscription and Erasure Writing was a facsimile of immortality for individuals and whole societies; thus, a medieval Latin translator of Plato referred to memoria literarum . The phrase suggested that writing is a kind of receptacle, which contains memory as if it were a tangible physical object. Still, it was no secret that literary memory is not “literally” eternal because even the most durable media are overshadowed by the threat of erasure. The tension between inscription and obliteration (literally de-lettering) was and remains an omnipresent theme.

Lost Books and Libraries Lost writings are a powerful leitmotif in the emotional history of writing. The erasure of a single work seems tragic even now, but in the long manuscript age before Gutenberg, the destruction of a book could symbolize the loss of the whole world. If nothing but fragments of a text survive, the biblioclasm inevitably stimulates writers to imagine the complete whole that was destroyed. Like the armless Venus de Milo, mutilated writings have inspired nostalgic dreams of reconstitution, ranging from scholarly treatises to fantasy and kitsch. The immense Library of Alexandria was already the archetype of mass erasure during antiquity and the Middle Ages, and it still excites both scholars and nonspecialists.

Rediscovery Not all lost writings are gone for good; some are merely misplaced, and startling rediscoveries have been made over the centuries. Famous recovered works that crowd scholarly daydreams include the dramatic example of an entire library belonging to Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian emperor who died in 627 BCE. Discovered in 1849–1852, it contained thousands of cuneiform tablets, many broken into tiny fragments. The trove included the epic of Gilgamesh , the oldest major work of world literature, containing what its first reader in two millennia christened “the original version of Noah’s Flood.” More recently, space-age technologies have permitted unprecedented collaboration between manuscript scholars and cutting-edge scientists, who miraculously salvaged lost texts by that archetypal mathematician Archimedes.

Bookhunters Many recoveries of lost works have been owed to random good fortune, but just as frequently they were the result of deliberate searches. The figure of the Bookhunter, an Indiana Jones who traces clues and braves danger to recover priceless written treasure, was already present in ancient Egyptian myth. During the Renaissance, scholarly bookhunters transformed the ancient fables into an exciting reality; as they rediscovered landmarks of Greek and Roman culture, they laid bare centuries of dramatic stories about the history and powers of writing. Even today, the search and recovery operation is still going strong, including in cultures far older than Greece and Rome.

Ancient Wisdom Biblioclasms—lost libraries and damaged manuscripts—inspire a romantic nostalgia so intense that writers have often imagined whole utopias of extinct wisdom. Sometimes hard evidence of destruction inspired these bookish fantasies, but paradoxically, daydreams of loss were often provoked by exciting rediscoveries. Until the eighteenth century, sapientia veterum , the wisdom of the ancients, was the scholar’s imagined paradise, his (or increasingly her) Garden of Eden. Democratized literacy since 1800 has made reveries about the stupendous achievements of Egypt and Atlantis into perennial favorites of popular culture. Plato imagined Atlantis 2400 years ago, yet modern daydreams about lost utopias, from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to the 1985 film Back to the Future , differ from their ancient counterparts mainly through their anachronistic or pseudoscientific assumptions about technology and science.

Forgeries and Fakes Forged texts were common in ancient Greece, and even earlier in Egypt. During the Renaissance, when genuine Greek and Roman texts and epigraphic inscriptions were being rediscovered in droves, forgery and falsification ran rife. Scholars developed techniques for detecting them, but forgers stayed a step ahead of their critics. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, novelists were employing narrative techniques—some of them dating back to ancient Greece—that blurred the boundaries between fact, forgery, and fiction in suggestive and often disturbing ways. In 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , subtitled “the life and strange surprising adventures” of an Englishman from York, “written by Himself,” was told so realistically that a century later many readers, including a notorious forger of Shakespeare manuscripts, still mistook it for a factual account.

Books of the Damned Not all enthusiasm is positive. Whether genuine or forged, physically real or only imagined, books have at times incarnated an ideal of evil. Early Christians destroyed numbers of books they considered theologically, morally, or intellectually dangerous, including the Book of Enoch , which claimed to be the memoirs of Noah’s great-grandfather. Other scandalous books were nonexistent or unlocatable to begin with: the mere title of a book could ignite passionate controversy, even—or especially—when no one could find copies of it. Beginning in the thirteenth century, scholars gossiped and daydreamed apprehensively about a Book of the Three Great Impostors , which supposedly argued that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were charlatans and tricksters, and their religions nothing but tissues of lies. In the skeptical eighteenth century, a book was finally forged to fit the title, to widespread disappointment.

Holy Books The opposite of damned books were sacred books, which were off limits ( sacer in Latin) in a different way, “untouchable” because religious leaders declared them immune to all criticism. These holy books—or scriptures—are the most radically explicit example of creating authority —religious and political credibility—through writing. Their defenders claim that scriptures descend vertically from a god to humans, whereas modern scholars call them mere texts and explain their trajectories horizontally, across human history. From the Book of Enoch onward, legends about God and the Hebrew alphabet, including the origins of the Torah itself, were based on passages in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament, the Qur’an, and the Book of Mormon, as well as numbers of would-be scriptures now forgotten, went further and described in “autobiographical” detail how they came to be written by gods or their human amanuenses.

Imaginary Books As the previous two categories suggest, a letter, an inscription, or even an entire book can be wholly imaginary, as thoroughly nonexistent as cloud-cuckoo-land. Paradoxically, a brief title makes the hypothetical existence of a book easier to imagine than the narrated life of a Robinson Crusoe or an Elizabeth Bennet. Conversely, it is more difficult to establish the unreality of an imaginary book than that of a unicorn or a utopia. The metahistory of writing is entwined with the history of imaginary books, and examples of full-on mythical bibliography are far from rare. Whether as earnest scholarly quests for literary chimeras or as satirical send-ups of learned pretense, mythical bibliography remains a major expression of the social and emotional importance of writing.

Writing, Books, and Libraries as Metaphors and Symbols Various myths about the history of writing are strongly symbolic or metaphorical. At the end of Dante’s Paradiso , his famous description of God as the ultimate book symbolized the overwhelming consequence of writing and books for Christian culture in 1320. Six centuries later, Jorge Luis Borges came to international fame through his tale “The Library of Babel” (1941). Borges describes the cosmos as an infinite library whose only inhabitants are despondent librarians searching vainly for the ultimate book that will make sense of their bibliocosm. Borges’s tales and essays frequently couch the deepest philosophical truths in enigmatic narratives, glorifying language, writing, and books as convincingly as genuine primitive myths ever did, sometimes naming uncanny or savage gods as their authors.

Conclusions The history of writing is ready for its emotional close-up: what people have done with writing is now well known, but how they felt about it over time remains uncharted. The celebrities of bookish myths were not only gods and humans, but also writings, and ultimately the art of writing itself. Discarded documents, when they survive, have told us much about the way people used writing, in every kind of activity from accounting to religious contemplation, poetic meditation, philosophical inquiry, and scientific research. But discarded attitudes to writing still await the same kind of systematic spadework that archaeologists perform on material remains of the past.

The attitudes buried in myths and legends of writing reflect times when digging in the ground was for farmers, not archaeologists. Later, scholars researched the history of writing by reading books, but they had to construct that history for themselves from scattered, sometimes enigmatic anecdotes. Like the texts of Sappho’s poems or the Dead Sea Scrolls, emotional evidence about the history of writing survived in mutilated, fragmentary form. Nevertheless, that lore is as vital to the history of literature as Shakespeare’s sonnets or Dickens’s novels.

Generations of scholars have told us how a single author or a vaguely defined period (“the Middle Ages” or “the Enlightenment”) thought about books or libraries. But aside from writing as a profession (monk, scrivener, poet, historian, journalist, novelist, etc.), little has been collected of what earlier ages thought and felt about writing as an art , that is, as a whole phenomenon , in its organic relationship to humanity and civilization. Essential evidence for the emotional history of writing is only infrequently found in revered masterworks by Homer, Dante, or Jane Austen. The best sources are often lurking in outmoded scholarship: their technical obsolescence actually makes their defunct erudition more compelling as emotional history. Hiding under the dunes of dusty bygone scholarship are stories as captivating as Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” —a familiar poem inspired by an ancient, now-forgotten anecdote about writing.

 __________________________________

Adapted from  How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now  by Walter Stephens. Copyright 2023. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Introduction

The history and prehistory of writing are as long as the history of civilization itself. Indeed the development of communication by writing was a basic step in the advance of civilization.

Yet writing is little more than 5,000 years old. The oldest writings that have come down to the present day are inscriptions on clay tablets made by the Sumerians in about 3100 bc . The Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia , between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Egyptians in the Nile River valley developed writing about 100 to 200 years later ( see Egypt, ancient ).

Writing is sometimes spoken of as humankind’s greatest invention. It was developed by many people, in many places, and over a long period of time. The identity of the individuals responsible for the major steps in the development of writing is not known. Their names, like those of the inventors of the wheel, are lost forever in the dimness of the past.

How Early Humans Communicated

Long before the earliest writings of the Sumerians and the Egyptians were developed, people communicated with each other by a number of different methods. Early humans could express thoughts and feelings by means of speech or by signs or gestures. They could signal with fire and smoke, drums, or whistles.

These early methods of communication had two limitations. First, they were restricted as to the time in which communication could take place. As soon as the words were spoken, the gesture was made, or the smoke was blown away by the wind, they were gone and could not be recovered, except by repetition. Second, they were restricted as to space. They could be used only between persons more or less close to each other.

Forerunner of Writing: Picture, or Idea, Writing

The need for communicating in a form less limited by time and space led to drawings or markings on objects of any solid material. These messages lasted as long as the materials themselves. Humans had been drawing pictures from earliest times. The prehistoric cave paintings were artistic and realistic representations of the world of primitive humans ( see human origins ). If the pictures were intended to record an event or to convey a message, they were a form of writing.

A great number of such pictures, drawn on or carved in rock , have been found in the western mountains of the United States and Canada. They are called petrograms if they are drawn or painted and petroglyphs if they are carved.

Such pictures convey ideas, or meanings, directly to the mind without the use of words, sounds, or other language forms. This primitive method of communication is known as pictography (picture writing) or ideography (idea writing), and it formed the basis of the Chinese and Japanese characters used today.

Idea, or meaning, writing has many limitations. If he wished to communicate the simple message “I killed five lions,” the writer could start by drawing five separate pictures of lions. “I killed” still had to be expressed. Remembering the way he actually killed the lions, whether with a spear, a club, or a bow and arrow, the writer would draw the figure of himself holding the weapon that he had used in the act.

There were several roundabout ways the writer could make sure that other people understood it was he and no one else who killed the lions. If he were long-legged, he could draw himself with extra-long legs. He could draw himself with a special hairdo or headdress. He could also use the device, widely employed among Indians, of adding a picture standing for his name—for instance, White Buffalo or Red Shirt—near the head of the figure. All this was cumbersome and involved a great deal of thought in finding the right pictures to express the intended meanings. This system of writing was employed by the Plains Indians and the Aztecs.

Sumerians and Egyptians Originate Writing

The ideographic method of communication may have been sufficient in the simpler societies of hunters and nomads. It could not, however, meet the needs of urban societies with their highly developed commerce, industry, agriculture, and state organization, all of which involved the need to keep records.

The first of the urban societies arose in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here the ancient Sumerian civilization flourished. Some time later in the Nile River valley the Egyptians developed their civilization.

Early writing was influenced by a number of factors, particularly by the materials available. The people of ancient Egypt developed beautiful signs, called hieroglyphics , for writing inscriptions on tombs and monuments and for writing religious texts and important documents on papyrus . The word hieroglyphic is from the Greek hieros , meaning “sacred,” and glyphein , meaning “to carve.”

