Writing History

Interesting Events by Phases

Invent

• 3400-3000 BCE Cuneiform and scrolls with hieroglyphics

• 2500 BCE Library of Ebla and 2100 BCE Gilgamesh

• 1550 BCE Egyptian Book of the Dead

• 1050 BCE Phoenician alphabet, 1000 I Ching, 1000-500 Hebrew Torah

Disseminate

•   275 BCE Library of Alexandria houses hundreds of thousands of scrolls

•   250 BCE Chinese Erya is a proto-dictionary with 2,000 entries

•     78 Pliny the Elder compiles Naturalis Historia

•   300 The bound book form or “codex” replaces most scrolls

•   392 First Christian Bible

Organize

• 500 Sanskrit (Hindu) Amarakosha (dictionary) compiled

• 1440-55 Printing press invented; Gutenberg Bible printed

• 1605 First weekly newspaper in Germany

• 1728 Chambers’ Cyclopedia and 1751 Diderot’s Encyclopedia

• 1755 Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary

Standardize

• 1694 Dictionary of the French Academy

• 1788 London Times founded

• 1851 NY Times founded

• 1868 Typewriter patented

• 1878 The Hindu (newspaper) founded

• 1928 First Oxford English Dictionary

Fuse

• 1956 Dartmouth Conference coins “Artificial Intelligence”

• 1971 WordStar released precursor to 1983 MS Word

• 1991 Berners-Lee launches the World Wide Web

• 1998 Google launched and 2004 Facebook launched

• 2022 ChatGPT launched, Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini soon after