22 March - World Water Day 2006: Water and Culture

Engraved pictogram on clay, beginning of the 4th millennium B.C. © UNESCO - M.L. Bonsirven-Fontana

Language is a facet of human communication and life that can either unite or divide. Theories abound as to how languages evolved on Earth, and some linguists speculate that all human languages are interconnected and emerged from a single source. One thing is certain: languages rarely stay in one place. From their place of birth, they travel with their speakers, wherever they might go. As such, water is one of the most important conveyers of human language that exists.

One example of a language that has expanded its boundaries and changed with the geography of the speakers' land is the Proto-Bantu language in Africa. Beginning at least 2,000 years ago, small groups of Proto-Bantu tribes began spreading south and east from western Africa (near modern-day Nigeria and Cameroon), following the Congo River through the rainforests. They shared their skills with the people they met, and adapted their methods to suit each new environment. They farmed the riverbanks, which were the only places that received enough sunlight to support farming. However, some of their farming methods quickly exhausted the land. The search for new, fertile soil kept the migrating people on the move. Within 1,500 years, the Bantu speakers had populated much of the southern half of Africa, and their language had spread and evolved with each migration and settlement.

Water is not only a means of transporting people who then transfer their language; historically, water has also been the primary means of producing materials designed for the sharing and spread of knowledge and language. This is the case of Ancient Egyptian papyrus, which was made from the root of a plant, and then soaked in water and pressed into a flat sheet on which the Egyptians wrote. Papyrus scrolls have made their way from ancient times, transferring knowledge of Egypt's language systems - hieroglyphs, thought to be one of the first written languages in the world - and their civilization. All forms of knowledge were thus written down: medical and surgical procedures, historical elements and more, and then communicated through papyrus scrolls and transported on the Nile from city to city and culture to culture.

Water has also been of utmost importance in the transfer of knowledge from one civilization to another. European settlers in North America brought with them their religious beliefs and traditions, and through their gradual migration inland by river, impressed these beliefs and traditions on the indigenous tribes that they encountered, while learning farming techniques from them.