Because the people of southern Mesopotamia lacked both stone and material suitable for making paper, they pressed signs into wet clay tablets with the end of a reed or wooden stylus. This produced wedge-shaped marks; hence such writing is called cuneiform , from the Latin cuneus , meaning “wedge.” When preservation of the tablets was desired, they were baked. ( See also Babylonia and Assyria .)

The basic idea in the new writings was to express words of the language rather than ideas and meanings. Such a message as “I killed five lions” would not be expressed by pictures drawn in any order. It would instead be expressed in picture signs drawn in the order of the words in this sentence. The word “I” might be expressed by the picture sign of a head with the hand pointing to the nose; “killed” by the picture sign of a spear; “five” by five strokes; and “lion” by the picture sign of a lion.

The scribe no longer had a choice of using one sign or another according to the situation he was trying to describe. Whether the killing was done with a spear, a club, or a bow and arrow, the scribe could use for the word “kill” only that sign which he had learned to associate regularly with the word. If in Sumer the killing of animals or humans was done normally with a spear, then the picture of a spear would most likely have been chosen as the sign for the word “kill.”

A system of writing in which individual signs stand for individual words of the language is called logography (word writing). The signs in such a system are called logograms (word-signs).

Phonetic Writing

Word writing represented a tremendous advance over idea writing. It too, however, was not practical. Thousands of signs for thousands of words had to be invented and—what was worse—learned by students. It was still difficult to express some abstract ideas, such as “life”; proper names which have no known meanings, such as Thomas or New York; and grammatical forms, such as the endings -ed and -s in the sentence “I killed five lions.”

A way to overcome these difficulties was found in the use of the phonetic principle, or rebus device. An example would be writing the English word “belief” by drawing pictures of a bee and a leaf. In Sumerian the abstract word ti (life) was difficult to express in a picture sign. The scribe therefore wrote the word with an easy-to-draw picture sign of an arrow, which also had the sound of ti in Sumerian. Thus a picture sign stood for a speech sound.

With the rebus device new horizons were opened to the expression of all linguistic forms, no matter how abstract. It was no longer necessary to go through a process of mental gymnastics to figure out how to express such a word as “date” meaning an agreement made between a boy and a girl to meet at a certain time and place. Should the word be expressed by the picture of a boy and girl holding hands, by that of a tree and the moon, or by something else? With the rebus device this word could be written simply with the sign for “date” meaning a fruit. Its sign is easy to draw, and it sounds like the other “date.” Furthermore, the sign for “date” (fruit) might be used phonetically in every word in which the syllable “date” appears, such as “vali date, ” “consoli date, ” or “candi date. ”

Systems of writing in which signs are used either for full words of definite meaning or for syllables are called word-syllabic or logo-syllabic writings. Such word-syllabic writings were widespread in ancient times, among the Sumerians and Egyptians, among the Hittites in Anatolia (Asia Minor), among the Minoans and Mycenaeans in the Aegean area , and among the Chinese. The still undeciphered writings of the Elamites in southern Iran and of an unknown people who lived in India in very ancient times were also logo-syllabic. The Maya of Central America developed a system which lies somewhere between the ideographic stage of the Aztec and such fully developed word-syllabic systems as those of the Sumerians and the Egyptians.

Pictographic Origin of Word-Syllabic Systems

Like the primitive ideographic writings, all the word-syllabic writings were originally pictographic; that is, they contained signs in which one could easily recognize pictures of humans and objects such as animals, plants, and mountains.

The ideographic systems retained their pictorial characters from the beginning to the end of their existence. In the course of time, however, the word-syllabic writings developed cursive, linear forms. These became abbreviated and greatly changed through constant use. It is impossible to recognize in the great majority of them the pictures they originally represented. In Egypt three forms were used at the same time. There was a hieroglyphic form, which was a carefully drawn picture writing found mainly on public and official monuments. There were also hieratic and demotic forms, which were abbreviated, cursive writings used mainly for private and business correspondence.

Syllabic Writing

Next in the history of writing was the syllabic stage. All syllabic writings were derived from the word-syllabic systems. They were either identical with or simplified from the syllabaries of those systems. A syllabary is a list of characters, each one of which is used to write a syllable.

The Babylonians and Assyrians, who superseded the Sumerians in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates, accepted almost without change the Sumerian word-syllabic system. The foreign Elamites, Hurrians, and Urartians, who lived north of the Assyrians and Babylonians, felt that the task of mastering the complicated Sumerian system was too heavy a burden. They merely devised a simplified syllabary and eliminated almost entirely the many word-signs of the Sumerians.

The Japanese developed a simple syllabary from the Chinese word-syllabic writing. Japanese children are still taught this in the lower grades. In the higher grades they learn also a number of word-signs borrowed from Chinese, which they use side by side with their syllabary. This is similar to the writing, in English, of the word “plus” either as a word-sign “+” or alphabetically as “plus.”

Syllabic Writing of the Phoenicians

The most radical changes took place in the system which the Semites of Syria and Palestine developed from the Egyptian word-syllabic writing between 1500–1000 bc . They eliminated all the word-signs and all the syllabic signs with more than one consonant. They limited their syllabaries to about 30 signs beginning with a consonant and ending in any vowel.

The most important Semitic writing was developed around 1000 bc by the Phoenicians in the ancient city of Byblos. Their writing consisted of 22 syllabic signs beginning with a consonant and ending with a vowel. This is the writing which was destined to play a most important role in the history of civilization. Due to its great simplicity, the Phoenician writing spread rapidly. It was accepted gradually by other Semitic peoples, such as the Hebrews, Arameans, Arabs, and Abyssinians. In its march eastward it spread among the peoples of Persia and India. In its westward drive it was adopted in Greece, Italy, and the rest of Europe.

Because the vowels were not indicated in the Phoenician syllabic signs, these signs are called consonantal or even alphabetic by some scholars. The creators of a true alphabet , however, were not the Phoenicians but the Greeks.

A Summary of the Stages of Writing

There were three great steps by which writing evolved from primitive ideography to a full alphabet. First came the use of signs to stand for word sounds, leading to a word-syllabic writing. The Sumerians were the first to develop this stage of writing.

Second came the creation of a Semitic syllabary of some 22 to 30 signs. The greatness of the Phoenician writing did not lie in any revolutionary change but in its simplification. It excluded all the word-signs and signs with more than one consonant of the Egyptian system, and it was restricted in syllabary to a small number of open syllabic signs. This writing became the prototype of all alphabets.

The third great step was the creation of the Greek alphabet. This was accomplished by the systematic use of vowel signs. When these were added to the syllabic signs borrowed from the Semitic system, the result was to reduce the values of those syllabic signs to alphabetic signs.

In reaching its final development, whatever its forerunners may have been, writing had to pass through these three stages—word, syllabic, and alphabetic—in this, and no other, order. No stage of development could be skipped. No writing could start with a syllabic or alphabetic stage unless it was borrowed from a system which had gone through the previous stages. A system of writing could stop at one stage without developing further. The Plains Indians of North America never progressed beyond pictographic writing. Japanese and Chinese writings remained word-syllabic.

Writing rarely developed through all stages within any one area. People were usually conservative and attached to their own kind of writing. In Egypt and Babylonia religious interests, and in China political interests, were responsible for maintaining a difficult and obsolete form of writing and making its general use by the people impossible. It was therefore foreign peoples, not bound by local traditions and interests, who were frequently responsible for introducing new and important developments in the history of writing. Thus it was the Phoenicians who simplified Egyptian writing, and the Greeks who developed the alphabet they derived from the Phoenicians.

Ignace J. Gelb

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This guide was created to take you along a step by step process to develop a speech. It is mainly focused on helping you brainstorm, identify, and define a topic to research.

This is a general guide, so it may vary from your classroom assignments. As always, refer to your professor and syllabus for your project requirements. 

Narrow Your Topic

Evaluate your topic, cite your sources.

Consider these questions:

• What subjects or ideas interest you?
• What kinds of life experience do you have?
• What kinds of issues have affected you or people you care about?
• Do you have a passion about an idea, a question, a subject? How can you explain or describe it such that others might be passionate about it as well?
• Does your subject have an edge? Does the topic have passionate supporters and opponents as well as being logical and reasonable? Is it debatable? Is it an unsolved problem?

A good practice is to make a list of ideas. As an example, here is an imaginary student’s list of ideas:

With the topics on your list, ask yourself these questions:

• Which topics are most worthy of your time?
• Why is your topic significant?
• Does it work with my assignment? (Is your speech informative, persuasive, etc.)

It is often beneficial (unless the topic is given or encouraged) to avoid heavily discussed topics. This helps to keep the speech interesting rather than giving an audience information they hear regularly.

Overused topics may include abortion, global warming, affirmative action, the death penalty, recycling, and sex and violence in the media. There is always a possibility to find an interesting angle or portion of the topic, but make sure you verify it with a professor first.

Let's take our student's list as an example. Our student might not want to write a speech on recycling, but maybe they have a a great way to reuse/remake something that is normally thrown out. This could work as a topic for a demonstration speech, though they would need to have the topic approved.

What are some other topics ideas from this list?

One way to develop these ideas is to make a concept map. Below is a sample of the student's concept map if they focused on knitting.

• Concept Mapping

Now this particular student enjoys mysteries and crime shows, because they like to figure out who the culprit is. The student needs to write an informative speech, and decides that they could inform others on how to solve mysteries.

Since it is a very large topic, the student decides to focus on helping people solve mysteries by informing them on how to tell if someone is lying .

After narrowing the topic, evaluate your speech to see if it is a good fit for your assignment.

• If it takes a while to explain your topic is either too complicated or too broad. Consider your time requirements and if you can adequately discuss the topic.
• Begin to focus on what you want to say and why. Part of this will already be dictated by the type of speech you are assigned. Making a concept map can help provide you with ideas.
• Who will hear the information? Will they have experience with the topic? What other factors will influence how they will interpret the information?
• You will want to use solid, scholarly information on the topic. General information might be easy to find, but you will need facts and research to back up your claims and information.

In our example the student’s evaluation would look like this:

Write out your research question or thesis statement. Underline words that you believe best represent the main ideas.

How can we determine if someone is lying to us?

Second, create a list of synonyms for each word you underlined and use these terms to search for resources.

Lying OR lie-spotting Face perception Body language. Deception.

You can add additional terms as you survey what is available:

Lying OR Deception AND workplace or business Friendship or workplace or business

As you gather resources be sure to evaluate the resources!

Check out the Searching Strategies for Websites and Databases for more tips. Check out the Evaluating Resources page to avoid choosing bad sources for your projects!

There are lots of reasons to provide references to the sources that you use.

Your audience may want to know how to investigate your topic further. By providing your resources you are helping others who are interested in the same topic.

You also need to credit the people who did the research you are using otherwise you will be claiming it is your own (even if unintentionally doing so). Plagiarism is a serious offense.

Here is a definition of plagiarism:

“Plagiarism is appropriating someone else's words or ideas without acknowledgment. To understand plagiarism we must consider two questions: (1) How is plagiarism like or unlike theft— (2) Why is plagiarism considered wrong; why should we acknowledge the originator of an idea.”

(Encyclopedia of Ethics. London: Routledge, 2001. Credo Reference. 17 April 2009 <http://www.credoreference.com/entry/7915618>.)

Just like in college writing, speeches should provide your audience with verbal cues to the information you have used: the SOURCE where you found your information. (This might be an interview, scholarly article, book, or website, etc.); the AUTHOR, when available, and the DATE when your source was published or accessed (for web sources and interviews).

