Rock paintings and writing

Writing is a system of written signs people use to pass thoughts and messages to each other. Through it the experience and knowledge of the past reached later generations. The first writing was created in Asia and North Africa (Egypt). The kinds of writing were: reminder signs (for example showing a quantity with pebbles or shells), object writing (bread and salt as a sign of friendship), picture writing and word writing. Word writing includes Egyptian and Chinese hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform; there the signs stand for words or meanings, not letters, so many signs had to be memorised. That is why the alphabet was invented: an alphabet is a system of letters in a fixed order; the word “alifbo” comes from “alif” and “be”, the first letters of the Arabic alphabet. One of the world’s first alphabets, the Phoenician alphabet, was made by the Phoenicians in the 2nd millennium BCE: it had 22 letters and was written from right to left. Many scripts today, including Latin and Cyrillic, grew out of the Phoenician script. Our ancestors used Khorezmian, Sogdian, Orkhon-Yenisei, Arabic and other scripts; today’s Uzbek alphabet is based on the Latin script.