Once upon a time, before the formation of civilizations and before the norms of society were created, people communicated using hand gestures and primitive oral sounds. The concept of languages originated about 10,000 years ago and changed the course of humanity.
It was the use of languages that led to the development of the human race and brought us to where we are today. Although the origin of the first language is controversial around the world, some ancient scriptures and cave paintings allow some speculation.
10 most ancient languages in the world
Greek (1400 BC)
Greek is one of the oldest written languages on earth, one of the first Indo-European languages, and the language with the longest history of alphabetic graphology on the planet. The first written Greek letters were found on baked clay tablets in the remains of the Minoan palace of Knossos in Crete. This language is known as Linear A and has not been fully deciphered until today. The most famous example is written on the famous Phaistos disc. In the 12th century BC, a new language began to develop called Linear B, where each character is a combination of consonants and vowels. Linear B dates from the Mycenaean civilization.
Hatti (1400 BC)
The Hutt language is a non-Indo-European language of ancient Anatolia. The Hutt language is found in Hittite cuneiform texts. It was the language of the linguistic substratum (the language of the indigenous people) in the bend of the Galis River (now called the Kyzyl River) and in the more northern regions. It is impossible to establish how long the Hattians were present in Anatolia before the Indo-Europeans entered the country, but it seems that by the beginning of the new Hittite empire (c. 1400 - c. 1190 BC), Hatti was a dead language.
Luwian (1400 BC)
The language was originally misnamed as a hieroglyphic Hittite as it was discovered in the archives of the Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern-day Bogazkal), but its decoding eventually led to the conclusion that the language was not Hittite but Luwian. Hittite and Luwian belonged to the Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family. According to Hittite sources, the Luwians were their neighbors and they formed a kingdom called Arzava in western and southern Anatolia, where the Luwian hieroglyphs probably originated.
Hittite (1650 BC)
The Hittites were one of the many nations that spoke the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Hittite language was associated with Luwian, and possibly with later languages such as Lydian, Lycian, and Carian. Unlike Luwian, which had a local writing system, the Hittites adopted Akkadian cuneiform. Approximately 375 cuneiform characters have been adopted from Akkadian cuneiform. As in Akkadian, signs can be roughly divided into phonograms, logograms and determinants.
Hurrian (2200 BC)
The Hurrian language, which has disappeared since the 3rd millennium BC. e., is not an Indo-European language or a Semitic language. It was the language of the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, and is probably at least originally spoken in the Hurrian settlements of modern Syria. It is believed that the speakers of this language originally came from the Armenian highlands and spread across southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC.
Elamite (2300 BC)
The development of writing in Elam took place in parallel with the development in Sumer. Already in the 8th millennium BC. clay tokens were used to represent goods: grain, livestock, alcohol, etc. And, like the rest of Mesopotamia, by the end of the 4th millennium BC.clay tokens were kept inside envelopes with stamps that most likely indicated the owners or contents. Shortly thereafter, markings began to be applied to the surface of the envelopes in order to count the number of tokens inside, thus a number system appeared. Soon, clay tokens were completely eliminated, and thus the transition to a purely abstract representation of quantities was completed.
Eblaitic (2400 BC)
Eblai is an extinct Semitic language that was used in the 23rd century BC in the ancient city of Ebla, in the western part of modern Syria. Eblight was very close to the pre-Sargon Akkadian language. For example, Professor Manfred Krebernik says that Eblight is "so closely related to Akkadian that it can be attributed to the early Akkadian dialect." According to Cyrus H. Gordon, while the scribes may have spoken Eblight, most of the inhabitants did not use it. The language is known from some 15,000 cuneiform tablets that were found in the 1970s, mostly in the ruins of the city of Ebla.
Akkadian (2400 BC)
Akkadian, also called Assyro-Babylonian, is a dead Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia from the 3rd to 1st millennium BC. NS. It was distributed throughout the territory stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf during the Sargon dynasty, which ruled from about 2334 to about 2279 BC. NS. By 2000, the language had supplanted Sumerian, although Sumerian was still used as a written language for sacred literature.
Around the same time, Akkadian was split into the Assyrian dialect, which was spoken in northern Mesopotamia, and the Babylonian dialect, which was spoken in the south of Mesopotamia. At first, the Assyrian dialect was more widespread, but Babylonian gradually supplanted it and became the language of communication in the Middle East by the 9th century BC.
Egyptian (2700 BC)
On the basis of ancient texts, scholars usually divide the history of the Egyptian language into five periods: Ancient Egyptian (from 3000 to 2200), Middle Egyptian (2200-1600), Late Egyptian (1550 - c. 700), Demotic (c. 700 BC). - approx. 400 g) and Coptic (from 2 to 17 c). Thus, the five literary dialects are differentiated. These language periods refer only to the written language, which is often very different from the spoken dialects. Coptic is still used by the church (along with Arabic) among Arabic-speaking Christians in Egypt.
Sumerian (2900 BC)
The Sumerian language in southern Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC was the first language to be used in cuneiform. It is an isolated language, which means that we do not know other languages that have had an impact on it, even if they were. While there are some theories that Sumerian is part of the Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish, or other language families, this is a minority opinion with insufficient evidence.
This language was spoken in a region where Semitic languages were also spoken, in particular Akkadian, and at the end of the second millennium BC, it eventually ceased to be used in favor of these languages. However, the literary form of the language existed for another 2000 years, and this also had a noticeable impact on other languages of the region in terms of their vocabulary, grammar and writing.