Who wrote the first written word

• Anthropologist are now looking closer at cave paintings as a form of communication. Von Petzinger, a PhD student at the University of Victoria who has been studying prehistoric signs in European caves for a decade, says they suggest «the first glimmers of graphic communication» before the written word. Cave paintings acted as a precursor before the development of written word, as the development of a writing system had to come from some basic idea.

• Written word emerges in around 3100 BCE in Sumer, Mesopotamia. This system of writing was called Cuneiform and was made by drawing marks in wet clay with a reed implement. In cuneiform, a stylus is pressed into soft clay to produce wedge-like mark that represent word-signs (pictographs) and, later, phonograms or (word-concepts).

• Early cuneiform tablets were known as proto-cuneiform. At first, cuneiform was representational. A bull might be represented by a picture of a bull, and a pictograph of barley signified the word barley. The writings became abstract as it evolved to encompass more abstract concepts, eventually creating the writing system of Cuneiform. The evolution of Cuneiform occurred in stages. In stage one it was used for commercial transactions and the transactions were represented by tokens.

• In the next stage, pictographs were drawn into wet clay, replacing the token method. With cuneiform, writers could tell stories, relate histories, and support the rule of kings. Furthermore, cuneiform was used to communicate and formalize legal systems, most famously Hammurabi’s Code.
  The expansion of cuneiform began in the 3rd millennium, when the country of Elam in southwestern Iran adopted the system of writing.

• The Elamite version of cuneiform continued into the 1st millennium BCE. It also provided the Indo-European Persians with the model for creating a new simplified quasi-alphabetic cuneiform writing for the Old Persian language.
  The Hurrians in northern Mesopotamia adopted a different form of cuneiform around 2000 BCE and passed it on to the Indo-European Hittites.
  In the 2nd millennium cuneiform writing became a universal medium of written communication.

• The Egyptian characters were names hieroglyphs by the Greeks in about 500 BC, because this form of writing was used for holy texts. ‘Hieros’ and ‘Glypho’ mean ‘sacred’ and ‘engrave’ in Greek. The Egyptian scribe would use a fine reed pen to write on the smooth surface of the papyrus scroll.

• The Indus script, although not deciphered yet, is known from its thousands of seals, carved in steatite or soapstone.
  Usually the center of each seal has a realistic depiction of an animal, with a short line of formal symbols. The lack of longer scripts or texts suggests that this script was probably only used for trading and accountancy purposes.

• The last of the early civilizations to develop writing is China. Chinese characters are extremely difficult when printing, typewriting or word-processing because of the complex characters. Yet they have survived.
  The non-phonetic Chinese script has been a crucial binding agent in China’s vast empire. Those who are often unable to speak each other’s language, have been able to communicate fluently in writing through Chinese script.

• The Olmec, are regarded as America’s first civilization, existed from about 1500 to 400 BC. They lived in what is known as the Olmec heartland, in Mexico on the southern tip of the Gulf of Mexico.
  Cascajal Block, an ancient slab of writing which is thought to be the oldest known writing system in the Western Hemisphere. This block dates to the first millennia BC. The block shows linear arrangements of certain characters that appear to be depictions of tribal objects.

• Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. Compared to Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters. This script was simple enough that everyone could learn it. Because it recorded words phonetically, it could be used in any language, unlike the writing systems that were already existent. The script was spread by the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean.

• In Greece, vowels were added to the script, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels.With both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script, this made the script a true alphabet. In the early years, there were many variations of the Greek alphabet, and many alphabets evolved from this one.

• The Romans in their turn developed the Greek alphabet to form letters suitable for the writing of Latin. Through the Roman empire the alphabet spread through Europe, and eventually through much of the world, as a standard system of writing

• Cuneiform and its international prestige of the 2nd millennium had been exhausted by 500 BCE.

• The Arabic alphabet is one of the most used writing systems in the world. It can be found in large parts of Africa and Western and Central Asia, as well as in smaller communities in East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Although Arabic scripts are most common after creation of Islam in the 7th century CE, the origin of the Arabic alphabet lies goes further back.

• The Nabataeans, who established a kingdom in modern-day Jordan, were Arabs. They wrote with a cursive Aramaic-derived alphabet that would eventually evolve into the Arabic alphabet.
  Nabataean inscriptions continue to appear until the 4th century CE, coinciding with the first inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet.

• The writing system of the Mayan developed from the less sophisticated systems of the Olmec civilization. The Mayans began their writing system during the second half of the Middle Pre Classic period. The system of writing used by the Mayan people until the end of the 17th century, 200 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

• Ulfilas’ outstanding contribution to writing is his invention of the Gothic alphabet, which he created from Greek and Latin. Ulfilas invented the Gothic alphabet, a writing system, in the 4th century AD. The Gothic alphabet had 27 letters. The Gothic alphabet is similar to Greek and Latin, but there are differences in phonetic values and in the order of the letters.

• In 700 BC the pressure of business caused the Egyptian scribes to develop a more abbreviated version of the hieratic script. Parts were still the same Egyptian hieroglyphs, established more than 2000 years before, but they are now so elided that the result looks like an entirely new script. Known as demotic (‘for the people’), it is harder to read than the earlier written versions of hieroglyphics.

  Both hieroglyphics and demotic continue to be used until about 400 AD.

• Manuscripts gained popularity in Italy in the 7th to 8th century. People began using them to create a neat and formal look with all capital letters. To emphasize the beginning of an important passage, first letter was written much larger than the rest of the text and in a grander style. The following letters were in smaller ordinary text. This distinction between capital and under case letters, is the same one we use today.

• Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century. This invention furthered the ability to mass produce books and the rapid spread of knowledge throughout Europe.
  Gutenberg’s invention was inspired by the Chinese monks who set ink into paper using a method known as block printing. Block printing is the process in which wooden blocks are coated with ink and pressed to sheets of paper.

• Charles Fenerty invented paper from wood pulp as early around 1841. He was concerned about the difficulty a local paper mill was having in obtaining an adequate supply of rags to make quality paper, so he created his own.

• Today many teens communicate through emojis. Experts say emojis can help some teenagers express themselves. Nearly 40 percent of Millennials, or people between 18 and 34, say emojis and GIFs are a much better way to communicate their thoughts and feelings than words.

History of writing

Six major historical writing systems (left to right, top to bottom: Sumerian pictographs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese syllabograms, Old Persian cuneiform, Roman alphabet, Indian Devanagari)

The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by systems of markings^[1] and how these markings were used for various purposes in different societies, thereby transforming social organization. Writing systems are the foundation of literacy and literacy learning, with all the social and psychological consequences associated with literacy activities.

In the history of how writing systems have evolved in human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols (symbols or letters that make remembering them easier). True writing, in which the content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development. It is distinguished from proto-writing, which typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it more difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance.

The earliest uses of writing in ancient Sumeria were to document agricultural produce and create contracts, but soon writing became used for purposes of finances, religion, government, and law. These uses supported the spread of these social activities, their associated knowledge, and the extension of centralized power.^[2] Writing then became the basis of knowledge institutions such as libraries, schools, universities and scientific and disciplinary research. These uses were accompanied by the proliferation of genres, which typically initially contained markers or reminders of the social situations and uses, but the social meaning and implications of genres often became more implicit as the social functions of these genres became more recognizable in themselves, as in the examples of money, currency, financial instruments, and now digital currency.

Writing systems[edit]

Symbolic communication systems are distinguished from writing systems. With writing systems, one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. In contrast, symbolic systems, such as information signs, painting, maps, and mathematics, often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken language. Every human community possesses language, a feature regarded by many as an innate and defining condition of humanity (see Origin of language). However the development of writing systems, and their partial replacement of traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, and slow. Once established, writing systems on the whole change more slowly than their spoken counterparts and often preserve features and expressions that no longer exist in the spoken language.

Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria: Firstly, writing must be complete; it must have a purpose or some sort of meaning to it, and a point must be made or communicated in the text. Secondly, all writing systems must have some sort of symbols which can be made on some sort of surface, whether physical or digital. Thirdly, the symbols used in the writing system typically also mimic spoken word/speech, in order for communication to be possible.^{[5][page needed]}

The greatest benefit of writing is that it provides the tool by which society can record information consistently and in greater detail, something that could not be achieved as well previously by spoken word. Writing allows societies to transmit information and to share and preserve knowledge.

Recorded history of writing[edit]

Some notational signs, used next to images of animals, may have appeared as early as the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe circa 35,000 BCE, and may be the earliest proto-writing: several symbols were used in combination as a way to convey seasonal behavioural information about hunted animals.^[6]

The origins of writing are more generally attributed to the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities.^[7] These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them.^[7] The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BCE, and soon after in various parts of the Near East.^[7]

An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing:

Because the messenger’s mouth was heavy and he couldn’t repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.

Scholars make a reasonable distinction between prehistory and history of early writing^[10] but have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became «true writing». The definition is largely subjective.^[11] Writing, in its most general terms, is a method of recording information and is composed of graphemes, which may, in turn, be composed of glyphs.^[12]

The emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the «historicity» of a culture by the presence of coherent texts in the culture’s writing system(s).^[10]

Inventions of writing[edit]

Writing was long thought to have been invented in a single civilization, a theory named «monogenesis».^[13] Scholars believed that all writing originated in ancient Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and spread over the world from there via a process of cultural diffusion.^[13] According to this theory, the concept of representing language by written marks, though not necessarily the specifics of how such a system worked, was passed on by traders or merchants traveling between geographical regions.^[a][14]

However, the discovery of the scripts of ancient Mesoamerica, far away from Middle Eastern sources, proved that writing had been invented more than once. Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BCE), Egypt (around 3250 BCE),^[15][16][13] China (1200 BCE),^[17] and lowland areas of Mesoamerica (by 500 BCE).^[18]

Regarding ancient Egypt, several scholars^[15][19][20] have argued that «the earliest solid evidence of Egyptian writing differs in structure and style from the Mesopotamian and must therefore have developed independently. The possibility of ‘stimulus diffusion’ from Mesopotamia remains, but the influence cannot have gone beyond the transmission of an idea.»^[15][21]

Regarding China, it is believed that ancient Chinese characters are an independent invention because there is no evidence of contact between ancient China and the literate civilizations of the Near East,^[22] and because of the distinct differences between the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to logography and phonetic representation.^[23]

Debate surrounds the Indus script of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilisation, the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, and the Vinča symbols dated around 5500 BCE. All are undeciphered, and so it is unknown if they represent authentic writing, proto-writing, or something else.

