Ancient systems of writing in the Middle East arose when people needed a method for remembering important information. In both Ancient Iraq and Ancient Egypt each of the stages of writing, from pictograms to ideograms to phonetograms, evolved as a response to the need to express more complex ideas. Satisfaction of this need gave us the two most famous forms of ancient writing, cuneiform from ancient Iraq, and hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. Both of these …showed first 75 words of 1770 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1770 total…a phonogram stage where the symbols were uniconsonantal (one consonant), biconsonantal (two consonants) and triconsonantal (3 consonants), greatly reducing the number of signs required to write. In its most advanced form hieroglyphics were composed of three types of signs, pictograms, phonetograms, and determinatives to help the reading understand a symbols meaning. As the Greek name suggests, these hieroglyphics were mainly used for religious purposes rather than for economic as in ancient Iraq. The Egyptians believed th