Methods of transmitting messages in antiquity. Ancient ways of transmitting information

I recently watched a report that talked about the ancient Indians who used the smoke from the fires to communicate at a distance. After watching, I involuntarily thought: "How else did people of those times communicate?" This is the topic I would like to talk about.

The need to transmit information from long distances arose a long time ago. And there are really many ways of such transmission. But here the most interesting of them will be considered.

Knot writing in ancient China

It is worth starting with this method of transmitting information. After all, it is he who is considered the most ancient. It is assumed that he still existed. before the invention of hieroglyphs.

Here, interrelated cords, while the information is directly carried by the nodules and them colors.

It was with the help of knots that population records and ancient accounting were kept.

Indian wampum

Born in North America. He introduces himself special belt on which are strung beads and shells.

To transfer such belts, the Indians used vampoon messengers. Messages transmitted in this way formed contracts, recorded important events and recorded history.

Homeric whistle

They were used by residents canary islands. The local relief is characterized by deep gorges, calderas and hills. Keeping in touch here is not easy. That is why the Guanches (the indigenous inhabitants of these islands) invented their own whistling language that was heard in the distance 5 kilometers.

Once this language was used on all the islands of the Canary archipelago. But now it can only be heard on Gomera island.

Pigeon mail

We have all heard about her. But few people know that pigeons are capable of speeds up to 100 kilometers per hour. Plus, they always find their way to their nest.

Carrier pigeons were actively used to transmit information of those times. They also played a role in the transmission of military information and letters.

Other ancient ways of transmitting information

In addition to the above, there are many other ways in which they communicated in the old days. For example:

smooth iron plates(reflective beams) helped warn a neighboring tribe of danger;
as mentioned at the beginning, the Indians transmitted information using smoke from the fire;
sentry towers of the Great Wall of China lit fires at the approach of a threat;
stone structures often helped in finding the nearest settlements (served as "road signs");
and in Africa actively used drums.

These and many other methods were invented by people of antiquity. Some of these methods are still in use today.

5 unusual ways of transmitting information in antiquity

November 26 is World Information Day or World Information Day, established on the initiative of the Academy of Information in 1994.

Quipu - a kind of writing of the Incas and their predecessors in the Andes

The history of mankind knows examples of amazing ways of transmitting information, such as knot writing, Indian writing called wampum and ciphered manuscripts, one of which cryptologists cannot decipher until now. © Knot letter in China

Knot writing, or a method of writing by tying knots on a rope, presumably existed even before the advent of Chinese characters. Knot writing is mentioned in the treatise Tao de jing (“The Book of the Way and Dignity”), written by the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu in the 6th-5th centuries. BC. Cords connected to each other act as a carrier of information, and the knots and colors of the laces carry the information itself.

Knot letter in China

Researchers put forward different versions of the purpose of this type of "writing": some believe that the knots were supposed to save important historical events for their ancestors, others - that ancient people kept accounts in this way, namely: who went to war, how many people returned, who were born and who died, what is the organization of the authorities. By the way, knots were woven not only by the ancient Chinese, but also by representatives of the Inca civilization. They had their own nodular scripts "kipu", the device of which was similar to the Chinese nodular script.

Wampum

This writing of the North American Indians is more like a multi-colored ornament than a source of information. Wampum was a wide belt of shell beads strung on cords.

Wampum

To convey an important message, the Indians of one tribe sent a wampum carrier messenger to another tribe. With the help of such “belts”, agreements were concluded between whites and Indians, and the most important events of the tribe, its traditions and history were recorded. In addition to the informative load, wampums carried the burden of a currency unit, sometimes they were simply used as decoration for clothes. The people who "read" the wampums had a privileged position in the tribe. With the advent of white traders in wampums on the American continent, they stopped using shells, replacing them with glass beads.

Rubbed iron plates

The glare from the plates warned the tribe or settlement of the danger of attack. However, such methods of transmitting information were used only in clear sunny weather.

Stonehenge and other megaliths

Ancient travelers knew a special symbolic system of stone structures or megaliths, which showed the direction of movement towards the nearest settlement. These stone groups were intended, first of all, for sacrifices or as a symbol of a deity, but they were practically road signs for those who got lost.

Megalithic burial in Brittany

It is believed that one of the most famous monuments of the Neolithic era is the British Stonehenge. According to the most common version, it was built as a large ancient observatory, since the position of the stones can be associated with the location of heavenly sanctuaries in the sky. There is also a version that does not contradict this theory, that the geometry of the location of stones on the ground carried information about the lunar cycles of the Earth. Thus, it is assumed that the ancient astronomers left behind data that helped their descendants to manage astronomical phenomena.

Encryption (Voynich Manuscript)

Data encryption has been used since ancient times until now, only methods and methods of encryption and decryption are being improved.