The Sumerian archaic (pre-cuneiform) writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest true writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3100 BCE, with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BCE. The Proto-Elamite script is also dated to the same approximate period.^[24]

Developmental stages[edit]

A conventional «proto-writing to true writing» system follows a general series of developmental stages:

• Picture writing system: glyphs (simplified pictures) directly represent objects and concepts. In connection with this, the following substages may be distinguished:
  • Mnemonic: glyphs primarily as a reminder.
  • Pictographic: glyphs directly represent an object or a concept such as (A) chronological, (B) notices, (C) communications, (D) totems, titles, and names, (E) religious, (F) customs, (G) historical, and (H) biographical.
  • Ideographic: graphemes are abstract symbols that directly represent an idea or concept.
• Transitional system: graphemes refer not only to the object or idea that it represents but to its name as well.
• Phonetic system: graphemes refer to sounds or spoken symbols, and the form of the grapheme is not related to its meanings. This resolves itself into the following substages:
  • Verbal: grapheme (logogram) represents a whole word.
  • Syllabic: grapheme represents a syllable.
  • Alphabetic: grapheme represents an elementary sound.

The best known picture writing system of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols are:

• Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, c. 6600 BCE
• Vinča symbols (Tărtăria tablets), c. 5300 BCE^[27]
• Early Indus script, c. 3100 BCE

In the Old World, true writing systems developed from neolithic writing in the Early Bronze Age (4th millennium BCE).

Locations and timeframes[edit]

Proto-writing[edit]

The first writing systems of the Early Bronze Age were not a sudden invention. Rather, they were a development based on earlier traditions of symbol systems that cannot be classified as proper writing, but have many of the characteristics of writing. These systems may be described as «proto-writing». They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols to convey information, but it probably directly contained no natural language.

These systems emerged in the early Neolithic period, as early as the 7th millennium BCE, and include:

• The Jiahu symbols found carved in tortoise shells in 24 Neolithic graves excavated at Jiahu, Henan province, northern China, with radiocarbon dates from the 7th millennium BCE.^[30] Most archaeologists consider these not directly linked to the earliest true writing.^[31]
• Vinča symbols, sometimes called the «Danube script», are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennia BCE) artifacts from the Vinča culture of Central Europe and Southeast Europe.^[32]
• The Dispilio Tablet of the late 6th millennium may also be an example of proto-writing.
• The Indus script, which from 3500 BCE to 1900 BCE was used for extremely short inscriptions.

Even after the Neolithic, several cultures went through an intermediate stage of proto-writing before they used proper writing. The quipu of the Incas (15th century CE), sometimes called «talking knots», may have been such a system. Another example is the pictographs invented by Uyaquk before the development of the Yugtun syllabary for the Central Alaskan Yup’ik language in about 1900.

Bronze Age writing[edit]

Writing emerged in many different cultures in the Bronze Age. Examples are the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cretan hieroglyphs, Chinese logographs, Indus script, and the Olmec script of Mesoamerica. The Chinese script likely developed independently of the Middle Eastern scripts around 1600 BCE. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including Olmec and Maya scripts) are also generally believed to have had independent origins.
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing was developed around 2000 BCE for Semitic workers in the Sinai by giving mostly Egyptian hieratic glyphs Semitic values (see History of the alphabet and Proto-Sinaitic alphabet). The Geʽez writing system of Ethiopia is considered Semitic. It is likely to be of semi-independent origin, having roots in the Meroitic Sudanese ideogram system.^[33] Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design. In Italy, about 500 years passed from the early Old Italic alphabet to Plautus (c. 750–250 BCE), and in the case of the Germanic peoples, the corresponding time span is again similar, from the first Elder Futhark inscriptions to early texts like the Abrogans (c. 200–750 CE).

Cuneiform script[edit]

The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing by using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. By the 29th century BCE, writing, at first only for logograms, using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform) developed to include phonetic elements, gradually replacing round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing by around 2700–2500 BCE. About 2600 BCE, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language. Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. From the 26th century BCE, this script was adapted to the Akkadian language, and from there to others, such as Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.

Egyptian hieroglyphs[edit]

Writing was very important in maintaining the Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes.^{[citation needed]} Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train as scribes, in the service of temple, royal (pharaonic), and military authorities.

Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs «came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably [were], invented under the influence of the latter»,^[37] and that it is «probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia».^[38][39] Despite the importance of early Egypt–Mesopotamia relations, given the lack of direct evidence «no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt».^[40] Instead, it is pointed out and held that «the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy» and that «a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt».^[41]

Since the 1990s, the discoveries of glyphs at Abydos, dated to between 3400 and 3200 BCE, may challenge the classical notion according to which the Mesopotamian symbol system predates the Egyptian one, although Egyptian writing does make a sudden appearance at that time, while on the contrary Mesopotamia has an evolutionary history of sign usage in tokens dating back to circa 8000 BCE.^[35][9][42] These glyphs, found in tomb U-J at Abydos are written on ivory and are likely labels for other goods found in the grave.^[43]

Frank Yurco stated that depictions of pharonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper Egyptian Naqada culture and A-Group Nubia. He further elaborated that «Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, [which] further vitiates the Mesopotamian-influence argument».^[44]

Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from «fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African» and in «regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality» although he acknowledged the geographical location of Egypt made it a receptacle for many influences.^[45]

Elamite script[edit]

The undeciphered Proto-Elamite script emerges from as early as 3100 BCE. It is believed to have evolved into Linear Elamite by the later 3rd millennium and then replaced by Elamite Cuneiform adopted from Akkadian.

Indus script[edit]

Markings and symbols found at various sites of the Indus Valley Civilisation have been labelled as the Indus script citing the possibility that they were used for transcribing the Harappan language.^[46] Whether the script, which was in use from about 3500–1900 BCE, constitutes a Bronze Age writing script (logographic-syllabic) or proto-writing symbols is debated as it has not yet been deciphered. It is analyzed to have been written from right-to-left or in boustrophedon.^[47]

Early Semitic alphabets[edit]

The first «abjads», mapping single symbols to single phonemes but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol, emerged around 1800 BCE in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had a slight possibility of being inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for upwards of a millennium.^{[clarification needed]} These early abjads remained of marginal importance for several centuries, and it is only towards the end of the Bronze Age that the Proto-Sinaitic script splits into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet (c. 1400 BCE) Byblos syllabary and the South Arabian alphabet (c. 1200 BCE). The Proto-Canaanite was probably somehow influenced by the undeciphered Byblos syllabary and, in turn, inspired the Ugaritic alphabet (c. 1300 BCE).

Anatolian hieroglyphs[edit]

Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous hieroglyphic script native to western Anatolia, used to record the Hieroglyphic Luwian language. It first appeared on Luwian royal seals from the 14th century BCE.

Chinese writing[edit]

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze from the late Shang dynasty. The earliest of these is dated to around 1200 BCE.^[48][49]

There have recently been discoveries of tortoise-shell carvings dating back to c. 6000 BCE, like Jiahu Script, Banpo Script, but whether or not the carvings are complex enough to qualify as writing is under debate.^[30] At Damaidi in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, 3,172 cliff carvings dating to c. 6000–5000 BCE have been discovered, featuring 8,453 individual characters, such as the sun, moon, stars, gods, and scenes of hunting or grazing. These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese. If it is deemed to be a written language, writing in China will predate Mesopotamian cuneiform, long acknowledged as the first appearance of writing, by some 2,000 years; however it is more likely that the inscriptions are rather a form of proto-writing, similar to the contemporary European Vinca script.

Cretan and Greek scripts[edit]

Cretan hieroglyphs are found on artifacts of Crete (early-to-mid-2nd millennium BCE, MM I to MM III, overlapping with Linear A from MM IIA at the earliest). Linear B, the writing system of the Mycenaean Greeks,^[50] has been deciphered while Linear A has yet to be deciphered. The sequence and the geographical spread of the three overlapping, but distinct, writing systems can be summarized as follows:^[b][50]

Writing system	Geographical area	Time span
Cretan Hieroglyphic	Crete (eastward from the Knossos-Phaistos axis)	c. 2100−1700 BCE
Linear A	Crete (except extreme southwest), Aegean Islands (Kea, Kythera, Melos, Thera), and Greek mainland (Laconia)	c. 1800−1450 BCE
Linear B	Crete (Knossos), and mainland (Pylos, Mycenae, Thebes, Tiryns)	c. 1450−1200 BCE

Mesoamerica[edit]

A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing dated to about 500 BCE.^[51][52][53]

Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and has been fully deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE, and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century CE. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs: a combination somewhat similar to modern Japanese writing.

Iron Age writing[edit]

The Phoenician alphabet is simply the Proto-Canaanite alphabet as it was continued into the Iron Age (conventionally taken from a cut-off date of 1050 BCE).^{[citation needed]} This alphabet gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. These in turn led to the writing systems used throughout regions ranging from Western Asia to Africa and Europe. For its part the Greek alphabet introduced for the first time explicit symbols for vowel sounds.^[54] The Greek and Latin alphabets in the early centuries of the Common Era gave rise to several European scripts such as the Runes and the Gothic and Cyrillic alphabets while the Aramaic alphabet evolved into the Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac abjads, of which the latter spread as far as Mongolian script. The South Arabian alphabet gave rise to the Ge’ez abugida. The Brahmic family of India is believed by some scholars to have derived from the Aramaic alphabet as well.^[55]

Grakliani Hill writing[edit]

A previously unknown script was discovered in 2015 in Georgia, over the Grakliani Hill just below a temple’s collapsed altar to a fertility goddess from the seventh century BCE. These inscriptions differ from those at other temples at Grakliani, which show animals, people, or decorative elements.^[56][57] The script bears no resemblance to any alphabet currently known, although its letters are conjectured to be related to ancient Greek and Aramaic.^[56] The inscription appears to be the oldest native alphabet to be discovered in the whole Caucasus region,^[58] In comparison, the earliest Armenian and Georgian script date from the fifth century CE, just after the respective cultures converted to Christianity. By September 2015, an area of 31 by 3 inches of the inscription had been excavated.^[56]

According to Vakhtang Licheli, head of the Institute of Archaeology of the State University, «The writings on the two altars of the temple are really well preserved. On the one altar several letters are carved in clay while the second altar’s pedestal is wholly covered with writings.»^[59] The finding was made by unpaid students.^{[citation needed]} In 2016 Grakliani Hill inscriptions were taken to Miami Laboratory for Beta analytic radiocarbon dating which found that the inscriptions were made in c. 1005 – c. 950 BCE.^{[citation needed]}

Writing in the Greco-Roman civilizations[edit]

Greek scripts[edit]

The history of the Greek alphabet began in at least the early 8th century BCE when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet for use with their own language.^[60]: 62 The letters of the Greek alphabet are more or less the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and in modern times both alphabets are arranged in the same order.^[60] The adapter(s) of the Phoenician system added three letters to the end of the series, called the «supplementals». Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in present-day Turkey and by the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek adopted this variation. After first writing right to left, like the Phoenicians, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right. Occasionally however, the writer would start the next line where the previous line finished, so that the lines would read alternately left to right, then right to left, and so on. This was known as «boustrophedon» writing, which imitated the path of an ox-drawn plough, and was used until the sixth century.^[61]

Italic scripts and Latin[edit]

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The most widespread descendant of Greek is the Latin script, named for the Latins, a central Italian people who came to dominate Europe with the rise of Rome. The Romans learned writing in about the 5th century BCE from the Etruscan civilization, who used one of a number of Italic scripts derived from the western Greeks. Due to the cultural dominance of the Roman state, the other Old Italic scripts have not survived in any great quantity, and the Etruscan language is mostly lost.

