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West Saxon formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period. The dominant forms of Middle and Modern English developed mainly from Mercian. Old English was first written using a runic script called the futhorc. This was replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish missionaries in the 8th century.
Private legal documents for the sale of land appeared in Mesopotamia in the early 3rd millennium BC, not long after the appearance of cuneiform writing. [86] The first codes of law were written in Mesopotamia c. 2100 BC, exemplified in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) that was inscribed on stone stelae throughout the Old Babylonian Empire. [87]
However, invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BCE. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol ...
Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) [2] or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed by the 17th century.
Magna Carta Cotton MS. Augustus II. 106, one of four surviving exemplifications of the 1215 text Created 1215 ; 810 years ago (1215) Location Two at the British Library ; one each in Lincoln Castle and in Salisbury Cathedral Author(s) John, King of England His barons Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury Purpose Peace treaty Full text Magna Carta at Wikisource Part of the Politics series ...
Here is a natural enough Modern English translation, although the phrasing of the Old English passage has often been stylistically preserved, even though it is not usual in Modern English: What! We Spear-Danes in ancient days inquired about the glory of the kings of the nation, how the princes performed bravery.
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The first page of Beowulf. Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses the surviving literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England (Jutes and the Angles) c. 450, after the withdrawal of the Romans, and "ending soon after the ...