Here are three ways to incorporate citations for your speech:

• Use quotation marks to attribute words of another person on your note cards. You can express quotations in your speech in several ways.
• Provide credit or citation such that the audience can trace back to the original source.
• Paraphrasing the main ideas WITH correct attribution.  A paraphrase will replace some of the words while keeping the main idea of the original work.

For more information on how to cite sources, see the “Citation” page in this guide.

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What this handout is about

This handout will help you create an effective speech by establishing the purpose of your speech and making it easily understandable. It will also help you to analyze your audience and keep the audience interested.

What’s different about a speech?

Writing for public speaking isn’t so different from other types of writing. You want to engage your audience’s attention, convey your ideas in a logical manner and use reliable evidence to support your point. But the conditions for public speaking favor some writing qualities over others. When you write a speech, your audience is made up of listeners. They have only one chance to comprehend the information as you read it, so your speech must be well-organized and easily understood. In addition, the content of the speech and your delivery must fit the audience.

What’s your purpose?

People have gathered to hear you speak on a specific issue, and they expect to get something out of it immediately. And you, the speaker, hope to have an immediate effect on your audience. The purpose of your speech is to get the response you want. Most speeches invite audiences to react in one of three ways: feeling, thinking, or acting. For example, eulogies encourage emotional response from the audience; college lectures stimulate listeners to think about a topic from a different perspective; protest speeches in the Pit recommend actions the audience can take.

As you establish your purpose, ask yourself these questions:

• What do you want the audience to learn or do?
• If you are making an argument, why do you want them to agree with you?
• If they already agree with you, why are you giving the speech?
• How can your audience benefit from what you have to say?

Audience analysis

If your purpose is to get a certain response from your audience, you must consider who they are (or who you’re pretending they are). If you can identify ways to connect with your listeners, you can make your speech interesting and useful.

As you think of ways to appeal to your audience, ask yourself:

• What do they have in common? Age? Interests? Ethnicity? Gender?
• Do they know as much about your topic as you, or will you be introducing them to new ideas?
• Why are these people listening to you? What are they looking for?
• What level of detail will be effective for them?
• What tone will be most effective in conveying your message?
• What might offend or alienate them?

For more help, see our handout on audience .

Creating an effective introduction

Get their attention, otherwise known as “the hook”.

Think about how you can relate to these listeners and get them to relate to you or your topic. Appealing to your audience on a personal level captures their attention and concern, increasing the chances of a successful speech. Speakers often begin with anecdotes to hook their audience’s attention. Other methods include presenting shocking statistics, asking direct questions of the audience, or enlisting audience participation.

Establish context and/or motive

Explain why your topic is important. Consider your purpose and how you came to speak to this audience. You may also want to connect the material to related or larger issues as well, especially those that may be important to your audience.

Get to the point

Tell your listeners your thesis right away and explain how you will support it. Don’t spend as much time developing your introductory paragraph and leading up to the thesis statement as you would in a research paper for a course. Moving from the intro into the body of the speech quickly will help keep your audience interested. You may be tempted to create suspense by keeping the audience guessing about your thesis until the end, then springing the implications of your discussion on them. But if you do so, they will most likely become bored or confused.

For more help, see our handout on introductions .

Making your speech easy to understand

Repeat crucial points and buzzwords.

Especially in longer speeches, it’s a good idea to keep reminding your audience of the main points you’ve made. For example, you could link an earlier main point or key term as you transition into or wrap up a new point. You could also address the relationship between earlier points and new points through discussion within a body paragraph. Using buzzwords or key terms throughout your paper is also a good idea. If your thesis says you’re going to expose unethical behavior of medical insurance companies, make sure the use of “ethics” recurs instead of switching to “immoral” or simply “wrong.” Repetition of key terms makes it easier for your audience to take in and connect information.

Incorporate previews and summaries into the speech

For example:

“I’m here today to talk to you about three issues that threaten our educational system: First, … Second, … Third,”

“I’ve talked to you today about such and such.”

These kinds of verbal cues permit the people in the audience to put together the pieces of your speech without thinking too hard, so they can spend more time paying attention to its content.

Use especially strong transitions

This will help your listeners see how new information relates to what they’ve heard so far. If you set up a counterargument in one paragraph so you can demolish it in the next, begin the demolition by saying something like,

“But this argument makes no sense when you consider that . . . .”

If you’re providing additional information to support your main point, you could say,

“Another fact that supports my main point is . . . .”

Helping your audience listen

Rely on shorter, simpler sentence structures.

Don’t get too complicated when you’re asking an audience to remember everything you say. Avoid using too many subordinate clauses, and place subjects and verbs close together.

Too complicated:

The product, which was invented in 1908 by Orville Z. McGillicuddy in Des Moines, Iowa, and which was on store shelves approximately one year later, still sells well.

Easier to understand:

Orville Z. McGillicuddy invented the product in 1908 and introduced it into stores shortly afterward. Almost a century later, the product still sells well.

Limit pronoun use

Listeners may have a hard time remembering or figuring out what “it,” “they,” or “this” refers to. Be specific by using a key noun instead of unclear pronouns.

Pronoun problem:

The U.S. government has failed to protect us from the scourge of so-called reality television, which exploits sex, violence, and petty conflict, and calls it human nature. This cannot continue.

Why the last sentence is unclear: “This” what? The government’s failure? Reality TV? Human nature?

More specific:

The U.S. government has failed to protect us from the scourge of so-called reality television, which exploits sex, violence, and petty conflict, and calls it human nature. This failure cannot continue.

Keeping audience interest

Incorporate the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos.

When arguing a point, using ethos, pathos, and logos can help convince your audience to believe you and make your argument stronger. Ethos refers to an appeal to your audience by establishing your authenticity and trustworthiness as a speaker. If you employ pathos, you appeal to your audience’s emotions. Using logos includes the support of hard facts, statistics, and logical argumentation. The most effective speeches usually present a combination these rhetorical strategies.

Use statistics and quotations sparingly

Include only the most striking factual material to support your perspective, things that would likely stick in the listeners’ minds long after you’ve finished speaking. Otherwise, you run the risk of overwhelming your listeners with too much information.

Watch your tone

Be careful not to talk over the heads of your audience. On the other hand, don’t be condescending either. And as for grabbing their attention, yelling, cursing, using inappropriate humor, or brandishing a potentially offensive prop (say, autopsy photos) will only make the audience tune you out.

Creating an effective conclusion

Restate your main points, but don’t repeat them.

“I asked earlier why we should care about the rain forest. Now I hope it’s clear that . . .” “Remember how Mrs. Smith couldn’t afford her prescriptions? Under our plan, . . .”

Call to action

Speeches often close with an appeal to the audience to take action based on their new knowledge or understanding. If you do this, be sure the action you recommend is specific and realistic. For example, although your audience may not be able to affect foreign policy directly, they can vote or work for candidates whose foreign policy views they support. Relating the purpose of your speech to their lives not only creates a connection with your audience, but also reiterates the importance of your topic to them in particular or “the bigger picture.”

Practicing for effective presentation

Once you’ve completed a draft, read your speech to a friend or in front of a mirror. When you’ve finished reading, ask the following questions:

• Which pieces of information are clearest?
• Where did I connect with the audience?
• Where might listeners lose the thread of my argument or description?
• Where might listeners become bored?
• Where did I have trouble speaking clearly and/or emphatically?
• Did I stay within my time limit?

Other resources

• Toastmasters International is a nonprofit group that provides communication and leadership training.
• Allyn & Bacon Publishing’s Essence of Public Speaking Series is an extensive treatment of speech writing and delivery, including books on using humor, motivating your audience, word choice and presentation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Boone, Louis E., David L. Kurtz, and Judy R. Block. 1997. Contemporary Business Communication . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Ehrlich, Henry. 1994. Writing Effective Speeches . New York: Marlowe.

Lamb, Sandra E. 1998. How to Write It: A Complete Guide to Everything You’ll Ever Write . Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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10 of the Most Famous and Inspirational Speeches from History

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What makes a great and iconic speech? There are numerous examples of brilliant orators and speechmakers throughout history, from classical times to the present day. What the best speeches tend to have in common are more than just a solid intellectual argument: they have emotive power, or, for want of a more scholarly word, ‘heart’. Great speeches rouse us to action, or move us to tears – or both.

But of course, historic speeches are often also associated with landmark, or watershed, moments in a nation’s history: when Churchill delivered his series of wartime speeches to Britain in 1940, it was against the backdrop of a war which was still in its early, uncertain stages. And when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he was addressing a crowd who, like him, were marching for justice, freedom, and civil rights for African Americans.

Let’s take a closer look at ten of the best and most famous speeches from great moments in history.

Abraham Lincoln, ‘ Gettysburg Address ’ (1863).

The Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history, yet it was extremely short – just 268 words, or less than a page of text – and Abraham Lincoln, who gave the address, wasn’t even the top billing .

The US President Abraham Lincoln gave this short address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on 19 November 1863. At the time, the American Civil War was still raging, and the Battle of Gettysburg had been the bloodiest battle in the war, with an estimated 23,000 casualties.

Lincoln’s speech has been remembered while Edward Everett’s – the main speech delivered on that day – has long been forgotten because Lincoln eschewed the high-flown allusions and wordy style of most political orators of the nineteenth century. Instead, he addresses his audience in plain, homespun English that is immediately relatable and accessible.

Sojourner Truth, ‘ Ain’t I a Woman? ’ (1851).

Sometimes known as ‘Ar’n’t I a Woman?’, this is a speech which Sojourner Truth, a freed African slave living in the United States, delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. The women in attendance were being challenged to call for the right to vote.

In her speech, Sojourner Truth attempts to persuade the audience to give women the vote . As both an ex-slave and a woman, Sojourner Truth knew about the plight of both groups of people in the United States. Her speech shows her audience the times: change is coming, and it is time to give women the rights that should be theirs.

John Ball, ‘ Cast off the Yoke of Bondage ’ (1381).

The summer of 1381 was a time of unrest in England. The so-called ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, led by Wat Tyler (in actual fact, many of the leaders of the revolt were more well-to-do than your average peasant), gathered force until the rebels stormed London, executing a number of high-ranking officials, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, Simon Sudbury.

Alongside Tyler, the priest John Ball was an important leading figure of the rebellion. His famous couplet, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?’ sums up the ethos of the Peasants’ Revolt: social inequality was unheard of until men created it.

Winston Churchill, ‘ We Shall Fight on the Beaches ’ (1940).

Winston Churchill had only recently assumed the role of UK Prime Minister when he gave the trio of wartime speeches which have gone down in history for their rhetorical skill and emotive power. This, for our money, is the best of the three.

Churchill gave this speech in the House of Commons on 4 June 1940. Having brought his listeners up to speed with what has happened, Churchill comes to the peroration of his speech : by far the most famous part. He reassures them that if nothing is neglected and all arrangements are made, he sees no reason why Britain cannot once more defend itself against invasion: something which, as an island nation, it has always been susceptible to by sea, and now by air.

Even if it takes years, and even if Britain must defend itself alone without any help from its allies, this is what must happen. Capitulation to the Nazis is not an option. The line ‘if necessary for years; if necessary, alone’ is sure to send a shiver down the spine, as is the way Churchill barks ‘we shall never surrender!’ in the post-war recording of the speech he made several years later.

William Faulkner, ‘ The Agony and the Sweat ’ (1950).

This is the title sometimes given to one of the most memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speeches: the American novelist William Faulkner’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature at Stockholm in 1950.