Writing during the Middle Ages[edit]

With the collapse of the Roman authority in Western Europe, literacy development became largely confined to the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persian Empire. Latin, never one of the primary literary languages, rapidly declined in importance (except within the Roman Catholic Church). The primary literary languages were Greek and Persian, though other languages such as Syriac and Coptic were important too.

The rise of Islam in the 7th century led to the rapid rise of Arabic as a major literary language in the region. Arabic and Persian quickly began to overshadow Greek’s role as a language of scholarship. Arabic script was adopted as the primary script of the Persian language and the Turkish language. This script also heavily influenced the development of the cursive scripts of Greek, the Slavic languages, Latin, and other languages.^{[citation needed]} The Arabic language also served to spread the Hindu–Arabic numeral system throughout Europe.^{[citation needed]} By the beginning of the second millennium, the city of Córdoba in modern Spain had become one of the foremost intellectual centers of the world and contained the world’s largest library at the time.^[62] Its position as a crossroads between the Islamic and Western Christian worlds helped fuel intellectual development and written communication between both cultures.

Renaissance and the modern era[edit]

By the 14th century a rebirth, or renaissance, had emerged in Western Europe, leading to a temporary revival of the importance of Greek, and a slow revival of Latin as a significant literary language. A similar though smaller emergence occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia. At the same time Arabic and Persian began a slow decline in importance as the Islamic Golden Age ended. The revival of literacy development in Western Europe led to many innovations in the Latin alphabet and the diversification of the alphabet to codify the phonologies of the various languages.

The nature of writing has been constantly evolving, particularly due to the development of new technologies over the centuries. The pen, the printing press, the computer and the mobile phone are all technological developments which have altered what is written, and the medium through which the written word is produced. Particularly with the advent of digital technologies, namely the computer and the mobile phone, characters can be formed by the press of a button, rather than making a physical motion with the hand.

Writing materials[edit]

There is no very definite statement as to the material which was in most common use for the purposes of writing at the start of the early writing systems.^[63] In all ages it has been customary to engrave on stone or metal, or other durable material, with the view of securing the permanency of the record. Metals, such as stamped coins, are mentioned as a material of writing; they include lead,^[c] brass, and gold. There are also references to the engraving of gems, such as with seals or signets.^[63]

The common materials of writing were the tablet and the roll, the former probably having a Chaldean origin, the latter an Egyptian. The tablets of the Chaldeans are small pieces of clay, somewhat crudely shaped into a form resembling a pillow, and thickly inscribed with cuneiform characters.^[d] Similar use has been seen in hollow cylinders, or prisms of six or eight sides, formed of fine terracotta, sometimes glazed, on which the characters were traced with a small stylus, in some specimens so minutely as to require the aid of a magnifying-glass.^[63]

In Egypt the principal writing material was of quite a different sort. Wooden tablets are found pictured on the monuments; but the material which was in common use, even from very ancient times, was the papyrus, having recorded use as far back as 3,000 BCE.^[64] This reed, found chiefly in Lower Egypt, had various economic means for writing. The pith was taken out and divided by a pointed instrument into the thin pieces of which it is composed; it was then flattened by pressure, and the strips glued together, other strips being placed at right angles to them, so that a roll of any length might be manufactured. Writing seems to have become more widespread with the invention of papyrus in Egypt. That this material was in use in Egypt from a very early period is evidenced by still existing papyrus of the earliest Theban dynasties.^[65] As the papyrus, being in great demand, and exported to all parts of the world, became very costly, other materials were often used instead of it, among which is mentioned leather, a few leather mills of an early period having been found in the tombs.^[63] Parchment, using sheepskins left after the wool was removed for cloth, was sometimes cheaper than papyrus, which had to be imported outside Egypt. With the invention of wood-pulp paper, the cost of writing material began a steady decline. Wood-pulp paper is still used today, and in recent times efforts have been made in order to improve bond strength of fibers. Two main areas of examination in this regard have been «dry strength of paper» and «wet web strength».^[66] The former involves examination of the physical properties of the paper itself, while the latter involves using additives to improve strength.

Uses and implications of writing[edit]

Writing and the economy[edit]

According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat writing had its origins in the counting and cataloguing of agricultural produce, and then economic transactions involving the produce.^[67] Government tax rolls followed thereafter. Written documents became essential for the accumulation, accounting, of wealth by individuals, the state, and religious organizations as well as the transactions of trade, loans, inheritance, and documentation of ownership.^[68] With such documentation and accounting larger accumulations of wealth became more possible, along with the power that accompanied wealth, most prominently to the benefit of royalty, the state, and religions. Contracts and loans supported the growth of long-distance international trade with accompanying networks for import and export, supporting the rise of capitalism.^[69] Paper money (initially appearing in China in the 11th century CE)^[70] and other financial instruments relied on writing, initially in the form of letters and then evolving into specialized genres, to explain the transactions and guarantees (from individuals, banks, or governments) of value inhering in the documents.^[71] With the growth of economic activity in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, sophisticated methods of accounting and calculating value emerged, with such calculations both carried out in writing and explained in manuals.^[72] The creation of corporations then proliferated documents surrounding organization, management, the distribution of shares, and record-keeping.^[73]

Economic theory itself only began to be developed in the latter eighteenth century through the writings of such theorists as Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith. Even the concepts of an economy and a national economy were established through their texts and the texts of their colleagues.^[74] Since then economics has developed as a field with many authors contributing texts to the professional literature, and governments collecting data, instituting policies and creating institutions to manage and advance their economies. Diedre McCloskey has examined the rhetorical strategies and discursive construction of modern economic theory.^[75][76][77] Graham Smart has examined in depth how the Bank of Canada uses writing to cooperatively produce policies based on economic data and then to communicate strategically with relevant publics.^[78]

Writing and religion[edit]

The identification of sacred religious texts or scriptures, often claimed to be of divine origin, codified distinct belief systems associated with particular divine texts, and became the basis of the modern concept of religion.^[2] The reproduction and spread of these texts became associated with these scriptural religions and their spread, and thus were central to proselytizing.^[2] These sacred books created obligations of believers to read, or to follow the teachings of priests or priestly castes charged with the reading, interpretation and application of these texts. Well-known examples of such scriptures are the Torah, the Bible (with its many different compilations of books of the Old and New Testaments), the Quran, the Vedas, the Bhaghavad Gita, and the Sutras, but there are far more religious texts through the histories of different religions with many still in current use. These texts, because of their spread, tended to foster generalized guides for moral and ethical behavior, at least for all members of the religious community, but often these guidelines were considered applicable to all humans, as in the ten commandments.

Writing and the law[edit]

Private legal documents for the sale of land appeared in Mesopotamia in the early third millennium BCE, not long after the initial appearance of cuneiform writing.^[79] The first written legal codes followed shortly thereafter around 2100 BCE, with the most well known being the Code of Hammurabi, inscribed on stone stellae throughout Babylon circa 1750 BCE.^[80] While Ancient Egypt did not have codified laws, legal decrees and private contracts did appear in the Old Kingdom around 2150 BCE. The Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly Exodus and Deutoronomy, codified the laws of Ancient Israel. Many other codes were to follow in Greece and Rome, with Roman law to serve as a model for church canon law and secular law throughout much of Europe during later periods.^[81][82]

In China the earliest indications of written codifications of law or books of punishments are inscriptions on bronze vessels in 536 BCE.^[83] The earliest extant full set of laws dates back to the Qin and Han Dynasties, which set out a full system of social control and governance, with criminal procedures and accountability for both government officials and citizens. These laws required complex reporting and documenting procedures to facilitate hierarchical supervision from the village up to the imperial center.^[84]

While Common Law developed in a mostly oral environment in England after the Romans left, with the return of the church and then the Norman invasion, customary law began to be inscribed as were precedents of the courts; however, many elements remained oral, with documents only memorializing public oaths, wills, land transfers, court judgments, and ceremonies. During the late Medieval period, however, documents gained authority for agreements, transactions, and laws. With the founding of the United States laws were created as statutes within written codes and controlled by central documents, including the federal and state Constitutions, with all such legislative documents printed and distributed.^[85] Also court judgments were presented in written opinions which then were published and served as precedents for reasoning in consequent judgments in states and nationally. Courts of Appeals in the United States only consider documents relating to records of prior proceedings and judgements and do not take new testimony,^[86]

Writing and government, states, bureaucracy, citizenship, and journalism[edit]

Writing has been central to expanding many of the core functions of governance through law, regulation, taxation, and documentary surveillance of citizens; all dependent on growth of bureaucracy which elaborates and administers rules and policies and maintains records (see red tape). These developments which rely on writing increase the power and extent of states.^[2] At the same time writing has increased the ability of citizens to become informed about the operations of the state, to become more organized in expressing needs and concerns, to identify with regions and states, and to form constituencies with particular views and interests; the rise and fate of journalism is closely linked to citizen information, regional and national identity, and expression of interests. These changes have greatly influenced the nature of states, increasing the visibility of people and their views no matter what the form of governance is.

Extensive bureaucracies arose in the ancient Near East^[2] and China^[87][88] which relied on the formation of literate classes to be scribes and bureaucrats. In the Ancient Near East this was carried out through the formation of scribal schools,^[89] while in China this led to a series of written imperial examinations based on classic texts which in effect regulated education over millennia.^[90] Literacy remained associated with rise in the government bureaucracy, and printing as it emerged was tightly controlled by the government, with vernacular texts only emerging later and then being limited in their range up through the early twentieth century and the fall of the Ching dynasty.^[91] In ancient Greece and Rome, class distinctions of citizen and slave, wealthy and poor limited education and participation. In Medieval and early modern Europe church dominance of education, both before and for a time after the reformation, expressed the importance of religion in the control of the state and state bureaucracies.^[92]

In Europe and the colonies in the Americas the introduction of the printing press and decreasing cost of paper and printing allowed for greater access of ordinary citizens to gain information about the government and conditions in other regions within the jurisdictions.^[93] The Reformation with an emphasis on individual reading of sacred texts, eventually increased the spread of literacy beyond the governing classes and opened the door to wider knowledge and criticism of government actions. Divisions in English society during the sixteenth century, the Civil War of the seventeenth century, and the increased role of parliament that followed, along with the splitting of political religious control^[94] were accompanied by pamphlet wars.