Voynich manuscript

Encryption allowed a message to be transmitted to the intended recipient in such a way that no one else would be able to understand it without the key. The forefather of encryption is cryptography - monoalphabetic writing, which could only be read with the help of a “key”. One example of a cryptographic script is the ancient Greek "scytale" - a cylindrical device with a parchment surface, the rings of which moved in a spiral. The message could only be deciphered with a wand of the same size.

One of the most mysterious manuscripts recorded using encryption is the Voynich manuscript. The manuscript got its name in honor of one of the owners, the antiquary Wilfried Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from the College of Rome, where it had previously been kept. Presumably, the document was written at the beginning of the 15th century and describes plants and people, but it has not yet been deciphered. This made the manuscript known not only among cryptologists-decoders, but also gave rise to all sorts of hoaxes and conjectures among ordinary people. Someone considers the bizarre texts of the manuscript to be a skillful forgery, someone considers it an important message, someone considers it a document in an artificially invented language.

The question of how primitive people spoke has been of concern to scientists for a long time. They offered many versions that could solve this mystery.

Language is a divine gift

Ancient scientists believed that people began to speak due to the intervention of higher powers, that is, they considered language a gift from God. For example, in one Egyptian text, which dates back to the 3rd century BC, it is said that the supreme god Ptah is the creator of speech. In other countries, too, the "naming of all things" was attributed to the chief deity. The Bible also speaks of this, in which God initially possesses speech with the only difference that he attracted man to create a language when, having populated the earth, he watched what names man would give to all living things.

In accordance with this theory, we can conclude that the primitive man did not speak at all until a miracle happened.

Language was created by people

The second hypothesis of the origin of the language appeared in the era of Antiquity. Such ancient Greek and Roman thinkers as Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius and many others concluded that man himself created the language and the gods did not take part in this.

However, this idea did not receive its development then, since the spread of Christianity returned everything to its own path, and God again became the creator of the language.

Things began to change only in the 18th century, when scientists paid great attention to the concepts of the origin of human speech. The three most popular are:

1. onomatopoeic, who argued that language arose as a result of imitation of the sounds of nature. The argument is the presence in all languages of onomatopoeic vocabulary (crowing, barking, grunting, and so on);

2. social contract theory, implying that primitive people agreed on how to use the language;

3. the third concept can be conditionally called "from unconscious sounds to conscious speech". Scientists who adhered to it believed that at first people made unconscious sounds, then they learned to control them. In parallel with this, the ability to control their mental actions also developed.

Also, some scientists suggested that primitive people initially communicated with gestures, supplementing them with sounds, and then gradually switched to using only sounds.

Interestingly, after all these scientific studies, linguists have reached a dead end. They discovered, for example, that it was impossible to divide languages into primitive and developed languages based only on their morphological complexity. According to this theory, it turned out that the Chinese language is one of the most primitive, and, therefore, very close to the primitive language. This contradicted the fact that China had a developed culture.

As a result, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, linguists abandoned all attempts to establish how primitive people spoke. They were replaced by psychologists and historians studying the primitive world.

Primitive people spoke like children

Nevertheless, during the study of this issue, scientists came to the conclusion that the language appeared unconsciously. The simplest analogy, which lay in plain sight, was the development of speech in a child. This process is gradual, consisting of a number of stages.

In the 40s of the XX century, a hypothesis was proposed, according to which primitive people formed the language in the same way as children. This idea was expressed by a specialist in primitive society Vladimir Kapitonovich Nikolsky and linguist Nikolai Feofanovich Yakovlev.

The main provisions of this concept:

the speech of primitive people did not consist of individual sounds, but of whole thoughts and, as a result, whole sentences (as a child first speaks in sentence words);
primitive people did not distinguish vowels and consonants, but there were so-called "cries-syllables" (in the language, such elements were preserved in "syllable-sentences", such as yes, no, hey, well, na etc);
primitive people did not use words. At first they expressed their thoughts in words-sentences that developed and supplemented one and the same thought, and later a combination of thoughts;
words-concepts could appear in that period of development of primitive man, when there was a transition from gathering to hunting. These words-concepts consisted of one sound and were rather vague compared to modern words. In addition, they could denote both objects and actions, but now words have ceased to be equal to sentences.

However, this concept is only a hypothesis. After all, a child is born with already developed organs of speech, and for primitive people who were just learning to speak, these organs could be completely different. In addition, according to the American linguist Noam Chomsky, the child already has a certain program in the brain for mastering speech, and primitive people simply did not have it yet.

In a word, until the time machine is invented, we will not be able to find out how primitive people spoke. We can only be content with conjectures and hypotheses.

In the modern world, conditions for operational communication have been created. You can be on different continents and exchange instant messages, emails, parcels. Today, communication by phone, like a lot of other things, whether it's iPhone repair or delivery of goods from distant countries, is no longer a novelty. Naturally, this was not always the case. Even the appearance of paper envelopes and stamps once humanity did not know. There were other ways to convey messages.

What are they?