In his speech, Faulkner makes his famous statement about the ‘duty’ of writers: that they should write about ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’, as well as emotions and themes such as compassion, sacrifice, courage, and hope. He also emphasises that being a writer is hard work, and involves understanding human nature in all its complexity. But good writing should also remind readers what humankind is capable of.

Emmeline Pankhurst, ‘ The Plight of Women ’ (1908).

Pankhurst (1858-1928) was the leader of the British suffragettes, campaigning – and protesting – for votes for women. After she realised that Asquith’s Liberal government were unlikely to grand women the vote, the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded by Pankhurst with her daughter Christabel, turned to more militant tactics to shift public and parliamentary opinion.

Her emphasis in this speech is on the unhappy lot most women could face, in marriage and in motherhood. She also shows how ‘man-made’ the laws of England are, when they are biased in favour of men to the detriment of women’s rights.

This speech was given at the Portman Rooms in London in 1908; ten years later, towards the end of the First World War, women over 30 were finally given the vote. But it would be another ten years, in 1928 – the year of Pankhurst’s death – before the voting age for women was equal to that for men (21 years).

Franklin Roosevelt, ‘ The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself ’ (1933).

This is the title by which Roosevelt’s speech at his inauguration in 1933 has commonly become known, and it has attained the status of a proverb. Roosevelt was elected only a few years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.

Roosevelt’s famous line in the speech, which offered hope to millions of Americans dealing with unemployment and poverty, was probably inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau, a copy of whose writings FDR had been gifted shortly before his inauguration. The line about having nothing to fear except fear itself was, in fact, only added into the speech the day before the inauguration took place, but it ensured that the speech went down in history.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, ‘ Among Us You Can Dwell No Longer ’ (63 BC).

Of all of the great classical orators, perhaps the greatest of all was the Roman statesman, philosopher, and speechmaker, Cicero (whose name literally means ‘chickpea’).

This is probably his best-known speech. At the Temple of Jupiter in Rome, Cicero addressed the crowd, but specifically directed his comments towards Lucius Catiline, who was accused of plotting a conspiracy to set fire to the capital and stage and insurrection. The speech was considered such a fine example of Roman rhetoric that it was a favourite in classrooms for centuries after, as Brian MacArthur notes in The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches .

Queen Elizabeth I, ‘ The Heart and Stomach of a King ’ (1588).

Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury is among the most famous and iconic speeches in English history. On 9 August 1588, Elizabeth addressed the land forces which had been mobilised at the port of Tilbury in Essex, in preparation for the expected invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.

When she gave this speech, Elizabeth was in her mid-fifties and her youthful beauty had faded. But she had learned rhetoric as a young princess, and this training served her well when she wrote and delivered this speech (she was also a fairly accomplished poet ).

She famously tells her troops: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’. She acknowledged the fact that her body was naturally less masculine and strong than the average man’s, but it is not mere physical strength that will win the day. It is courage that matters.

Martin Luther King, ‘ I Have a Dream ’ (1963).

Let’s conclude this selection of the best inspirational speeches with the best-known of all of Martin Luther King’s speeches. The occasion for this piece of oratorical grandeur was the march on Washington , which saw some 210,000 men, women, and children gather at the Washington Monument in August 1963, before marching to the Lincoln Memorial. King reportedly stayed up until 4am the night before he was due to give the speech, writing it out.

King’s speech imagines a collective vision of a better and more equal America which is not only shared by many Black Americans, but by anyone who identifies with their fight against racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination.

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3 Famous Speech Writers Throughout History: What They Teach You About Public Speaking

That said, some individuals are so talented at writing a speech their good speech writing makes them famous. Before we discuss these three famous writers, it’s essential to articulate what they do and why they are so crucial. Essentially, what makes a great speech writer?

Learning from these iconic individuals can help you learn tips on how to create a compelling talk. Whether you need to write wedding speeches, persuasive speeches, or simply want to know how best to capture your audience’s attention, learning from those before you can be your guide.

Bear in mind that while we discuss writers for presidents, there are many types of speechwriters. People hire a speech writer for various reasons, but every great writer shares a few commonalities.

What Is A Speech Writer?

A speech writer is an individual who conducts the necessary research process, writing, and editing, on behalf of the speaker. Individuals in both the public and private sectors often hire speech writers.

While you may associate speech writers with elected officials, such as vice presidents or presidents, you can also employ a speech writer for smaller events.

Since speech writers dedicate their lives writing speeches, employing one can help you create the best bullet points to enable your audience to listen attentively.

Speech writers cover a variety of events and write for well-known and lesser-known individuals. In order to define what makes a great speech writer, let’s cover three major speech writers throughout history.

Alexander Hamilton: A Detail Not Included In His Musical

Whether you know Alexander Hamilton from your high school history class or the musical named after him, Hamilton was a friend of George Washington. So when the first president of the United States decided to step down from office and wanted to give a farewell address, Hamilton was involved.

Although Washington originally asked James Madison to write his address , eventually, the task was turned over to Hamilton. Hamilton created his draft with full creative liberties but also incorporated Madison’s. Amendments were made, and the speech underwent many changes.

Alexander Hamilton is famous in many ways. However, following his death and Washington’s, controversy broke out concerning who wrote Washington’s Farewell Address. However, Hamilton’s wife publicly stated that :

“A short time previous to General Washington’s retiring from the Presidency…Hamilton suggested to him the idea of delivering a farewell address…with which idea General Washington was well pleased… Mr. Hamilton did so, and the address was written.”

Even President George Washington needed a speech writer at the end of his two terms. Hamilton was his go-to, and his speech has been remembered for decades. Never underestimate the power of a great speech or the tedious edits that make it so.

Judson Welliver: The First Presidential Speech Writer

While Alexander Hamilton is partially known for writing the famous Farewell Address, Judson Welliver is known as the first presidential speech writer . Until Warren G. Harding, there was no official speech writer for presidents.

However, Welliver was present for Harding, and when he took office, Welliver’s help transitioned into writing speeches. When Calvin Coolidge entered office he also used Welliver’s writing tips. Consequently, speech writers as a whole never left the White House.

Welliver was widely known as a newspaperman before his transition into speech writing for presidents. Before Welliever’s time, speech writers were not a standard commodity for presidents.

Judson Welliver helped where he was equipped to. Using his talent where needed, he created an entirely new position within the government. The name Judson Welliver should not go without notice.

Richard N. Goodwin: Capturing History With A Pen

Richard N. Goodwin married Dorris Kearns Goodwin. He did not know that just as he captured history through famous speeches, his wife would capture his career as well. In fact, he is a standout example of what makes a great speech writer.

Goodwin was considered a staff celebrity when President Lyndon B. Johnson recruited him to become his speech writer. Goodwin is credited with writing some of the President’s most well-known speeches.

He only served for two years on President Johnson’s staff. Regardless, one of these speeches is the 1965 famous address to Congress, in which the president called for voting rights legislation .

Although his political career was brief, Goodwin left an indelible mark as a speech writer. What is said lasts for decades, not just on the page but in the minds and hearts of those who hear them. Working as a speech writer isn’t simply a job but a way to embody the struggles and successes of others. Speech writing allows you to become a voice for history.

How Do You Become A Speech Writer?

Becoming a speech writer largely depends on what type of speeches you want to write. Regardless of who you one day work for, an elected government official, maid of honor, or even need to write your own speech, self-educating is important.

Take the necessary time to study the above names as well as lesser-known individuals. Pay attention to the small dedtails that made these names great:

• Alexander Hamilton edited his speech over and over
• Judson Welliver filled a need with his talent
• Richard N. Goodwin became a voice for history

Additionally, add in study of the art of communication, debate, and even body language. Once you have a general understanding of how to write a great speech, you can do the following:

• Volunteer at events that encompass your field of interest
• Practice writing speeches
• Watch memorable speeches

What Makes A Great Speech Writer?

A great speech writer knows how to write an effective speech by implementing the following:

• Creating a quality speech structure
• Knowing when to repeat keywords and phrases
• Presenting the core idea in a concise manner

The execution of a speech is left up to the speaker. A great speech writer trusts the speaker to voice their final draft with great tone, appropriate eye contact, and timely pauses.

The more speeches you write, the better you will understand how to write in another person’s voice. Speech writing is a type of ghostwriting. It’s crucial to draft your speech in the voice of the one presenting it.

It takes time and effort to draft a speech that:

• Fits the occasion
• Is the correct length
• Matches the tone of the speaker
• Is written to the right audience

But what if you don’t only want to become a great speech writer? Instead, you want to also ensure the speech is delivered exactly the way you hope it to be?

You Are Your Own Speech Writer: How To Start Excelling Today

When you realize you have the power to become your own speech writer, your options are limitless. Now you know examples of famous speech writers throughout history. You learned what makes a great one, and that you can be your own. Follow these few steps:

• You can create an environment that enables you to not just write a great speech, but deliver a great speech.
• Hone in on your uniqueness
• Perfect your presentation skills
• Write your memorable speech

Many individuals spent time crafting and giving speeches that changed their life forever . When you write a memorable speech and deliver it with excellence, you have potential to succeed in astounding ways.

The great news is, if you are interested in public speaking, you can be your own speech writer. Build a group of qualified individuals around you. Learn exactly what goes into a speech that your audience will remember and practice your delivery.

Before you know it you could step on stage and present the talk you always wanted to share. Remember: When you realize you have the power to become your own speech writer, your options are limitless.

Introductory Note: To George Washington

In Praise of Judson Welliver

MasterClass

Richard Goodwin: The Speechwriter Who Named The “Great Society”

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Attacks on Walz’s Military Record

By Robert Farley , D'Angelo Gore and Eugene Kiely

Posted on August 8, 2024 | Updated on August 12, 2024 | Corrected on August 9, 2024

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino .

In introducing her pick for vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris has prominently touted Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the Army National Guard. Now, however, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance and the Trump campaign are attacking Walz on his military record, accusing the Minnesota governor of “stolen valor.”

We’ll sort through the facts surrounding the three main attacks on Walz’s military record and let readers decide their merit. The claims include:

• Vance claimed that Walz “dropped out” of the National Guard when he learned his battalion was slated to be deployed to Iraq. Walz retired to focus on a run for Congress two months before his unit got official word of impending deployment, though the possibility had been rumored for months.
• Vance also accused Walz of having once claimed to have served in combat, when he did not. While advocating a ban on assault-style weapons, Walz said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Update, Aug. 12: The Harris campaign says that Walz “misspoke.”
• The Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for misrepresenting his military rank in campaign materials. The Harris campaign website salutes Walz for “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.” Walz did rise to that rank, but he retired as a master sergeant because he had not completed the requirements of a command sergeant major.

A native of West Point, Nebraska, Walz joined the Nebraska Army National Guard in April 1981, two days after his 17th birthday. When Walz and his wife moved to Minnesota in 1996, he transferred to the Minnesota National Guard, where he served in 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery.

“While serving in Minnesota, his military occupational specialties were 13B – a cannon crewmember who operates and maintains cannons and 13Z -field artillery senior sergeant,” according to a statement released by Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer.

According to MPR News , Walz suffered some hearing impairment related to exposure to cannon booms during training over the years, and he underwent some corrective surgery to address it.

On Aug. 3, 2003, “Walz mobilized with the Minnesota National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery … to support Operation Enduring Freedom. The battalion supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey. Governor Walz was stationed at Vicenza, Italy, during his deployment,” Augé stated. The deployment lasted about eight months.

“For 24 years I proudly wore the uniform of this nation,” Walz said at a rally in Philadelphia where he was announced as Harris’ running mate on Aug. 6. “The National Guard gave me purpose. It gave me the strength of a shared commitment to something greater than ourselves.”