Newspapers and journalism, having origins in commercial information, soon was to offer political information and was instrumental to the formation of a public sphere.^[95][96] Newspapers were instrumental in the sharing of information, fostering discussion, and forming political identities in the American revolution, and then the new nation. The circulation of newspapers also created urban, regional, and state identification in the latter nineteenth century and after. A focus on national news that followed telegraphy and the emergence of newspapers with national circulation along with scripted national radio and television news broadcasts also created horizons of attention through the twentieth century, with both benefits and costs.^[97]

One of the earliest known examples of a named person in writing is Kushim, from the Uruk period.^[98]

Writing and knowledge[edit]

Much of what we consider knowledge is inscribed in written text and is the result of communal processes of production, sharing, and evaluation among social groups and institutions bound together with the aim of producing and disseminating knowledge-bearing texts; the contemporary world identifies such social groups as disciplines and their products as disciplinary literatures. The invention of writing facilitated the sharing, comparing, criticizing, and evaluating of texts, resulting in knowledge becoming a more communal property across wider geographic and temporal domains. Sacred scriptures formed the common knowledge of scriptural religions, and knowledge of those sacred scriptures became the focus of institutions of religious belief, interpretation, and schooling, as discussed in the section on writing and religion in this article. Other sections in this article are devoted to knowledge specific to the economy, the law, and governance. This section is devoted to the development of secular knowledge and its related social organizations, institutions, and educational practices in other domains.

Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and Mesoamerica[edit]

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, scribes became important for roles beyond the initiating roles in the economy, governance and law. They became the producers and stewards of astronomy and calendars, divination, and literary culture. Schools developed in tablet houses, which also archived repositories of knowledge.^[89] In ancient India, the Brahman caste became stewards texts that aggregated and codified oral knowledge.^[99] Those texts then became the authoritative basis for a continuing tradition of oral education. A case in point is the work of Pāṇini the linguist, who analyzed and codified knowledge of Sanskrit syntax, prosody and grammar. Mathematics, astronomy and medicine were also subjects of classic Indian learning and were codified in classic texts.^[100] Less is known about Mayan, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican learning because of the destruction of texts by the conquistadors, but it is known that scribes were revered, elite children attended schools, and the study of astronomy, map making, historical chronicles, and genealogy flourished. ^[101][102]

China[edit]

In China, after the Qin dynasty attempted to remove all traces of the competing Confucian tradition, the Han dynasty made philological knowledge the qualification for the government bureaucracy, so as to restore knowledge that was in danger of vanishing. The Imperial civil service examination system, which was to last for two millennia, consisted of a written exam based on knowledge of classical texts. To support students obtaining government positions through the written examination, schools focused on those same texts and the associated philological knowledge.^[90] These texts covered philosophical, religious, legal, astronomical, hydrological, mathematical, military, and medical knowledge.^[103] Printing as it emerged largely served the knowledge needs of the bureaucracy and the monastery, with substantial vernacular printing only emerging around the fifteenth century CE.^[91]

Ancient Greece and Rome[edit]

Ancient Greece gave rise to much written knowledge that influenced western learning for two millennia.^[104] Although Plato thought writing an inferior means of transmission of learning (recounted in the Phaedrus), we know of his works through Socrates’ written accounts of his dialogues. Havelock, as well, has seen the philosophic works of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle as arising from literacy and the ability to compare accounts from different regions and to develop systematic critical reasoning through the inspection of documents and writing coherent accounts.^{[105][106][107]} Aristotle wrote treatises and lectures which were the core of education at the Lyceum, along with the may volumes collected in the Lyceum’s library. Other philosophers such as the Stoics and Epicureans also wrote and taught during the same period in Athens, although we now have only fragments of their works.

Greek writers were the founding writers of many other fields of knowledge. Herodotus and Thucydides writing during the fifth century BCE in Athens are considered the founders of history, transforming genealogy and mythic accounts into systematic investigations of events. Thucydides developed a more critical, neutral history through the examination of documents, transcription of speeches, and interviews. Hippocrates during the same period authored several major works of medicine codifying and advancing the knowledge of this field. In the second century CE the Greek trained physician Galen went to Rome where he wrote numerous works that dominated European medicine through the Renaissance. Hellenized writers in Egypt also produced compendia of knowledge using the resources of the great library at Alexandria, such as Euclid whose Elements of geometry remains a standard reference to today. Ptolemy’s work on astronomy dominated through the Middle Ages.

Scholars in Rome continued the practice of writing compendia of knowledge, including Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo. While much of Roman accomplishment was in material culture of construction, Vitruvius documented much of the contemporary practice to influence design until today. Agriculture also became an important area for manuals, such as Palladius’ compendium. Numerous manuals of rhetoric and rhetorical education that were to influence future generations also appeared, such as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s de Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

Islamic learning[edit]

With the fall of Rome, the Middle East became the crossroads for learning, with knowledge bearing texts from the West and East meeting in Byzantium, Damascus, and then Baghdad. In Baghdad a research institute (or House of Wisdom) with a large library was founded, where Greek works of medicine, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy were translated into Arabic, along with Indian works on mathematics and therapeutics.^[108] To these texts, philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Avicenna and astronomers such as Al-Farqhani made new contributions. Al-Kharazami authored the first work on algebra, drawing on both Greek and Indian resources. The centrality of the Quran to the new Islamic religion also led to growth of Arabic Linguistics.^[109] From Baghdad knowledge and texts were to flow back to South Asia and down through Africa, with a large collection of books and an educational center around the Sankhore Mosque in Timbuktu, the seat of the Songhai Empire. During this period the deposed Abbasid Caliphate moved its seat of power and learning to Córdoba, now in Spain, where they founded a major library which reintroduced many of the classic texts back into Europe along with texts of Arab learning.

Early universities in Europe[edit]

The reintroduction of classic texts into Europe through the library and intercultural intellectual culture in Córdoba, including works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, along with Arabic texts such as by Avicenna and Al-Kharazami created a need for interpretation, lectures, and scholarship to make those works more accessible to scholars in monasteries and urban centers. During the twelfth century universities emerged from these clusters of scholars in Italy at Bologna; in Spain at Salamanca, in France at Paris and in England at Oxford.^[110] By 1500 there were at least sixty universities throughout Europe^[111] enrolling at least three quarters of a million students.^[112] Each of the four faculties (Liberal Arts, Theology, Law, and Medicine) was devoted to the transmission of classic texts rather than the production of fresh knowledge beyond lectures and commentaries. This form of scholastic education continued well into the seventeenth century and beyond in some locations and disciplines.^{[113][114][115][116][117]}

Printing and the growth of knowledge in Europe

Johannes Gutenberg’s European introduction of the moveable type printing press around 1450 created new opportunities for the production and widespread distribution of books, fostering much new writing, with particular consequences for the development of knowledge, as documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein.^[118] The production and distribution of knowledge was no longer tied to monasteries or universities with their libraries and collections of scribal copies. In the ensuing centuries a politically and increasingly religiously divided Europe, no single authority was able to censor or control the production of books. While universities remained attached to disseminating traditional texts, publishing houses became the new centers of knowledge production, and publishing houses in different jurisdictions led to a diversity of ideas becoming available as books moved across borders and scholars came to see themselves as citizens of the Republic of Letters.

The comparison of multiple editions of traditional texts led to improved textual scholarship.^[119] The ability to share and compare results from many regions and enlist more people into the production of science soon led to the development of early modern science.^[118] Books of medicine began to incorporate observations from contemporary surgery and dissections, including printed plates providing graphic displays, to improve knowledge of anatomy.^[120] With many copies of traditional books and new books appearing, debates arose over the value of each in what became known as the battle of the books.^[121] Maps and discoveries of exploration and colonization also were recorded in books and governmental records,^[122] often with the purpose of economic exploitation as in the Archives of the Indies in Seville but also to satisfy curiosity about the world.^[123]

Printing also made possible the invention and development of scientific journals, with the Journal des sçavans appearing in France and The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England both in 1665. Over the years these journals proliferated and became the basis of disciplines and disciplinary literatures.^[124] Genres reporting experiments and other scientific observations and theories developed over the ensuing centuries to produce modern practices of disciplinary publication with the extensive intertexts which represent the collective pursuits of disciplinary knowledge. The availability of scientific and disciplinary books and journals also facilitated the development of modern practices of scientific reference and citation. These developments from the impact of printing on the growth of knowledge contributed to the scientific revolution, science in the Renaissance and science in the Age of Enlightenment.

Modern research university and writing[edit]

In the eighteenth century a few Scottish and English dissident universities began offering some more practical and contemporary studies offered instruction in rhetoric and writing to enable their non-elite students to influence contemporary events.^[125][126] Only in the nineteenth century, however, did universities in some countries begin creating place for the writing of new knowledge, turning them in the ensuing years from primarily disseminating classic knowledge through the reading of classic texts to becoming institutions devoted to both reading and writing. The creation of research seminars and the associated seminar papers in history and philology in German Universities were a significant starting point for the reform of the university.^[127] Professorships in philology, history, economy, theology, psychology, sociology, mathematics and the sciences were to emerge over the century, and the German model of disciplinary research university was to influence the organization of universities in England and the United States, with another model developing in France. Both, however, prized the production of new knowledge by faculty and to be learned by students. In elite British universities writing instruction was supported by the tutorial system with weekly writing by students for their tutors, while in the United States regular courses in writing were often required starting in the late nineteenth century, with writing across the curriculum becoming an increasing focus, particularly towards the end of the twentieth century.

Military knowledge and classified documents[edit]

Military knowledge of strategies and devices date back to the ancient worlds of Egypt, India, China, Greece, and Rome, with both historical accounts and manuals for conducting war. After printing was introduced in the West, manuals for construction of fortifications and battle strategies were widely reproduced, as nations frequently were in conflict. With the growth of chemistry and other sciences, however, knowledge of new weaponry was frequently restricted to secret documents. Other documents also of limited distribution developed around policies, production, and distribution of the new weaponry.^[128] By World War I, both the Allied and Axis powers applied new technologies based on scientific advances to military uses, particularly chemical weapons, with over 5000 scientists engaged in developing and producing weaponry, while attempting to limit access to the information in secret documents.^[129][130] The drive towards secret knowledge, including novel research and not just applications of prior knowledge, became especially intense with the race to develop nuclear weapons in World War II as in the U.S. Manhattan Project. Aviation, rocketry, radar, encryption, and computing were also the subject of classified documents. This system of classification of knowledge continued after WWII ended as the Cold War ensued. The tension between the needs for military secrecy, open scientific research, and citizen deliberation over military policy led in the United States led to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which created civilian control, but through a continuing regime of classified knowledge.^[131][132]

Literature and writing[edit]

The history of literature followed after the development of writing in Sumer, which was initially used for accounting purposes. The very first writings from ancient Sumer by any reasonable definition do not constitute literature. The same is true of some of the early Egyptian hieroglyphics and the thousands of ancient Chinese government records. Scholars have disagreed concerning when written record-keeping became more like literature, but the oldest surviving literary texts date from a full millennium after the invention of writing. The earliest literary author known by name is Enheduanna, who is credited as the author of a number of works of Sumerian literature, including Exaltation of Inanna, in the Sumerian language during the 24th century BCE.^[133][134] The next earliest named author is Ptahhotep, who is credited with authoring The Maxims of Ptahhotep, an instructional book for young men in Egyptian composed in the 23rd century BCE.^[135] The Epic of Gilgamesh is an early notable poem, but it can also be seen as a political glorification of the historical King Gilgamesh of Sumer whose natural and supernatural accomplishments are recounted.