If today, having handed over an ipad or a phone for repair, we are counting the minutes until we can pick it up, then earlier people calmly managed without all kinds of gadgets. They simply didn't exist. In ancient tribes, especially in Africa, the signals were transmitted by the sounds of drums. Even now, any native understands such a "language." Many peoples used light effects to convey messages. The fire and the smoke flowing from it could signal an alarm, become a cry for help, or simply a signal and an upcoming halt. These methods of transmitting information were very effective, but somewhat limited. As the volume of information messages began to grow, the methods of transmission began to improve. So there were messengers who carried important news. "Postmen" were pigeons and even butchers! After all, it was they who often traveled long distances to make purchases.

In Russia, mention of the postal system appeared by the beginning of the 16th century. A qualitative breakthrough was the development of shipping and railways. And in 1820 the envelope was invented. It was created by a paper merchant in Brighton. It is noteworthy that even after the invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, postal communication has not lost its popularity.

HOW PEOPLE TRANSFERED INFORMATION Completed by 5G student Stefania Zaitseva Teacher Pogorelova E.V.

How information was transmitted in the past Initially, people used only means of short-range communication - speech, hearing, vision. It was possible to warn of impending danger by a cry, however, it could be heard at a distance of only a few hundred meters.

The sound of the drum, especially popular among African tribes, was able to carry the alarm signal for several kilometers. The Australian Aborigines still have a special word that means "to read the smoke." The use of fire communication in the Caucasus is also known. The lookouts were at line-of-sight on high places or towers. When danger approached, signalmen, lighting a chain of fires, warned the population about it. The signal transmitted from one sentinel to another quickly traveled long distances.

After millennia, a person had a need to transmit messages, in which much more meaning would be invested than a signal for hunting, about an attack, about a fire, etc. The speech of ancient people began to develop, and the first ancient languages appeared. Over long distances, information was transmitted through human messengers exclusively orally. At the same time, it became necessary to leave a memory to posterity about events in a separate tribe or natural phenomena that worried the first people. There was no written language at that time, and especially gifted individuals came up with such a way of transmitting information as drawings (petroglyphs).

Methods of data transmission had to be invented based on life. For example, there was an information environment in the form of special stone groups that showed directions in which one could move to the nearest communities. At the same time, many stone groups served as altars or solar altars, through which information could also be transmitted.

The further development of society forced a person to invent new ways of communication. The appearance of writing immediately gave humanity a tremendous impetus. Writing has gone through several stages of development, at first information was transmitted in the form of objects that could carry a direct or figurative meaning, such writing is classified by modern historians and archaeologists as subject writing. Then came pictographic and hieroglyphic writing. Pictographic writing looked like drawings-symbols drawn on stones, tablets, and tree bark. This method was very imperfect, because. could not convey the information in a more accurate form.

One of the most amazing types of writing is knot writing, it was a text written on a rope with knots tied on it. Very few such examples have come down to modern man, the most famous being the knotted script of the Incas and the knotted script of the Chinese.

Hieroglyphic writing soon replaced pictographic writing, and existed in some states until the last few centuries. Hieroglyphs had the form of symbols that carry a specific meaning. The most famous Chinese, Japanese and Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The most recent invention of man is alphabetic writing. It differed from hieroglyphic in that the written signs did not denote a specific word or phrase, but a separate sound or combination of sounds.

With the development of writing, such a means of long-distance communication as mail appeared. In antiquity, letters were carried by specially trained and trained messengers. These people were hardy long-distance runners, which is what they were brought up for from childhood. It did not turn out very quickly and rather laboriously, the runners quickly got tired, and on long hauls it was sometimes necessary to put up to several hundred runners in the form of a relay race, transmitting a message. The first post offices were created there, which sorted and organized the mail. To simplify and speed up the process of delivering messages, the mail was mounted on horses. It was a revolutionary breakthrough in its development

Who came up with the idea that you can deliver a letter by tying it to the leg or wing of a dove is not known for certain. Most likely, someone drew attention to the unrealistic ability of this bird to return to its native nest.

Scientific discoveries that influenced the transmission of information in the modern world In the 40s of the XIX century, the Russian scientist P.L. Schilling built a telegraph line in St. Petersburg that connected the Winter Palace and the General Staff.

In 1876, the telephone was invented in America, which made it possible to use human language rather than a telegraphic code for communication.

In 1895, the Russian inventor A.S. Popov discovered radio communications that did not require wires and cables. Until the 1920s, a special code invented by the French inventor Morse was used for telegraph and radio communications.

In the late 30s of the XX century, a method was invented for transmitting an encoded image using waves. The first television set was created, first black and white and then color

Today, in addition to broadcast television, there is cable and satellite, which appeared due to success in space exploration. Satellite communications cover the entire planet. In 1969, the first computer network began to function in the United States. It laid the foundation for the formation of the Internet computer network. Computer network - a means of modern operational information exchange