Walz’s Retirement from the National Guard

In recent years, however, several of his fellow guard members have taken issue with the timing of Walz’s retirement from the National Guard in May 2005, claiming he left to avoid a deployment to Iraq.

Vance, who served a four-year active duty enlistment in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent, serving in Iraq for six months in 2005, advanced that argument at a campaign event on Aug. 7.

“When the United States of America asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance said. “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with. I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

In early 2005, Walz, then a high school geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School, decided to run for public office. In a 2009 interview Walz provided as part of the Library of Congress’ veterans oral history project, Walz said he made the decision to retire from the National Guard to “focus full time” on a run for the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District (which he ultimately won in 2006). Walz said he was “really concerned” about trying to seek public office and serve in the National Guard at the same time without running afoul of the Hatch Act , which limits political speech by federal employees, including members of the National Guard.

Federal Election Commission records show that Walz filed to run for Congress on Feb. 10, 2005.

On March 20, 2005, Walz’s campaign put out a press release titled “Walz Still Planning to Run for Congress Despite Possible Call to Duty in Iraq.”

Three days prior, the release said, “the National Guard Public Affairs Office announced a possible partial mobilization of roughly 2,000 troops from the Minnesota National Guard. … The announcement from the National Guard PAO specified that all or a portion of Walz’s battalion could be mobilized to serve in Iraq within the next two years.”

According to the release, “When asked about his possible deployment to Iraq Walz said, ‘I do not yet know if my artillery unit will be part of this mobilization and I am unable to comment further on specifics of the deployment.’ Although his tour of duty in Iraq might coincide with his campaign for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional seat, Walz is determined to stay in the race. ‘As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq.'”

On March 23, 2005, the Pipestone County Star reported, “Detachments of the Minnesota National Guard have been ‘alerted’ of possible deployment to Iraq in mid-to-late 2006.”

“Major Kevin Olson of the Minnesota National Guard said a brigade-sized contingent of soldiers could be expected to be called to Iraq, but he was not, at this time, aware of which batteries would be called,” the story said. “All soldiers in the First Brigade combat team of the 34th Division, Minnesota National Guard, could be eligible for call-up. ‘We don’t know yet what the force is like’ he said. ‘It’s too early to speculate, if the (soldiers) do go.’

“He added: ‘We will have a major announcement if and when the alert order moves ahead.’”

ABC News spoke to Joseph Eustice, a retired command sergeant major who served with Walz, and he told the news organization this week that “he remembers Walz struggling with the timing of wanting to serve as a lawmaker but also avoiding asking for a deferment so he could do so.”

“He had a window of time,” Eustice told ABC News. “He had to decide. And in his deciding, we were not on notice to be deployed. There were rumors. There were lots of rumors, and we didn’t know where we were going until it was later that, early summer, I believe.”

Al Bonnifield, who served under Walz, also recalled Walz agonizing over the decision.

“It was a very long conversation behind closed doors,” Bonnifield told the Washington Post this week. “He was trying to decide where he could do better for soldiers, for veterans, for the country. He weighed that for a long time.”

In 2018, Bonnifield told MPR News that Walz worried in early 2005, “Would the soldier look down on him because he didn’t go with us? Would the common soldier say, ‘Hey, he didn’t go with us, he’s trying to skip out on a deployment?’ And he wasn’t. He talked with us for quite a while on that subject. He weighed that decision to run for Congress very heavy. He loved the military, he loved the guard, he loved the soldiers he worked with.”

But not all of Walz’s fellow Guard members felt that way.

In a paid letter to the West Central Tribune in Minnesota in November 2018, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr — both retired command sergeants major in the Minnesota National Guard — wrote, “On May 16th, 2005 he [Walz] quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have.”

“For Tim Walz to abandon his fellow soldiers and quit when they needed experienced leadership most is disheartening,” they wrote. “When the nation called, he quit.”

Walz retired on May 16, 2005. Walz’s brigade received alert orders for mobilization on July 14, 2005, according to the National Guard and MPR News . The official mobilization report came the following month, and the unit mobilized and trained through the fall. It was finally deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2006.

The unit was originally scheduled to return in February 2007, but its tour was extended four months as part of President George W. Bush’s “surge” strategy , the National Guard reported. In all, the soldiers were mobilized for 22 months.

Responding to Vance’s claim that Walz retired to avoid deploying to Iraq, the Harris-Walz campaign released a statement saying, “After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform – and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families.”

Walz on Carrying a Weapon ‘in War’

Vance also called Walz “dishonest” for a claim that Walz made in 2018 while speaking to a group about gun control.

“He made this interesting comment that the Kamala Harris campaign put out there,” Vance said, referring to a video of Walz that the Harris campaign posted to X on Aug. 6. “He said, ‘We shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war to be on America’s streets.’ Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war? What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone.”

In the video , Walz, who was campaigning for governor at the time, talked about pushing back on the National Rifle Association and said: “I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. … I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] research. We can make sure we don’t have reciprocal carry among states. And we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

But, as Vance indicated, there is no evidence that Walz carried a weapon “in war.”

Update, Aug. 12: In an Aug. 10 statement to CNN, the Harris campaign told CNN that Walz “misspoke.”

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in the statement. “He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them.”

As we said, Augé, in her statement, said Walz’s battalion deployed “to support Operation Enduring Freedom” on Aug. 3, 2003, and “supported security missions at various locations in Europe and Turkey.” During his deployment, Walz was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, and he returned to Minnesota in April 2004, Augé said. There was no mention of Walz serving in Afghanistan, Iraq or another combat zone.

In the 2009 interview for the veterans history project, Walz said he and members of his battalion initially thought they would “shoot artillery in Afghanistan,” as they had trained to do. That didn’t happen, he said, explaining that his group ended up helping with security and training while stationed at an Army base in Vicenza.

“I think in the beginning, many of my troops were disappointed,” Walz said in the interview. “I think they felt a little guilty, many of them, that they weren’t in the fight up front as this was happening.”

In an Aug. 8 statement addressing his claim about carrying weapons “in war,” the Harris campaign noted that Walz, whose military occupational specialties included field artillery senior sergeant, “fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times” in his 24 years of service.

Walz’s National Guard Rank

The Republican National Committee has criticized Walz for saying “in campaign materials that he is a former ‘Command Sergeant Major’ in the Army National Guard despite not completing the requirements to hold the rank into retirement.”

Walz’s biography on the Harris campaign website correctly says that the governor “served for 24 years” in the National Guard, “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major.” 

Walz’s official biography on the Minnesota state website goes further, referring to the governor as “Command Sergeant Major Walz.”

“After 24 years in the Army National Guard, Command Sergeant Major Walz retired from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005,” the state website says. 

Walz did serve as command sergeant major , but Walz did not complete the requirements to retire with the rank of command sergeant, Augé told us in an email. 

“He held multiple positions within field artillery such as firing battery chief, operations sergeant, first sergeant, and culminated his career serving as the command sergeant major for the battalion,” Augé said. “He retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy.”

This isn’t the first time that Walz’s National Guard rank has come up in a campaign. 

In their 2018 paid letter to the West Central Tribune, when Walz was running for governor, the two Minnesota National Guard retired command sergeants major who criticized Walz for retiring before the Iraq deployment also wrote: “Yes, he served at that rank, but was never qualified at that rank, and will receive retirement benefits at one rank below. You be the judge.”

Correction, Aug. 9: We mistakenly said a 2007 “surge” strategy in Iraq occurred under President Barack Obama. It was President George W. Bush.

Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt was an undergraduate intern at FactCheck.org from 2010 to 2011.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through  our “Donate” page . If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

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Independence Day 2024: Iconic slogans and inspiring quotes by freedom fighters that will ignite your patriotic spirit

Independence day 2024: fire up your patriotic spirits on august 15 with these iconic slogans and inspiring quotes by freedom fighters..

Independence Day 2024: India celebrates its 78th Independence Day on Thursday, August 15. India gained its freedom from the British colonial rule on August 15, 1947. The day honours the freedom fighters who laid their lives for the country and made countless sacrifices. During the freedom struggle, these freedom fighters gave many slogans to motivate people and instil patriotism in them. These slogans and quotes made a profound impact on the psyche of Indian citizens. So, to pump up the patriotic spirits on August 15 , here are some iconic slogans and inspiring quotes by freedom fighters.

(Also Read | Happy Independence Day 2024: Top 30+ wishes, images, quotes, SMS, Facebook and WhatsApp status to share on August 15 )

Independence day 2024: iconic slogans and inspiring quotes by freedom fighters.

"The shots that hit me are the last nails to the coffin of British rule in India." - Lala Lajpat Rai

"Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?" - Mahatma Gandhi.

"Satyamev Jayate." - Madan Mohan Malviya.

"Tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe azaadi doonga." - Subhash Chandra Bose.

"Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act." -Annie Besant.

"Who lives if India dies?" - Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

"Do or die." - Mahatma Gandhi.

"Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai, dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil mein hai." – Ramprasad Bismil.

(Also Read | Independence Day 2024: India celebrates its 78th I-Day this year; know theme, history, significance, celebrations )

"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." - Jawaharlal Nehru.

"Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it" - Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

"Constitution is not a mere lawyer's document; it is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of age." - BR Ambedkar.

"You can chain me, you can destroy me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind." - Mahatma Gandhi.

"Every citizen of India must remember that he is an Indian and he has every right in this country but with certain duties." - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

(Also Read | Independence Day 2024: Know all about Indian National Flag's history and the man behind it )

"So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you." - BR Ambedkar.

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." - Jawaharlal Nehru.

"Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution. The sword of revolution sharpened on the whetting stones of ideas." - Bhagat Singh.

"I want all people to be Indians first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians." - BR Ambedkar.

"Dushman ki goliyon ka hum samna karenge, Azad hee rahein hain, Azad hee rahenge" - Chandra Shekhar Azad.

"Let new India arise out of peasants’ cottage, grasping the plough, out of huts, cobbler and sweeper." - Swami Vivekananda.

(Also Read | Independence Day 2024: Pre-Independence eateries that are still open and loved )

"One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives." - Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

"A country's greatness lies in its undying ideal of love and sacrifice that inspire the mothers of the race." - Sarojini Naidu.

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JONATHAN TURLEY

“we are monitoring”: eu censor threatens musk ahead of the trump interview.

For those who criticized the European Union as a dangerous step toward a transnational governance system, Breton is the personification of their worst fears. He has wielded the sweeping powers and vague standards of the DSA to force companies to engage in comprehensive censorship regardless of national laws or their own values.

As I wrote in the book:

“Under the DSA, users are ’empowered to report illegal content online and online platforms will have to act quickly.’ This includes speech that is viewed not only as ‘disinformation’ but also ‘incitement.’ European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager has been one of the most prominent voices seeking international censorship. At the passage of the DSA, Vestager was ecstatic in declaring that it is ‘not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.’”

This week, Breton was irate that Musk was giving Trump a forum on X, formerly Twitter. He was not the only one. The interview was interrupted by what Musk said was a distributed denial-of-service (DDS) attack by people trying to prevent the interview.

Notably, a DDS attack interrupted a prior interview with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Like Breton, many were working tirelessly to prevent others from hearing opposing views.

Breton threatened Musk that the EU was watching and that the Trump interview could bring crippling sanctions under the DSA: “As there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in [the EU] in connection with events with major audience around the world, I sent this letter to @elonmusk.”

As in the past, Breton refused to recognize that he was interfering with elections in another country. Sitting in his EU office, he demanded that whatever is discussed in the interiew should satisfy his own content standards: “As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU.”