Psychological implications of writing[edit]

Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Eric Havelock were among the earliest to systematically argue for the psychological and intellectual consequences of literacy. Ong argued that the introduction of writing changed the form of human consciousness from sensing the immediacy of the spoken word to the critical distance and systematization of words, which could be graphically displayed and ordered,^[136][137] such as in the works of Peter Ramus.^[138] Havelock attributed the emergence of Greek philosophic thought to the use of the written word which allowed the comparison of beliefs and belief systems and the critical examination of concepts.^[105][107] Jack Goody argued that written language fostered such practices as categorization, making lists, following formulas, developing recipes and prescriptions, and ultimately making and recording experiments. These practices changed the intellectual and psychological orientation of those who engaged with them.^[139][140]

While recognizing the possibilities of all these psychological and intellectual changes that accompanied these literate practices, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole argued that these changes did not come universally or automatically with literacy, but rather were dependent on the social uses made of literacy in their local contexts.^[141] They carried out field observation and experiments among the Vai people of West Africa, for whom the psychological impacts of literacy vary due to the three different contexts in which locals learn to read and write the Vai language, English, and Arabic—practical skills, secular education, and religious education, respectively. European language literacies were associated with European style schooling, and fostered among other things syllogistic reasoning and logical problem solving. Arabic literacy was associated with the religious training of Madrasas and fostered, among other things, heightened rote memory. Literacy in the written forms of Vai associated with daily practices of making requests and explaining tasks, increased anticipation of audience knowledge and needs along with rebus solving (as the written language used rebus-like icons).

Following a different line of Inquiry, James Pennebaker and colleagues have carried out many experiments establishing that writing about traumas can relieve anxiety, improve mental well-being, and improve physical health measures and outcomes.^[142][143]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Baines, John. «The earliest Egyptian writing: Development, context, purpose». In Boudreau (2004), pp. 150–189.
• Boudreau, Vincent, ed. (9 December 2004). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-83861-0.
• Daniels, Peter T. (1996). Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (eds.). The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195079937.
• Haarmann, Harald (2002). Geschichte der Schrift [History of Writing] (in German). C. H. Beck. ISBN 3-406-47998-7.
• Millard, A. R. (1986). «The Infancy of the Alphabet». World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398. doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978.
• Olivier, J.-P. (1986). «Cretan Writing in the Second Millennium B.C». World Archaeology. 17 (3): 377–389. doi:10.1080/00438243.1986.9979977.

Further reading[edit]

21st century sources

• Ferrara, Silvia [it] (2022) [2019]. The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-60162-1
• Lambert, J. L. F. (2014–2017). Termcraft: The emergence of terminology science from the Vinčans and Sumerians to Aristotle. Lulu Press. ISBN 978-1-7751129-2-1.
• The Idea of Writing: Writing Across Borders. Edited by Alex de Voogt, Joachim Friedrich Quack. BRILL, 9 Dec 2011.
• Powell, Barry B. (2009). Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-6256-2
• Steven R. Fischer (2005). A History of Writing, Reaktion Books CN136481
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York University Press. Chapter 3.
• Jean-Jacques Glassner (2003). The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801873894

Late 20th century sources

• Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing. Thames & Hudson 1995 (second edition: 1999). ISBN 0-500-28156-4
• Hans J. Nissen, P. Damerow, R. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping, University of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 0-500-01665-8
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, Vol. I: From Counting to Cuneiform. University of Texas Press, 1992. ISBN 0292707835
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Home page, How Writing Came About, University of Texas Press, 1992, ISBN 0-292-77704-3.
• Saggs, H., 1991. Civilization Before Greece and Rome. Yale University Press. Chapter 4.
• Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6.
• Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge University Press, 1986

Earlier 20th century sources

• David Diringer Writing. New York: Praeger. 1962.
• Otto E. Neugebauer, Abraham Joseph Sachs, Albrecht Götze. Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. Pub. jointly by the American Oriental Society and the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1945.
• Smith, William Anton. The Reading Process. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.
• Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. vol. 28, pp. 852–853. Cambridge, England: University Press, 1911. «Writing».
• Clodd, Edward. The Story of the Alphabet. Library of useful stories. D. Appleton, 1910.

External links[edit]

Cuneiform

• cdli:wiki: Assyriological tools for specialists in cuneiform studies

General

• History of Writing. historian.net
• The World’s Writing Systems, all 294 known writing systems, each with a typographic reference glyph and Unicode status
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat  HomePage
• Children of the Code: A Brief History of Writing – Online Video

Broadcasts

• Cracking the Maya Code. NOVA, Public Broadcasting Service. (Timeline (flash))
• BBC on tortoise shells discovered in China
• Fragments of pottery discovered in modern Pakistan
• Egyptian hieroglyphs c. 3000 BCE

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Tablet V of the epic of Gilgamesh. The left half of the whole tablet has survived and is composed of 3 fragments. The Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraq

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By Dr. Mark Damen / 07.25.2015
Professor of Ancient Drama, Ancient History, Latin and Greek Languages
Utah State University

Introduction: The Importance of Writing

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art and archaeology of the ancient Near East / Wikimedia Commons

One of the most exciting recent developments in ancient history centers around the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, whose theory concerning the origin of writing in Mesopotamia, the earliest known script in Western Civilization, has revolutionized our understanding of not only how writing developed but also how deep it reaches back into history. This chapter will address some of the highlights of her work, especially as it relates to the study of history. The next chapter (17) will carry that story forward through development of the alphabet.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat points out that writing is one of the great achievements of humankind, for at least three reasons. First, it represents a revolution in communication across space and time. That is, the ability to write allows our words to move far beyond the normal range of the voice and thus extends the expression of our thoughts geographically and chronologically. On this ability rests every sort of human inquiry, including history. Second, writing enables record-keeping, allowing us to study a prophet’s words, engrave a tombstone or collect taxes. Crossing this threshold where the voice cannot go, the written word endures, recording the past for later review and consideration. Third, writing give us a means for scrutinizing and editing our ideas which permits us to rewrite our thoughts. As such, it opens the way to revision and greater rigor of thought, essential in logical processes of every sort, including historical investigation.

Thus, the introduction of writing marks an important crux in the history of any civilization, not only because it marks a shift in mentality toward extending communication, keeping records and re-assessing thought but also because it allows a people to live on beyond their own lives and speak to a distant future. On the written word depends every form of learning ever invented, history especially.

Pictographic tablets from Tell Brak / The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Whether consciously or not, most people today understand how important writing is. We distinguish people as literate or illiterate, and when trying to better others’ lives, one of the first things we do is teach them to read and write. Our ancient ancestors also recognized the significance of writing and many had myths recalling its invention. In Egypt, for example, the god Thoth was said to have created hieroglyphics, along with language, magic and medicine. The Mesopotamians traced the invention of writing back to Nisaba, the goddess of granaries, who they said created it to keep records of the goods coming through her temples.

Perhaps most interesting of all, at least to the modern world, is the tale preserved in Hebrew lore that Moses received the gift of writing from God along with the Ten Commandments. The Bible, after all, says explicitly that the Decalogue was “written with the finger of God” (Ex. 31:18, cf. Deut. 5.22). Israelite scholars in antiquity subsequently reasoned that God had inscribed these commandments because Moses could not write and, thus, the Hebrews must have been illiterate up until then. In this tradition, then, the Ten Commandments serve as a lesson in both morality and literacy. If a rather odd way of interpreting the Bible, this bit of folklore shows how important writing was to the ancient Israelites who made a gift from God.

Sumerian cuneiform tablet / British Museum

The first western scholar known to have proposed a theory in which writing has a human origin was the French scholar Diderot in 1755. Based on an earlier suggestion by William Warburton, the bishop of Gloucester, Diderot suggested that early phonetic symbols developed out of pictographs, pictures representing ideas. A highly successful thesis, this proposition remained the basis for most explanations of the origin of writing in the West, until Schmandt-Besserat introduced her theory of tokens.

Much of this debate has revolved around the earliest known script in Western Civilization, cuneiform, the “wedge-shaped” system of signs used by the ancient Sumerians. Though later carved into stone, this type of writing was first impressed on clay tablets which were later fired, that is, baked so the signs won’t wash away or can’t be rubbed out. Finding it in deposits dating back as early as 3100 BCE, scholars theorized that cuneiform must have derived from a system of primordial pictographs. Indeed, several of its signs could be traced back to aboriginal “pictures” of the things they denoted. For example, cuneiform included a sign for “star” that looked like an asterisk, so it seemed safe to assume that it originated as some sort of depiction of a star and, therefore, all other signs derived from images, too.

But there were two major problems with postulating a pictographic origin for the great array and breadth of cuneiform signs. First, archaeological investigation has failed to produce any evidence of a forerunner for cuneiform. Instead, the physical evidence suggests this writing system arose very abruptly, seemingly out of nowhere, already in a fairly complex state. For instance, it contained right from the start at least nine hundred symbols, perhaps as many as fifteen hundred. If writing first sprang up at this moment, it came to life with a bang, almost impossibly fast. If you are mostly interested in modern writing services your first stop should be legitimateessaywriting.com.

Second, there were relatively few cuneiform signs which showed a clear lineage from pictures. The vast majority didn’t look at all like what they represented, even where it would have been easy to do so. For instance, the word for “sheep” was a simple “X.” Where are the legs, the wool, the horns? As early as 1928, long before Schmandt-Besserat began her work, the scholar William Mason had recognized this problem:

We must admit, that even in the earliest and most archaic inscriptions discovered, it is not always easy to recognize the original objects.

But he then went on to blame this on the ineptitude of ancient scribes:

Owing to the limitations of primitive culture, the inexperience of scribes and the lack of artistic ability, each scribe drew the characters in his own crude, faulty way, often incorrectly; so that it is quite impossible always definitely to distinguish the character and identify it with the object intended.

“Primitive” scribes with “crude” ways? Or could it be there was something wrong with theory?

Mesopotamian tablet, c.3200 BCE / British Museum

Another way early historians explained these anomalies was by asserting that the Mesopotamians had deployed their now-lost system of pictographs only on biodegradable material, such as bark or animal hides. But this explanation rests on two undocumented phenomena: (1) an unknown pictographic writing system which had been executed exclusively on (2) a medium now lost. Stools with two legs missing don’t make very comfortable seats. Nevertheless, in the absence of any form of writing preceding cuneiform or any better explanation for its aboriginal complexity, the pictographic theory trudged on, in spite its obvious flaws.

Aerial of Urik ruins / Wikimedia Commons

Over time, as more and more tablets came to light and our understanding of cuneiform improved, other issues arose to challenge further the theory of a pictographic origin. When scholars could see more clearly how early cuneiform developed, they realized that those few signs which did, in fact, arise from pictographs had been introduced after the invention of this script. That is, while the cuneiform “star” did indeed look like a star, dating suggested it was a later entry in the registry of Sumerian signs, not an early example of a type of pictography from which all cuneiform stemmed. Other historians pointed out that pictographs do not form the basis of other ancient scripts, like the Eskimo and Indian writing systems.