Breton expressly warned that the censors were watching. Breton wrote of the Musk-Trump interview: “Therefore, we are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political – or societal – events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

“This notably means, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of  harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.

He then threatened to impose ruinous financial penalties until Musk censored others, including potentially one of two leading presidential candidates in the United States.

Musk responded with a defiant message that began with “Bonjour!” He added a vulgar Tropic Thunder reference.

Breton is one of the key figures in an anti-free speech movement that has swept over Europe. It is now using the DSA, as many of us predicted, to force other countries to censor their citizens and even their leaders. It is free speech regulated to the lowest common denominator, the level set by the EU and Breton.

There is a crushing irony. The left has made “foreign interference” with elections a mantra of claiming to be defending democracy. Yet, it applauds EU censors threatening companies that carry an interview with a targeted American politician. It also supports importing such censorship and blacklisting systems to the United States. When you agree with the censorship, it is not viewed as interference, but an intervention.

If citizens want to see where the anti-free speech movement will take us in the United States, they need only to look at Europe where free speech is in a virtual free fall. As I wrote in “ The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage ”:

“The impact of these laws was evident in a poll of German citizens. Only 18 percent of Germans feel free to express their opinions in public. Fifty-nine percent of Germans did not even feel free expressing themselves in private among friends. And just 17 percent felt free to express themselves on the internet. The only true success of censorship has been the forced or compelled silence of those with opposing views. That pretense of social harmony is treated as success even though few minds are changed as fewer voices are heard in society.”

Musk may be the only individual with sufficient money and commitment to stand up to the EU and the global censors. That is precisely why Musk is being targeted by so many in the media, academia, and government. It is also why many of us support X and its struggle against the EU and Breton.

Jonathan Turley  is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “ The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage ” (Simon and Schuster).

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282 thoughts on ““we are monitoring”: eu censor threatens musk ahead of the trump interview”.

Where is our crack Attorney General and Secretary of State in all of this? Someone should be firing a sharp diplomatic warning shot at Commissioner Thierry Breton and the EU. The target was two US citizens meeting in the US having a discussion and letting the public listen in – all well protected by our first amendment.

We should recognize that the approach to disinformation by many leaders in Europe is the exact same approach voiced by the Vice Presidential pick Tim Walz. We should recognize that there is no nuance between the two opinions but rather identical word for word statements that affect your desire to say what you want to say without fear of imprisonment. The next step that follows has always been the formation of legislation to codify the penalties that must by employed lest you place one toe over the line. Tim Walz would prefer that you spend your life looking over your shoulder. Yet there are still those who persist in saying it can’t happen here so just wake me from my nap after the election. Does this describe you?

@Thinkitthrough

Yup. And if we succeed in turning things around, those same people will likely never know anything happened. It’s an actually legitimate form of tunnel vision. Some will even say, though we’ve rejected modern progressivism whole hog, that modern progressivism saved the day; there are plenty of voters who haven’t paid much attention to anything for nigh on 30+ years, when it was ‘cool’ to insult Newt Gingrich, and they are the same people that thinks republicans invented the KKK or that Trump sleeps with minors. They honestly believe that Mitch McConnell is the ‘king’ of the republican party. 🙄 C’est la vie. They are idiots. Some of them not even really that useful. We continue regardless, and in the future they will be glad we did, even if they can’t connect the dots and be grateful to us that held the line. And they will likely still vote blue. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Dear Prof Turley,

It’s just as well the EU goes deaf . .. they’re dumb and blind too.

I don’t know about the EU, but its difficult enough to decipher, at any given time, exactly what Donald Trump is trying to say even when you speak American. .. like I do. [Elon is not much better. Elon launched a bright red Telsa s into the vast void of space with the top down and the radio playing .. . what does that mean?!]

JD Vance spent Sunday morning making the rounds trying to interpret what Trump is saying for the flabbergasted State-run media outlets. Another wasted hillbilly elegy imo.

Trump says a lot of things. Maybe the most things, and the biggest crowds to hear them. Beautiful, fabulous and tremendous high IQ MAGA things, and sometimes not. .. it’s like speaking in tongues.

*lets talk American .. .

See below as Dennis the Demented Draft Dodger makes 13 claims without supporting evidence. One of the 13 is that there was no supporting evidence.

Bwahahahahahahahaha

Jonathan: While Harris/Walz are touring the country–drawing huge crowds–what is DJT doing? He’s posting all hours of the day and night making bizarre claims that the Harris rallies are all AI generated. And he gives “press conferences” where he doesn’t take Qs but rambles on with his continued lies and on Monday he gave an “interview” to Elon Musk on X. The interview with Musk didn’t start well. There was an almost 45 min. delay die to technical glitches. Musk tried to blame the delay on a “massive DDOS”. There was no evidence to support the claim the delay was due to a denial-of-service attack.

The Musk/DJT “interview”, if you want to call it that, was Musk endorsing all of DJT’s rambling, incoherent and crazy statements. It was one crazy statement after another by DJT. He said he welcomed “climate change” because he thinks he’ll “have more oceanfront property”. Then DJT told Musk “if something happens with the election [he loses] which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it will be a far safer place to meet than our country”. Now there’s an idea. Musk and DJT moving to Venezuela to hang out with Pres. Maduro!

DJT and Musk are in similar predicaments. Musk’s X is suffering from the loss of advertising because big companies don’t want to be associated with neo-Nazi propaganda. And now Musk complains he is under close scrutiny by the EU because he incited the anti-Muslim riots in the UK. DJT has a similar problem. He social media company is tanking. Investors are bailing before the bottom falls out. And DJT is flailing around–he doesn’t have a response to the huge crowds that are showing up at the Harris/Walz rallies and recent polls that show them leading in some of the battleground states.

DJT and Musk are birds of a feather. They are complaining about how bad the world is treating them. Pretty pathetic stuff!

Here is Dennis, complaining about how badly Trump and Musk are treating him. Pretty pathetic stuff!

Glad Dennis was among the 1Billion listening in.

“And now Musk complains he is under close scrutiny by the EU because he incited the anti-Muslim riots in the UK.”

Your failure to take your anti-psychotics is showing.

Dennis: Thanks. Speaking of “pathetic stuff”, DJT is doubling down on his claim that he almost died in a helicopter crash with Willie Brown. Trump claims that he has “flight records” to prove it. When a CNN reporter asked him to produce the flight records, she reported that he responded in a sing-song voice. Meanwhile, Willie Brown was interviewed by a San Francisco television reporter and the repeated that he never went up in a helicopter with Trump, and never would because so many people dislike Trump, including helicopter maintenance people. Willie Brown was interviewed by CNN and repearted that he never was on any helicopter with Trump. Included in Trump’s lie about the helicopter near-death experience was Trump’s claim that Willie Brown had very bad things to say about Kamala Harris, too, something else Willie Brown denies.

According to “Politico”, dateline 8/9/24:

“The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.

It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.” “I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.

Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.

In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.

In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.

“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.

Holden recalled being a bit worried about the helicopter ride because it came not long after five people, including three high-level executives of Trump’s casinos, were killed when their chopper crashed in 1989 over Forked River, New Jersey.

But Holden says Trump told him they were in good hands, noting that he had two capable pilots. “He tells me to ‘look at the sky,’” Holden said. “‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.’”

Also aboard was Trump’s late brother, Robert, the attorney Harvey Freedman and Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development. Res told POLITICO on Friday that she also remembers the ride well. In fact, she said she wrote about it in her book, “All Alone on the 68th Floor.”

Now, WHAT were Trump supporters saying about “Dementia Joe” not knowing what the hell he was talking about? The entire purpose of Trump making up the story about Willie Brown was to try to get in a dig at Kamala Harris by claiming that Willie had said bad things to say about her. Other than fake tales of bravado, there wasn’t any other reason to make up this story, and the fact that he refuses to back down and claims that he has “flight records” to prove his claims is reminiscent of the interview Trump did with Meredith Vieiera in which he said that he had people in Hawaii digging up dirt on Barak Obama, and “you wouldn’t believe what they’re finding”. Well, he’s right about that–we wouldn’t believe it, but the bigger question is Trump’s pathological lying, his refusal to back down, his lies about having “flight records” to prove his claim and WHY the Republican Party continues to support him. Alternatively, it’s entirely possible that Trump is psychotic–hallucinating about an event that never happened, but either way, he has no business trying to be the leader of the free world. He’s 78 now–what fantasy world will he be in in 4 years’ time?

You wanna know what delusional is???

You coming here daily with the same worn out rant thinking anyone is paying attention or cares one iota about your thoughts.

You thinking that your spastic rants do anything other than turn people off to whatever message you think your bringing.

Delusional Gigi.

Anonymous: there isn’t any “worn out rant”–the interview with Holden was just a few days ago. But the bigger question posed by this incident is Trump’s fitness for office, his endless lying and why Republicans look the other way after having trashed Joe Biden’s fitness for office because he mis-spoke. Trump couldn’t have flight records for a flight that never happened. As to the 1990 flight, there are too many witnesses who were aboard along with Holden, including Res, who wrote about the incident in her book. Also, if the problrematic flight happened when Trump was in office, it would have made the news. There WAS a helicopter trip when Trump was in office to survey damage from a wildfire and then-governor Jerry Brown, along with governor-elect Gavin Newsome, were aboard, but it didn’t nearly crash. Trump loves to call people “crazy”, but this incident should be taken very seriously because it leads to the reasonable question of whether Trump is hallucinating or just plain lying. His doubling down and lying about nonexistent flight records just add more fuel to the fire and is further proof of his narcissism—he just can never be wrong, can never admit he’s wrong and will never apologize.

Every single day is the same WORN OUT RANT about Trump. EVERY SINGLE DAY

Want me to link to all of them, Gigi? You’ve lied about what you’ve said befrore…

In fact, you just did it again!

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha

Delusional Gigi RANTS AGAIN

“but this incident should be taken very seriously”

It is a talking point we’ve heard ad nauseam since the President Joe Biden debate debacle in Atlanta and one we can expect to hear even more should Democrat power brokers convince the “Big Guy” to step aside for the good of the nation. Paraphrasing: Joe Biden is a decent/good/honest man who has enjoyed a highly successful presidency and has served his country selflessly and honorably for But let’s be clear. As one of the very few people in this business to write a book on the man going back to his days in law school, I can say without fear of contradiction that Joe Biden is most certainly NOT a good or decent or honest man. In fact, he’s quite the opposite. SNOPES’ DEBUNKING OF CHARLOTTESVILLE HOAX SHOWS BIDEN LIED, SAYS TRUMP CAMPAIGN Biden also has not enjoyed even a moderately successful presidency. The cost of living is up more than 20 percent since he took office. Gas prices are up 50 percent. Violent crime has driven law-abiding citizens out of major American cities (all run by Democrats with liberal district attorneys) to red states like Texas, The president’s disastrous border policies have allowed more than 10 million people to enter this country illegally, including hundreds on the terror watch list. Education test scores are at their lowest levels in decades. The U.S. has provided Ukraine with a virtual blank check to fight a war against Russia that is in a hopeless stalemate. The U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan was one of the most tragic and humiliating moments in our country’s history. And China’s posture toward Taiwan has never been more aggressive. Otherwise, wow… What a success! BIDEN REPEATS FALSE FOOTBALL CLAIM TO WEST POINT GRADUATES AT COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS But getting back to Biden’s character, does a good or decent or honest man so plagiarize his work and speeches, both in law school and as a presidential candidate, as he did in 1988? Does a good or decent or honest man blatantly play the race card to win votes, as he did in 2020 by insisting he was arrested while on the porch with a Black couple during the civil rights era? Because that never happened. Does a good or decent or honest man tell families in Maui, some of whom lost family members and/or their homes, that he could relate to what they were going through by saying he and his family (and Corvette) also survived a raging fire in his home that nearly killed his wife and cat? Because the fire chief at the time said the blaze was a small kitchen fire that was quickly extinguished and endangered no one. Does a good or decent or honest man pretend his 7th grandchild doesn’t exist simply because she was the product of his crack-addicted son’s fling? Does a good or decent or honest man warn that then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney was going to put Blacks “back in chains” if elected? Does a good or decent or honest man use his late son as a prop over and over when talking to Gold Star families by saying his son Beau also died while on active duty in Iraq? Because Beau died of cancer years after coming home. Joe Biden has failed upwards his entire life and has lied so many times along the way, it’s impossible to list them all without going over a 100,000-word limit. Here are just a few of the biggest whoppers with cheese. • I once drove an 18-wheeler. • No soldiers died under my watch. • I inherited 9 percent inflation. • The Inflation Reduction Act” is the strongest bill you can pass to lower inflation. • I inherited a God-awful mess at the border. • The Border Patrol endorsed me. • I taught a political theory class at Penn. • I’ve traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jinping. • My uncle was eaten by cannibals. I still can’t over that last one… You get the point. Joe Biden is not, and has never been, a good, decent or honest man, despite what every panicked Democrat and many media members insist as they try to coax him into retirement. He’s been a lousy president since 2021, and a lousy guy for at least a half century. And that’s no lie.

Biden’s not running for President any more. Trump IS. Biden is old news. The tall tale Trump told about the near-death helicopter ride is something that Democrats will not allow to be swept under the rug because it is emblematic of what Trump is–either psychotic or a pathological liar who can never be wrong, no matter how much proof there is to the contrary.

And, reliable historians all agree–Trump is the worst president in modern US history. Biden got America past COVID, got kids back in school, got businesses and restaurants open again for business, got leisure travel restored and turned around Trump’s recession. Biden brought unemployment to a 50 year low, manufacturing is returning to America, he mended relations with our EU and NATO allies that Trump trashed, he got passed the CHIPS Act, Infrastructure Act, Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan that brought thousands of kids out of poverty. Inflation is coming down.

Snopes didn’t “debunk” anything–Trump said there were “good people” on both sides. Then, later, he said that he condemned Neo=Nazis–they wree one of the 2 sides. Snopes included an editorial note pointing out these facts. And, BTW, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand by”.

I notice that you, as usual, cite NO sources for your claims.

“Biden’s not running for President any more.”

Wait, how can that be??? You said he wasn’t demented and would win in November!!!

What happened, Gigi. Were you wrong? did you lie.

Delusional Gigi RANTS ON!!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/09/us/politics/biden-history-fact-check.html

Bwahahahaha Gigi denies ranting, even while DOING IT AGAIN!!!

“Biden’s not running for President any more. Trump IS. Biden is old news. “

Joe Biden IS the President of the United States, you fvcktard. Do even say this shit to yourself before you type it???

So, why arent you concerned about the CURRENT POTUS, Gigi?

Because you are delusional.

As I said before, Biden has been one of the most successful presidents in recent history. Your MAGA attacks are BS. America is thriving again after Trump nearly destroyed it.

No you said he is old news.

And you lied about his success.

And you just lied again.

And you didnt answer the question.

If you are so concerned about Trump for lying about his past, why werent you concerned about Biden, who is still president?

I will answer for you, since you refuse to answer.

Because you are a hypocritical, lying, delusional spastic. And apparently proud of it.

“one of the most successful presidents in recent history.”

But yet he had the lowest approval rating of ANY President EVER. Why is that, Gigi? Delusional.

Even with a fawning press, his ratings were lower than Trump!!

57% of the country say he is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER

EAT IT, Delusional Gigi

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/24/joe-bidens-approval-ratings/

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-BIDEN/POLL/nmopagnqapa/

You can call me names all you want–but I cited Politico who quotes the actual people who were there when the hard landing happened and who refute what Trump said. HOW doe sthat make ME either delusional or a liar? WHAT counter-facts do you have?

If there’s any “worn out rant” here–it’s you, Anonymous, Tom, or whatever other name you are using at the time–you constantly accuse ME of lying, but I always cite my sources. You don’t seem to understand that I’M not the one saying this–the actual witnesses are. You accuse me of being delusional–HOW is it delusional for Holden, Res and Willlie Brown to deny what Trump said? You are either paid to attack people who tell the truth about Trump or it’s YOU who is delusional.

And it’s not a “rant” to point out that a candidate for the US Presidency has a serious issue–either pathological lying or maybe psychosis–he hallucinated an event that never happened and refuses to back down despite massive credible counter evidence. You MAGAs may dismiss the fact that Trump constantly lies, but most Americans DO mind. We simply cannot believe anything he says.

Politico Bwahahahahahahahaha

NO ONE CARES, dum dum

“but I always cite my sources.”

YOU ARE DELUSIONAL

You have been told this a hundred times.

POLITICO IS NOT A SOURCE

Politico may have sources (or they may be lying again).

THE ATLANTIC IS NOT A SOURCE

VOX IS NOT A SOURCE

MEDIA-ITE IS NOT A SOURCE

RACHEL FVCKING MADDOW IS NOT A SOURCE

Here it comes spastic

FACTCHECK.ORG IS NOT A SOURCE

When you claimed Texas made electricity from crude oil, NBC was your “source”. NBC is NOT A SOURCE. I cited the SOURCE, the Texas Public Utilities Website. You’re Ignorant fvcking response…that neither of us has personal knowlege. Thats who you are. Pathetic.

When you claimed inflation was 9%, you used factcheck.org as your “SOURCE”. I used the Bureau of Labor Statistics Website to prove your spastic ass WRONG. THAT is a SOURCE.

DELUSIONAL GIGI thinks a lying ass “writer” is a source.

Delusional.

“You MAGAs may dismiss the fact that Trump constantly lies, but most Americans DO mind.”

Delusional Gigi

Why didn’t YOU mind when Joe CONTINUED to repeat the lie that his son died IN IRAQ even AFTER being called out for it NUMEROUS times?

What did I LIE about?

When did you lie? you lie so much you can’t even recall when.

You said you never claimed the inflation rate was 9% when Trump left office. You called me a liar for saying you said it.

You lied again when you claimed you misspoke. YOU BELIEVED IT.

YOU’re A LIAR. A pathological one at that.

You didn’t think it was serious when JOE made up lie after lie after lie about his life. Thats not old news. thats current news. You are still the same pathetic sycophant you were then. Current.

You’ve NEVER admitted Joe is delusional.

Because YOU are delusional.

I’m not going to go over ancient history with you–WHAT did I lie about in the above-post–YOU ACCUSED ME OF lying–WHAT did I lie about? I cited interviews Politico did with Willie Brown, who denies ever going in a helicopter with Trump, and with Holden and others who DID go on a helicopter and say it was 1990.

“WHAT did I lie about in the above-post–YOU ACCUSED ME OF lying–WHAT did I lie about?”

You’re lying right now. Cut and paste where I accused you of lying today.

I said you are delusional. And you just proved me right again.

LOL gigi thinks if she hasn’t lied in the last 3 days, she’s not a liar anymore.

Bwahahahahahahaha

How long after 6th grade did it take you to get your virginity back??

“I’m not going to go over ancient history with you–“

“DID go on a helicopter and say it was 1990.”

Bwahahahahaha

Spastic idiot.

‘Gigi’– “I’m not going to go over ancient history with you” Meaning her posts from yesterday, last week, last month… Then continues talking about a story from 1990.

It’s not Gigi.

It’s NUTCHACHACHA!

Why are you lying about your name?

Did you change it legally?

Joe Bidens MANY TALL TALES should be taken seriously….

Bwahahahahahahaha Delusional Gigi

Delusional Gigi said this: “but this incident should be taken very seriously”

Joe said this:

I was at Ground Zero the morning after 9/11

I watched the bridge collapse in PA

I was arrested with Nelson Mandella

I was born in the same hospital as my grandfather

I was born a year to the same day my grandfather died

I was congratulated by a dead man

I was nominated for the Naval Academy

I used to drive an 18 wheeler

I was arrested, standing on a porch with a black family

I’m the first in my family ever to go to college

I never made $400K

My uncle was eaten by cannibals

I went to a historically black college

The list goes on.

Funny, gigi didn’t want to take any of this seriously….

NOBODY cares about what Joe Biden said–he’s not running for President. Trump is. Trump is either lying or is psychotic–either way, that is concerning.

It wasn’t concerning to you when it was Biden, when he was running for President. YOU denied that he was demented or even diminished.

Now you hypocritical pretend to be concerned about Trump.

You’re a LIAR. You, Trump and Biden should all get along well.

Pretend to be stupid if you want. We’re used to it.

Trump is either lying or is psychotic–either way, that is concerning.

You crack me up. You have no shame.

If Trump is lying, why is that concerning? He’s told 50k lies LOL. Every time he does, you get concerned..

Why weren’t you concerned about Bidens lies? Why aren’t you concerned about Walz’s lies? Why arent you concerned about Kamala’s lies?

Yes, yes, very concerning. Spastic.

‘Gigi’ is obviously very smitten with Trump. She (supposedly) knows every single little detail about him. He’s such a bad boy. The One. Her OCD TDS just can’t help itself.

I note once again that you have no factual response to the Trump lie about the nonexistent near death helicopter ride with Willie Brown, so YOU go on a rant about Joe Biden and me. That is exactly the tactic that MAGA media and Trump use, and it doesn’t work.

The crazy lady is at it again. She can’t even remember her name, which is why she used Natasha in the past.

30-40 years ago, there was trouble on an air flight, and Trump was with a prominent black person. Trump may have confused one politician with another; I don’t know. This question mark is Gigi or Natasha’s big revelation about Trump’s lies, which is more about memory, but Gigi doesn’t know the difference.

OK, crazy lady, I will accept Trump erred in a recollection 30-40 years old. What is your point?

I note once again that you are “very concerned” about Trump, but never were/are not about Biden.

So you go on a rant about Trump, AGAIN.

Walz is on video no less than EIGHT DIFFERENT TIMES, claiming to have retired as a Sargeant Major.

That is a violation of the UCMJ, Article 106.

He even had the Speaker of the House introduce him as such.

Is he lying or psychotic? Either way, is it concerning, Gigi???

You are delusional.

—-Tom

It is being reported that First Sergeant Tim Walz will withdraw from the race if he is required to visit the battleground states

Bwahahahahahaha! Sounds about right!!

You mean RETIRE from the race.

“NOBODY cares about what Joe Biden said–he’s not running for President.”

Ahhhhh, poor Gigi. She is so delusional.

Everyone should care about what Trump said, but not about what the POTUS said.

She has defended the CURRENT PRESIDENTS lies for 3-1/2 years. She continues to say he is a-ok.

She’s such a concerned citizen.

Gigi You are a laughingstock and ha e zero self respect.

Ninety percent of each of your daily rants is copied and pasted from the previous day’s rant.

Would it kill you to proofread?

Gigi, Anonymnous has had the majority of his posts removed this morning because he has been getting too foul mouthed personal with other commenters. Now he’s toned it down and has upped the obnoxiousness. It was a noticeable difference. It seems his constant ad hominem attacks and foul mouthed insults forced the moderator’s hand.

Spastic George with nothing to say but an ad hom attack.

Trying to come to the aid of the obnoxious, delusional Gigi.