Another issue concerned geography. In Sumeria, the earliest cuneiform tablets come from Uruk, a major hub of civilization in the Near East and the focus of much early archaeology. But later archaeologists found evidence that cuneiform was also being used in Syria far to the west and Iran to the east at almost the same time as it first appears in Uruk. And this raised a further issue. Uruk was at that time an urbanized community with a large economy and population. Syria and Iran were relatively poor areas, sparsely populated. But cuneiform appears in all these places simultaneously. How did a complex form of writing with many abstract signs used mainly to keep a tally of properties and possessions spread with such uniformity so widely and rapidly across both city and country?

Tigris-Euphrates River system / Wikimedia Commons

Yet another challenge to the pictograph theory came from the material it was most often written on, clay. According to the standard explanation, there’s a good reason for that. There’s much clay to be found in and around the Tigris and Euphrates river beds, and not much wood or animal hides. So, because of its sheer abundance alone, clay was the logical choice for Mesopotamians to use as a writing medium.

But it’s not a logical choice. Clay is, in fact, very difficult to write on. First and foremost, it isn’t naturally flat. It has to be pressed into a workable shape first, which is usually something rounded, something that will fit in the palm of the hand. And circular is indeed the form in which we find many a cuneiform tablet. But it’s still rather difficult to write on clay even when it’s carefully molded into a hand-friendly ball. Yet virtually all early cuneiform is found on clay, as if it were somehow to the ancient people of this area their traditional vehicle for writing.

In sum, the standard theory of how writing arose in Mesopotamia is full of holes and contradictions but until Schmandt-Besserat came along, there wasn’t any better way to piece together the evidence. Looking at the abstract nature of even the earliest cuneiform signs, their widespread use and, most of all, the material on which they were impressed led her to a new theory and a better account of this all-important development.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s New Theory of the Origin of Writing

Tokens

Studying Mesopotamian culture in the early 1970’s, Schmandt-Besserat first set out to investigate the uses of clay before the development of pottery in early Near Eastern culture. But as she was searching for bits of clay floors, hearth linings, beads and figurines, she kept running into massive piles of small ceramic pieces found in various shapes and sizes.

Clay Tokens from Mesopotamia, c.3500 BCE / From How Writing Came About, by Denise Schmandt-Besserat

At the time, these were called “enigmatic objects” or “objects of uncertain purpose,” because scholars were utterly bemused about their purpose and meaning. So, for instance, when looking at a group of five cones, one archaeologist, Carleton Coon, remarked famously, “they look like nothing else in the world but suppositories. What they were used for is anyone’s guess.” In the process of cataloguing them as part of her research, Schmandt-Besserat first referred to them as “geometric objects” because of their configurations, until ones resembling animals and tools began to emerge. Realizing they must have stood for things, she started calling them tokens, the name by which they are now known. But still no one had any idea what they stood for, or how they were used.

Schmandt-Besserat noted some important clues, however. Many of these tokens are incised—that is, they have various markings engraved on them—and they come in a wide variety of shapes: spheres, cones, disks, cylinders and so on. Ranging in length from one to five centimeters, though they are clustered in groups of one-to-three and three-to-five centimeters, all are simple to make, in Schmandt-Besserat’s words, “the shapes which emerge spontaneously when doodling with clay.” That they had, in fact, been molded from wet clay, is evident from the fingerprints still preserved on some of them.

Sumerian clay tokens, c.3300 BCE / Susa Museum, Iran

There is also a clear evolution in their design. Those found in earlier layers are plain, few in number and naturalistic in shape, while those dating to the latest times, after 3500 BCE, are more highly incised and decorated. Also there are more shapes and greater complexity among later tokens—at the same time, none required high-level skill in ceramics to create—including naturalistic renditions of beds, fruit and tools. Most intriguing of all, they stop being made after 3000 BCE, just as cuneiform enters the scene. In that final phase of their evolution, tokens revert to fewer and plainer shapes and eventually fall out of use entirely.

There are several other things notable about the nature and disposition of these tokens. For one, they come from all over the Near East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Israel. For another, they date to very early times, as far back as 8000 BCE. Furthermore, there is evidence some care went into their creation because many have been fired. Firing signifies a desire to preserve them, which in turn argues that they had value of some sort. They are, in fact, among the earliest fired ceramics known.

Clay writing tokens, c.3300 BCE / Museum of Susa, Iran

Most of this was already evident, if inexplicable, when Schmandt-Besserat began her work. Awareness of the existence of tokens, in fact, went back almost all the way to the beginning of Near Eastern archaeology in the nineteenth century. And as early as 1959, evidence emerged that tokens represented part of a system of enumeration, functioning as counters of some sort. In particular, an envelope-tablet had been found—envelope-tablets are hollow balls of clays with tokens inside—which contained on the exterior a list of sheep and on the interior the exact number of tokens matching that inscribed on the outside. But because this was the only such tablet known, it seemed a stretch to reconstruct a entire system of token-counting based on one single piece of evidence. But, as Schmandt-Besserat later noted, the existence of many tokens having the same shape but in different sizes does, in fact, suggest they once belonged to an accounting system of some sort.

Token material chart / Utah State University, Creative Commons

The decipherment of that system became the hallmark and triumph of her career. She noted initially that several of the designs used on and for tokens resembled later cuneiform signs. From there it was not much of a conceptual leap, though its implications to history were immense, that the tokens had originally functioned as counters representing one unit of a particular item, in much the same way later cuneiform signs denoted items in written form. But the problem wasn’t really the concept, so much as its application. How did this token system of counting work, and what was it used to count? And, most important, why was it necessary?

When tokens first appeared around 8000 BCE, the vast majority of people in the world subsisted as hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move, with little or no need for counting things since nomads don’t usually own much and what little they have is by necessity portable. Thus, it’s surprising to find counters among the remains of civilizations dating to seventh-millennium BCE. What do they have to count? To the contrary, a settled community where goods can be stored is where one expects to find an accounting system develop, but to the first users of tokens urbanization lay far off in a distant future they could hardly have imagined.

Çatalhöyük ruins / Wikimedia Commons

Or so it once seemed. Recent archaeological investigations have been pushing the horizon of urbanized life back further and further in time. Settlements like Çatal Hüyük (pronounced CHAT-ul HOO-yuk) in central Turkey, which is a prehistoric community dating well back into the sixth millennium BCE, give evidence that city sites existed long before the rise of Sumerian civilization (ca. 3000 BCE). This suggests, in fact, that urbanization began at the very brink of agriculture which in some places developed as early as the eighth millennium BCE, and since farming entails a settled lifestyle and the accumulation and storage of goods, it makes sense that a counting system like tokens would also have roots that deep in history. But the need for something doesn’t prove its existence. Fortunately, there’s other evidence that tokens served as counters.

Çatal Hüyük beehive city illustration / Utah State University, Creative Commons

Similar counting systems, for one, can be found even today all over the planet. Of particular interest here, modern shepherds in Iraq still use pebbles in counting sheep. But pebbles are undifferentiated, making it unclear what they represent. That is, if a counting system employs only one type of counter, it’s not possible to discriminate among various commodities. The solution to that problem is obvious and conforms precisely to the archaeological evidence seen in tokens, to differentiate the counters. Seen one way, tokens are exactly that, “differentiated pebbles.”

This makes it easy to understand how tokens would have been deployed in counting, as Schmandt-Besserat argues. Say, for instance, you’re a tribal chieftain and want to hold a feast. You send a runner, a young boy perhaps, off with a handful of tokens that function as a sort of “shopping list.” You could also keep for yourself an identical set as a reminder of what you’d put on your “list.” And you could even change your mind later and send off another boy with more tokens, in other words, a revised list. With all that, tokens clearly serve as a writing system, at least inasmuch as they are a form of communication and record-keeping in which it’s possible to edit one’s “words,” all the hallmarks of writing.

Clay animal tokens / Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The evolution of tokens over time only adds further to the supposition they represent an ancient accounting system of some sort. In terms of their shapes and signs, many tokens remained highly stable, changing remarkably little during their over four millennia of use in prehistory. Others, however, became more complex, especially in their latest incarnation around and after 3500 BCE as the cities of Mesopotamia were in ascendance. Their increasing vocabulary of incisions—that is, inscribed lines used to signify things—was, no doubt, the by-product of mounting urbanization. After all, as larger and more complex cities began to develop, there would have been more and more things to keep track of, necessitating a richer language of incisions to account for all that.

And one final piece of evidence attests to the use of tokens as a system of communication, the fact that many later ones have perforations, doubtlessly designed to allow them to be strung together. But why? As a filing system of some sort? Or, were they threaded on a string—a string, of course, is biodegradable and would not have survived over time—with its loose ends sealed together with a bulla, a stamped clay seal of some sort. That the more complex tokens are the ones most often found with perforations argues in favor of such an interpretation of the evidence.

Envelopes and Impressed Tablets

But the evidence that made Schmandt-Besserat’s theory most compelling came with her study of a particular type of cuneiform document, the envelope-tablet. As noted before, it was common practice in Mesopotamian society after the invention of cuneiform to enclose a contract in a clay envelope, with a copy of the contract on the outside. This ensured no one had tampered with the details.

A Mesopotamian cylinder seal depicting a god sitting behind a sacred tree, facing a woman and a serpent. / British Museum

What Schmandt-Besserat showed was that this tradition extended far back in time, long before cuneiform itself. The envelope-tablet mentioned above in which tokens were deployed as counters had been discovered as early as 1959. Schmandt-Besserat showed this was no fluke. Other and older examples began to appear once it was clear what to look for, particularly “clay balls” with tokens inside and corresponding decorations on the outside.

Even more important, though, some of these clay balls contained the impressions of cylinder seals, long narrow stone tubes with images engraved on them in reverse so that, when they’re rolled over wet clay, they leave behind a picture in relief. Because each cylinder seal is unique, Mesopotamians used them as a way of “signing” documents. Indeed, some ancient Near Eastern contracts have numerous cylinder seal impressions on them, which are, in effect, the signatures of the individuals involved in the contract.

Sumerian cylinder seal and tablet impression / British Museum

Envelope-tablets with the text of a contract and the signatory cylinder seal impressions on the inside offered the advantage of ensuring the validity and integrity of a business transaction. But when the cuneiform document was completed and sealed inside its envelope, it was difficult to know exactly what the contract stipulated since the clay envelope hid the text inside. Archaeology shows, however, that the ancients found a ready solution to that problem. They copied the contract onto the envelope itself.

Schmandt-Besserat’s contribution, arguably one of her greatest, was to show how old this practice really was, that in its earliest manifestation the envelope-tablet didn’t utilize cuneiform writing but tokens themselves pushed into the wet clay of an envelope which left their impression on it. While the clay is still wet, the tokens themselves were sealed inside, and the whole package was left to dry or be fired. The copy of the tokens on the envelope is itself an important conceptual leap, a first step toward representing tokens abstractly as two-dimensional cuneiform signs, not three-dimensional tokens.

The next step was to stop impressing the tokens on the envelope and instead draw their picture on the envelope’s wet clay, an advancement which followed soon thereafter. This was especially necessary for incised tokens, because their marks which are crucial to their meaning do not transfer well onto wet clay. And as incised tokens became more popular in the economic boom starting around 3500 BCE, the need to represent them precisely on envelopes would only have increased.

Finally the ancient Mesopotamians must have realized that, if the tokens inside are represented on the envelope and the tablet is fired making it impossible to alter it in any way, the tokens themselves inside the envelope aren’t necessary. All a contract really needed to ensure its lasting validity was the symbolic signs on the outer envelope, originally an exterior copy of the contract but now the whole contract itself. With this, it makes sense that cuneiform signs derived from the shapes and markings on tokens, which do, indeed, constitute a “picture” of sorts but not the sort of picture expected in the standard view of a pictograph. It’s a picture of a token, not a picture of the thing itself. Schmandt-Besserat sums it up this way:

[T]hese types of symbols, which derived from tokens, were picture signs or “pictographs.” They were not, however, pictographs of the kind anticipated by Warburton. The signs were not pictures of the items they represented but, rather, pictures of the tokens used as counters in the previous accounting system. . . The first tablets were a decisive step in the invention of writing and amounted to a revolution in communication technology.

The last step to a full and independent writing system was the creation of new cuneiform signs not based on an original token design. That must first have happened when the thing being represented wasn’t a commodity of exchange at all in the traditional token economy, no “sheep” or “bar of metal,” but something like “star” or “man.” And this explains why true pictographic cuneiform signs date, for the most part, to later, not earlier times. It also clarifies why many are expressed as a rebus, a “word-picture” in which the elements of the word are written as separate and unrelated pictures, like writing “carpet” by drawing an automobile and a cat or dog.

Cuneiform chart / Utah State University, Creative Commons

From there, it’s no long trek to creating a syllabary, that is, a writing system representing spoken syllables, in which any word can be spelled phonetically. As we’ll see in Chapter 17, the Western alphabet arose from just that. Thus, Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s innovative researches have brilliantly elucidated the origins of writing, which we now know evolved from distinctive clay tokens to envelope-tablets with impressions of tokens on the outside to token-free tablets written in cuneiform, eventually containing its own complex syllabary.

Besides that, it also shed light on two idiosyncrasies of Mesopotamian writing: why the Mesopotamians wrote on clay as opposed to some more convenient—or, at least, naturally flatter—medium, and why many cuneiform tablets are round. Ever since the earliest use of tokens, clay was the traditional medium of accounting transactions in Mesopotamia. And not just because it was convenient to hold clay in a ball did cuneiform tablets tend to come in a rounded form, but because it was also the traditional shape used for early clay envelopes enclosing tokens. Much like changing people’s minds today about writing on paper, “hard copy” that is, or using a size of paper other than eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inches, cultural traditions can be deeply entrenched, even after technical advancements make them obsolete.

Conclusion: The Origin of Writing in Tokens

Thus, as a system of communication, tokens fulfill the three fundamental purposes which make writing the monumental invention it is. First, the use of tokens allowed ancient peoples to communicate across unprecedented expanses of space and time far exceeding the range of the voice. Second, they constituted a form of record-keeping, permitting the precise determination of how many there were of something, and even to distinguish between different types of item. And finally, the ability to re-send messages, to renegotiate contracts, to string tokens together and then re-string them entails perhaps the most important feature of this writing system, the revision process which admits scrutiny and editing of thought.

Perhaps most important of all to note, the discovery of all this came not from digging up new information but the study of what had already been uncovered and was sitting in museums, and in some cases had been for decades. It took fresh insight, a newcomer’s eyes, to realize all that it represented. Little wonder, then, Schmandt-Besserat’s theory was nominated as among the top one-hundred scientific theories of the twentieth century. It illuminates, after all, one of the top twenty inventions in a hundred centuries.

Pre-Alphabetic Writing

S. Harris, Wikimedia Commons

It’s pervasive. You see it everywhere—you’re looking at it right now, in fact—which makes it hard to remember sometimes that someone somewhere invented the alphabet, that it’s not a natural part of our being, not even as organic as counting to ten on your fingers. It’s also wise to remember that transcribing spoken words is only one way to record thoughts. That is, writing does not have to be alphabetic—it can be pictographic, with symbols representing images, the way men’s and women’s bathrooms are identified with male and female symbols all across the globe. Symbols are just as valid a way of expressing a thought as any word written using a alphabet. After all, who said what you hear or speak is closer to what you think than what you see or draw? Certainly, not Rembrandt!

And so there was a time before the invention of the alphabet, when other systems of writing prevailed in the West. This has always been true in China, for instance, where the writing system has never been tied explicitly to oral communication. In particular, ancient Mesopotamian peoples like the Sumerians and Babylonians wrote using ideograms, graphic symbols representing ideas or objects. Because of that, wherever cuneiform went, so did the supposition that ideograms were the way to write. But what happened to that mode of inscription? If early Western civilizations used a pictorial system to write, why don’t we still today?

There’s an easy answer to that question. Ideograms require an enormous investment of time, especially in the early stages of acquisition. It takes Chinese children, for instance, considerably more effort and usually much longer to learn how to write than their occidental counterparts trained in an alphabetic system. That’s because Asian students must essentially start from scratch and master a whole new way of communicating, whereas Western students with their ABC’s can depend somewhat on the spoken language they’ve already absorbed to help them read and write. “Somewhat” is key here, however, because alphabets are notoriously imprecise in recording the sounds actually articulated in speech. We’ll return to that point at the end of this section.

For now, let’s begin by surveying in brief what’s known about how the alphabet evolved. Its original stimulus seems to have come from Egyptian hieroglyphics, as they spread through Semitic communities in the Sinai and the deserts south of Palestine. From there it moved north across the ancient Near East. The Phoenicians, a sea-faring empire based on trade, carried alphabetic writing west, especially into Greece where it’s first evidenced around 850 BCE.

In Greek hands, the alphabet underwent important transformations, particularly the inclusion of vowels for the first time. Because they had strong ties to Italy, the Greeks handed their version of the alphabet to the Etruscans, an early Italic people, through whom it later passed to the Romans. Both made notable changes to accommodate alphabetic writing to their particular tongues. The Roman ABC’s subsequently formed the basis of both the Medieval and modern alphabets used in the West. Perhaps what’s more important to note is that, for all it’s seen, this type of writing has remained remarkably stable because, once set, an alphabet is hard to change.

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

The earliest predecessor of today’s Western alphabet is evidenced only long after its invention, leaving its origin deep in the mists of historical speculation. But since certain symbols found in ancient Egyptian scripts bear striking resemblance to some later alphabetic forms, scholars have hypothesized that the alphabet evolved out of hieroglyphics, at least in part. This insight stems from our understanding of the nature and evolution of ancient Egyptian writing, and for that we are in debt to the brilliant French linguist, Jean François Champollion, who in 1822 took the first crucial steps toward deciphering hieroglyphics. His principal assumption, that they incorporated at least some phonetic symbols, signs based on sounds—that is, Egyptian writing did not entirely comprised ideograms—broke important, new ground, allowing us not only to hear the Egyptians’ stories and histories in their own terms but also to grasp the contribution they made to modern writing, too.

Even though Mesopotamian cuneiform predates any known Egyptian script by at least a century or so, the Egyptians, it seems, invented hieroglyphics independently. If, instead, they learned from Mesopotamians how to write and didn’t come up with it all on their own, it can only have been written communication in its most rudimentary form, little more than the inspiration itself to write. That’s because there’s all but no apparent similarity between the cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts.

Far more important than any civilization’s claim to originality, however, are the advancements the Egyptians engineered in the technology of writing. To understand this, it’s necessary to delve briefly into the nature of hieroglyphics itself. In describing a world as complex as theirs, the scribes of ancient Egypt sought ways to expand the possibilities their writing system afforded. So, instead of relying strictly or even primarily on ideographic signs, they explored ways of representing spoken words in a written form. To wit, they began writing down what they heard, not just what they saw.

Hieroglyph chart / Utah State University, Creative Commons

From this evolved a syllabic script which could be used to write virtually any word in their language based on its pronunciation. In other words, the Egyptians developed a series of signs representing the syllables they used in speech, symbols, for instance, which represented the letter b in combination with any vowel: ba, be, bi, bo, bu and so on. With these, they could approximate the sound of any word—or wo-ra-de as they might have written our word “word” back then—and to help people remember the values these sounds portrayed, many of them were invested with mnemonic qualities, meaning their shapes served as aids to the reader’s memory of the consonants they signified. So, for instance, the sign for “r” in hieroglyphics looked like a mouth since r or r’t is the Egyptian word for “mouth.”

Still, having to phrase every word as some sort of wo-ra-de left things open to more than a little confusion. In other words, if you use syllabic signs, how can you tell that wo-ra-de means “word,” not “ward” or “weird”? But instead of doing what seems so obvious to us now, that is, use vowels to distinguish “word” from “weird”—the assignment of vowel qualities to letters like a, e, i, o, and u came only much later, and from a source far outside Egypt—Egyptian scribes devised a different and remarkably ingenious solution to the problem.

Pictograph chart / Utah State University, Creative Commons

They came up with a complex system of determinatives, ideographic signs used in tandem with syllabic figures to represent a word. It’s as if you wanted to write “pen” but had no vowels and could only put down symbols which represented the sounds “pa” and “ne.” Your reader might, then, interpret your pa-ne as not “pen,” but “pin” or “pan” or “pane” or “pine” or “pun.” So, to clarify which pa-ne you meant you drew an ideograph which looked like a pen after the word to show that the pa-ne you meant was “pen.” Such ideographic determinatives are found throughout hieroglyphics, and are part of what made and still makes Egyptian writing a formidable challenge to read.

But that’s also clearly part of the point of hieroglyphics. The scribal profession in Egypt was a highly selective and lucrative vocation, a monopoly of a sort in which scribes had a vested interest in maintaining a complex system which only they and their trained colleagues could decipher. Thus, it wasn’t in the general interest of the literate community in ancient Egypt to simplify or popularize writing, and so, while the Egyptian scriptural tradition had in it all the elements necessary for the creation of an alphabet, no such revolution ever took place in all of ancient Egypt’s long history. Those who could write didn’t want anyone to have an alphabet because it would have put them out of a job.

So, because of their inherently cryptic nature, it took a linguistic genius on the order of Champollion to unravel the secrets of hieroglyphics for the modern age. And it took an even greater genius to see that using only the alphabetic symbols inherent in a scribal system like hieroglyphics could make writing a feature of daily life for everyone. That stroke of brilliance belongs to some person or persons whose identity has been lost amidst the ravaged historical records of the second millennium BCE.

The Invention and Spread of the Alphabet

Ancient Egyptian chronology / Utah State University, Creative Commons

The alphabet, then, was not so much invented as isolated. That much is clear, even if the question is when and where and by whom is not. Hints of an alphabetic script are found as far back as 1700 BCE in evidence left behind by miners in the turquoise quarries of the Sinai (the triangular peninsula between Egypt and the Holy Lands). Soon thereafter, other early alphabetic scripts begin to emerge from texts written in Palestine. So it seems the alphabet escaped Egypt, much like the Hebrews of the Exodus, fleeing east and north across the desert, and wandered like Moses for many years in the wilderness.