Svealaz-George

I’m just thankful I didn’t have to spend all morning corrected your numerous lies and ignorant statements again.

It creepily sounds like you may be missing it???

Ewwwww dude.

Anonymous is not a single contributor. There are lots of anonymi.

Svelaz is just miffed that I outed him posting as Anonymous this morning because he is on the lie catching radar.

“Anonymous is not a single contributor. There are lots of anonymi.”

I didn’t read Gigi’s comment. Hit like if you skipped it too.

HullBobby, Just mindless ranting. Not worth reading. Just scroll past.

Agreed. Gigi is one I never bother with. I get the Anonymous ones at times because some post thoughtful comments anonymously. Hint: you can attach an alias username to the alias email you are likely using to post anonymously. It’s six and a half dozen to using ‘Anonymous’.

Agreed! What would be the point of reading her stuff? She’s a one-woman slush pile.

Voting Dunceocrat? Then you’re with the IslamoCommuNazi party: https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/08/13/newly-earthed-video-shows-tim-walz-praising-cleric-who-justified-violence-against-israel/

It wasn’t a Muslim immigrant. It was a British citizen. Since British citizens don’t have access to firearms like we do, knives are the most common weapon used. It’s not exclusively “a Muslim thing”.

t’s not exclusively “a Muslim thing”.

Yes, it is.

“A Muslim Thing..”? Knives are responsible for more homicides than “assault weapons” in the USA (FBI). 2019: Total Murder (Homicides) 13,927; by Rifles and Shotguns 564; By Knives and cutting instruments 1,476 Reference: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-20 From the Annual FBI Crime in the United States Report, table 20. Only handguns kill more people than knives.

Only handguns kill more people than knives.

Not for jihadists

Jihadists like knives. Its a Muslim thing

Anonymous 11:25 am- The accused murderer was the son of an immigrant and part of the immigrant community. They are individuals who are still at risk for radicalization and non assimilation into the greater community. I think the Brits on the scene know the difference. And I am sure they are aware of the great number of immigrants and citizens who have not assimilated into their new country and seem, in many cases, not inclined to assimilate. Also stabbings in the UK are at over 50,000 per year and reported by the British press. 3 little girls. Yeah I think I might riot also. Maybe it will make a dent in the thick skulls of their political leaders.

GEB, People should be free to protest the murder of three little girls. The murderer, should be charged, have his day in court. If he is found guilty by a jury of his peers, too bad they cannot hang him for his crimes.

Wanting to label the immigrant community and connect it to the murderer who is a British born citizen from wales is nothing more than a veiled attempt to lay blame on immigrants and sow hate towards the community.

That is precisely what those intentionally spreading rumors, including using a fake name, to incite violence against immigrants wanted to do.

It’s the same racist sentiment used to push Brexit on uk voters.

Assimilation is not the issue either. The murderer lived in the uk all his life. The radicalization of young immigrants often happens when they are bullied and ridiculed by racist citizens. Racist Brits took the opportunity to use the incident to paint the immigrant community as criminals and radicals. Spreading rumors and accusations online with deliberate intent to seek violence against immigrants are not protected acts of free speech. Elon fanned those sentiments on X purely for profit and increased engagement on his platform. That’s why the DSA is justified with its claim that they are watching him. The free-speech absolutist doesn’t seem to understand free speech also requires responsibility for exercising it.

Jihadist “immigrants” deserve to die.

Democrats, also known as Lemmings, have a long history of believing the lies told to them by their leaders. As if it is inbred, Democrats seem incapable of critical thinking and collectively their short term memory is about on par with a Yellow Lab. Who else could cheer while their leaders accuse their political opponent of being a threat to democracy while cheering just as loudly for the Vice President who supported a coup of the sitting President. Democrats have shown an equal disdain– actually a shocking disdain– for the First Amendment while their leaders push the boundaries of censorship as far as possible to silence those who do not walk lock-step with them. Ironically, none of this would have been possible without a compliant media who historically has been a primary beneficiary of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, we have learned that they have been all too willing to trade their integrity and even their profession for access to those who are working so hard to remake America. We are paying the price for several generations who have been taught that personal sacrifice for the good of the many is an old-fashioned, unnecessary hindrance to getting the instant gratification they want.

Honestlawyermostly, Well said.

As if it is inbred, Democrats seem incapable of critical thinking and collectively their short term memory is about on par with a Yellow Lab

It is telling that Democrats / MSM are literally rewriting history, esp on Tim Walz.

Democratic Gubernatorial Candidates March To Abolish ICE MINNEAPOLIS – Democratic gubernatorial candidates Tim Walz and Erin Murphy joined in a protest in Minneapolis weekend, calling for no borders and to “abolish ICE.” https://alphanews.org/democratic-gubernatorial-candidates-march-to-abolish-ice/

European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton, and European Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager are the epitome of Kafkaesque bureaucrats, Deep State apparatchiks, wielding power along PC arbitrary dogmatic lines. The argument for censorship of speech that is judged as harboring ‘harmful content’ that ‘incites violence, hate, racism’ and ‘generates detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security’ easily slides down the slippery slope into arbitrary dogmatic censorship and the dictatorship of the humanist cultural bourgeoisie running state bureaucracies. Their actions bring about not so much a utopian society, as a dystopian tyranny.

Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU (before it went ‘woke’) in her book ‘Hate’ argues that hate speech should not be countered with censorship, but with more speech, counter speech, using reasoned arguments to demonstrate why such speech is wrong. Such ideas should not be swept under the rug of censorship, where they will only fester, to eventually burst like an untreated abcess on the body politic, but treated with the antibiotic of clear, reasoned argument.

That is not to say that speech which clearly incites to violence, when it ‘directly, demonstrably, and immanently causes certain specific, objectively ascertainable serious harms’ must be countered by not just counterspeech, but also by law enforcement.

The problem arises when the state tools of censorship are applied to ‘disfavored speech’, so-called politically incorrect speech, which leads to tyranny, and the loss of freedom of speech. This is a result of the politically correct (NeoMarxist) movement on our campuses and in our bureaucracies, campuses where students are not taught how to think (aka critical thinking), but indoctrinated in what to think (critical theory). Such is the beast known as the Nanny State, with its incubators on the Nanny Campuses of western society, ‘theme parks for endangered Marxist species’ (locution courtesy of Prof. of History Michael Sugrue).

It’s interesting the image of Hitler you use JT. Hitler referred to immigrants, people of Jewish descent, Roma people, people with disabilities as vermin. trump uses the same language. Demeaning people to subhuman status is the first step in eliminating them.

Thanks for the reminder JT, showing how similar trump is to Hitler.

Trump said that MS-13 gang members are vermin. MS-13 members have a tear drops under their eye signifying the number of people they have killed. Trump is correct in his assessment. Hitler said that a race of people were vermin. Compared the two is dishonest in its formation. The art of taking a comment out of context is the hiding place of the person without an educated response. Mostly such comments are to be found among the young and uninitiated. In many occasions this lack of honesty continues in adulthood. Therein, Anonymous is properly explained and revealed. She’s been told to think it think it she does.

TiT, It is the lies from MSM they repeat over and over again. Thankfully we are much smarter then them.

Believe what you will, trump is using the language of hitler for a reason. trump has already talked about the next step, round them up and deport them AND/OR put them in detention camps. I do not like the language of trump at all, he demeans everyone, I do not want this person in any sort of authority in our government.

So you’re OK with members of M-13 (the objects of Trump’s language) being free to roam the streets of America, rather than deporting or jailing them. Apparently you never been the victim of one of their countless crimes.

“Believe what the truth if you will. Or believe my spastic fantasy of what Trump will do, based on nothing. He was never President”.

“he demeans everyone, I do not want this person in any sort of authority in our government.”

Gee, I guess you’re voting third party this year, eh?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jul/29/kamala-harris-employees-flee-in-droves-ex-staff-ci/

A few of Biden’s illegals, Migrants sheltered in Brooklyn accused of raping woman at knifepoint in front of boyfriend at Coney Island https://adnamerica.com/en/new-york/migrants-sheltered-brooklyn-accused-raping-woman-knifepoint-front-boyfriend-coney-island?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=offthepress&utm_campaign=home

Turley’s audience is just another cesspool of social media hostility, incapable of civil dialogue.

Is Camels Harris going to denounce the EU for interfering in “our democracy”? Antarctica will melt first.

Dear Mr. Turley, thank you for your article and a special thanks to GEB for penning a great comment although he was in a bad mood. I, too feel a “bad mood” whenever I read about the censorship going on in the world against the conservative thought. My question is what is the left afraid of with the conservatives? We have a real fight going on here in Wisconsin not only with the national election but with state wide ones as well. I can only hope the poor economy will drive people to the Republican Party this November, after all, “it’s the economy, stupid!”

Anonymously 10:43AM. Appreciate the note. I would suggest you do yourself a favor and move to Indiana. For the most part they are sane. A little exuberant about basketball but generally nice people. Slow to warmup to newcomers but once they do they stick. They welcomed this immigrant from the Deep South. Of course I have no real accent and sound very generic. The state is a little dull at times but that’s ok. Excellent Universities.

Trump has proposed three debates. The one on ABC, Harris has agreed to. The other two, one on Fox the other on NBC, Trump has said he will still attend even if Harris does not, and he will make them into town halls.

^ Article isn’t about debates. Upstate posts about debates. Shilling for Trump like Gigi does for the Dems.

No wonder your wife left you.

No wonder your husband left you

As we should recognize quite well, multi-generational welfare programs transform humble beneficiaries into arrogant entitlees. We need to give the EU an intervention. The United States needs to wean them and every other dependent nation off of our taxpayer’s teat.

“We need to give the EU an intervention”…… they can hate us for free !!!

Great point Skyraider! Yes they can, and will.

It’s worse than just this. They’ll eventually fail .

Btw I skip all anonymous. It saves me reading disgusting language. Form of censorship…

Voting Harris-Walz? Then you’re voting for IslamoCommuNazism.

Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has repeatedly hosted an alleged extremist Muslim leader who pledged “unwavering support” for Palestinians after the Oct. 7 terror attack and once promoted a Neo-Nazi propaganda film praising Hitler, according to a report.

Walz, Minnesota’s two-term governor, even doled out cash to the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, which is helmed by Imam Asad Zaman, the Washington Examiner revealed Friday. https://nypost.com/2024/08/09/us-news/tim-walz-has-hosted-muslim-leader-who-didnt-condemn-oct-7-and-touted-hitler-film/

You say voting for Harris-Walz is voting for IslamoCommuNazism? Then you’re a moron.

Did you read the New York Post. Probably not. You know less than nothing.

Ben and Jerry are about to introduce a Nazi flavored Ice Cream for this year’s 2024 Presidential Election… :-). I just wonder if they’ll have a few declinations… Cherry Nazi, Black Licorice Nazi, Plain Vanilla Nazi, Maybe French Vanilla Nazi, or even Rose Elixir Flavored Nazi…?

They censor citizens and opposition voices, while their governments continue to lie and gaslight the public about Ukraine and Israel. As for “violence and hate” — their campaign of violence in Ukraine and Gaza belies their claims that they want to make people safe. So, if the European leadership isn’t opposed to fascism, who really won WW2?

Oh, my! Europe is in need of liberation again.

“. . . Elon Musk for his decision to interview former President Donald Trump.” (JT)

In the name of election fairness, I look forward to KH’s interview on X.

Oh, wait. She doesn’t do interviews. She doesn’t articulate or explain her positions on important policies. As with everything else in her life, she doesn’t believe that she has to *earn* your vote.

She demands the unearned. In an election, the unearned is called a coronation.

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