Wikimedia Commons

Of this alphabet’s inventors we know nothing certain other than that they spoke a Semitic language, one related to Arabic and Hebrew, because the letters of this early alphabet conform well with the consonants prevalent in Semitic tongues. As such, it includes a number of gutturals, not the same sounds made in the back of the mouth as we saw in Indo-European languages but rasping sounds made deep in the throat and found frequently in Hebrew, Arabic and their linguistic kin. In other words, the early alphabet was designed to suit a Semitic speaker’s natural mode of talking.

It would be more accurate, however, to say alphabets—plural!—since the letters we ultimately ended up with don’t represent the only attempt to craft alphabetic writing in the second millennium BCE. Clearly, the idea of finding a way to simplify and popularize writing was in the air at this time. At Ugarit, for example, a city in northern Syria and a rich cosmopolitan trade center, there evolved an alphabet based not on the letter shapes with which we are familiar but cuneiform symbols, the type of writing popular in Mesopotamia at the time. Thus, this cuneiform alphabet is not a forerunner but an analog of the lettering system we use today. That is, someone faced east and tried doing the same thing with Mesopotamian cuneiform that the inventors of our alphabet did looking southwest to Egypt and hieroglyphics. That this cuneiform alphabet eventually didn’t catch on in the long run is probably little more than a fluke of fate.

The Phoenician Alphabet

All evidence, however, seems to indicate that the letters we use to write didn’t derive from this cuneiform-based script but the syllabic signs employed in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Somehow these letter forms made their way north to Phoenicia (on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea) where they flourished and began to spread widely, as evidenced by an explosion in alphabetic writing toward the end of the second millennium BCE in the lands around Palestine. There for the first time we see names given to the letters themselves: ‘aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, etc. These would later turn into the well-known register of Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, ktl., from which comes our word alphabet, an abridged form of this list “alpha-bet(a-gamma, . . .).”

Phoenician to medieval scripts / Utah State University, Creative Commons

Though nonsense to us, it’s easy to see why these particular names were chosen in Phoenician. They signify the letters’ values. ‘Aleph is the Phoenician word for “ox,” beth means “house,” gimel “camel,” daleth “door,” and so on. In other words, the Phoenician alphabet incorporates the same mnemonic device the Egyptians used, that each letter’s shape depicts a common thing, the word for which begins with the sound that letter represents.

But the Phoenicians went further than the Egyptians and named the very letter itself after that thing. When they then used only these letters in writing, that is, no ideographs or determinatives, a fully alphabetic script had at last been born. And in much the same way we teach children the alphabet today by having them recite “A is for apple, B is for boy, C is for cat, . . .,” the Phoenicians memorized their alphabet with similar mnemonics, except that their world was one of oxen and camels.

Script comparisons / Utah State University, Creative Commons

In the shapes of the letters themselves it’s also possible to see their figurative origin as illustrations designed to aid the memory. A is formed the way it is because it looks like an “ox”—turn it upside down and it has horns—B looks like a “house,” originally a rectangle divided in half as if it were an aerial drawing of a two-room home. The curve of C was originally a crude rendition of a camel’s hump, and so on. All this was designed to help Phoenicians recall each letter’s value, a pictographic reminder of the alphabet’s sounds, making it much easier to deploy than the daunting variety of signs required in either cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing.

That clear advantage was, however, offset by the complexity entailed in alphabetic writing as it moved between languages. Many of those problems encountered in transmission stemmed from the wide variety of consonant sounds found in different tongues. For instance, few languages other than English utilize the interdental /th/. Putting your tongue between your teeth as they’re closing is a thing most people instinctually avoid.

Hebrew Gezer “calendar” / Utah State University, Creative Commons

So, exporting the alphabet from Phoenicia wasn’t as easy an affair as simply handing it to foreigners and saying, “Here, use this to write with!” The ‘aleph-beth-gimel alphabet, so clearly tailored to Semitic linguistic structures and especially the Phoenician language, makes an excellent in point. To wit, early alphabetic writing evidences well its innate regionalism in one of its more unusual qualities—unusual to Westerners, at least—its lack of vowels.

Phoenician, and Semitic languages in general—which include modern Hebrew and Arabic—freely alter the internal vowels in a word according to an established schema, thereby changing its function. That is, by inserting different vowels it’s possible to change the way a word works in a sentence, in the same way we turn “write” into “wrote” to create a past-tense form in English. In Semitic languages, however, this system is far more complex and comprehensive, allowing vowel substitutions to make a verb into a noun. KTB, for instance, is the Semitic root for “write,” rendering many words in Arabic: katib “writer,” kitab “book,” katab “wrote,” and so on. To put it simply, consonants in Semitic languages tend to reflect root vocabulary, whereas vowels supply grammatical structures or clarify a word’s function in a sentence.

Because of this, the early Semitic inventors of the alphabet wrote only consonants, those being the principal agents of vocabulary in their language. This is why the name of God given to Moses, JHWH, is a string of consonants only, later rendered variously as Jehovah or Jahweh. Early Hebrews had no way to write vowels with their alphabet and, in fact, saw little need for them because through their native understanding of the Hebrew language they could supply the vowels in words as they read. And that’s where the Greeks come in.

The Greek Alphabet

That the Greeks inherited the alphabet from the Phoenicians is clear in several ways. First, the order of the letters in the Greek alphabet is basically the same as that in the Phoenician. Second, the Phoenician letter-names were carried over into Greek with only minor change —alpha, beta, gamma, delta—even though to the Greeks these names were meaningless terms. Third, the ancient Greeks themselves attested to their alphabet’s Phoenician heritage by calling it Phoinikeia grammata, “Phoenician letters,” and claiming it was brought to Greece by the Phoenician-born hero Cadmus, a figure in Greek mythology.

Wikimedia Commons

The remarkable consistency between the Greek and Phoenician alphabets extends to much more than the names for letters, however. With a stability maintained for millennia, the alphabet underwent very few changes during its translation into Greece, such that even if a Phoenician letter imported a sound the Greeks didn’t use, they retained the letter. That, however, opened the door to other developments.

One can see the problems—or opportunities—which the early alphabet presented the Greeks nowhere better than with ‘aleph, the first Phoenician letter. Before the Greeks recast this as it alpha, it represented a guttural consonant, something that sounds like gargling to us and has no counterpart in either English or Greek. Yet, the Greeks not only kept ‘aleph in their alphabet but retained it in the first position, a remarkably conservative posture.

But this conservatism also presented important opportunities for significant change, two in particular. First, when the Greek felt they needed to add new letters, they put them at the end of the alphabet, even where it made more sense to put them next to related letters. That’s because it’s very difficult to take ABC and turn it into ABWXYZC. Too many parents and teachers have nursed too many young readers on ABC, those letters with those values in that order, to make such a change work.

Thus, the new letters the Greeks needed to add—and they had little choice but to put them in their alphabet, since without them the Greeks couldn’t transcribe all the words of their language alphabetically—they more or less had to include them at the end of the alphabet. These were their phi, chi, psi, omega, the last four letters of the Greek alphabet. This set a trend in alphabetic evolution that new comes last, explaining why our alphabet ends W, X, Y, Z. Every one of this final quarter is a later addition appended onto the alphabet.

Besides that, the Greeks introduced a second major innovation in alphabetic writing, the vowel. Because Indo-European languages didn’t employ vowels as grammatical markers the way Semitic languages did, it wasn’t possible to write Greek or any Indo-European language using only consonants. Wtht vwls ts hrd t knw wht wrds yr rdng. And basic words like English a or I or French eau (“water”) would have been completely impossible to write. To make any use at all of the alphabet, the Greeks had to find some way of representing vowels.

Fortuitously, the solution to this problem worked in concert with the remedy for another. The Greeks needed vowels in order to write their language, and at the same time several of the letters they’d inherited from the Phoenicians represented sounds useless to them. So, with typical Greek confidence-in-rationalism they reassigned the phonetic value of these letters and turned them into vowels, without changing the traditional order of the letters. And so ‘aleph became alpha, the forerunner of our letter a, as did epsilon the ancestor of e, iota i, omicron and omega o, and upsilon u.

This explains why our vowels are all over the alphabet instead of being neatly collected in one place, as logic would dictate. They are, at heart, phonetic substitutions for the wide array of Phoenician gutturals found all across the original lettering system inherited by but useless to Greeks who were bold enough to give these letters new value but not so Philistine as to give them a new position in the alphabet. The addition of vowels entailed monumental consequences in the history of writing in the West, showing that, like politics, writing encompasses the art of the possible.

By endowing alphabetic writing with the possibility of much broader cultural applicability, the Greeks’ invention of vowels proved a turning point in Western Civilization. John Healey sums up neatly the significance of vowels:

The two great pivotal moments in this story (of the alphabet) are the devising of the consonantal alphabet on an acrophonic basis in the early second millennium BC, and the addition of the vowels to the consonantal repertoire in the earlier part of the first millennium BC. The first of these steps forward we owe to some uncertain group of inventors, possibly in a scribal school in Palestine, Phoenicia or Syria. The second we owe to the Greeks. The only other invention in this field which is more important than either of these is the invention of writing itself . . .

So enticing, in fact, were these Greek-devised vowels that ultimately those cultures which had inspired the alphabet but had at first written only in consonants ultimately adopted them, too. Hebrew and Arabic writing today marks vowels, though not with letters but punctuation marks added near a consonant.

The Greeks fostered one other significant development in alphabetic writing, the regular predisposition to write left-to-right. While early Greek lettering could go either left-to-right or right-to-left, and even sometimes both—a script that alternates between left-to-right and right-to-left on every other line is called boustrophedon, literally in Greek “as the ox turns (in plowing a field)”—eventually the Greeks settled on left-to-right as the standard form for writing, part and parcel of the general privileging of right-handedness in Western Civilization. That is, when righthanders put ink on paper, they’re less inclined to smear the letters if they pull their hands away from what they’re writing, and thus Greek scripts eventually settled into a left-to-right disposition, leaving lefties, on the other inky hand, to their own sinister deviances.

The Later History of the Alphabet

In the East, the Hebrews and other Semitic groups including the ancestors of the modern Arabs developed their own alphabet and direction of writing (right to left). These, too, evolved into different types of scripts, especially as time passed and Semitic languages multiplied. In particular, Aramaic, the most widespread of those daughter languages, ultimately replaced Hebrew as the common tongue used by the ancient Israelites, bringing with it its own species of alphabet.

The Roman Alphabet

Meanwhile, letters were spreading westward, too. The first non-Greek peoples we know of who used the Western alphabet in Italy were the Etruscans. This civilization was based in the area north of Rome, around modern Florence and Tuscany, and during the sixth and fifth centuries dominated the inhabitants of central Italy, including the early Romans. Among the many cultural artifacts which Etruscan control left behind in Roman life was the Greek alphabet, though in an adapted form.

Early Roman territory / Wikimedia Commons

For instance, the Greek alphabet which began alpha, beta, gamma, the equivalent of our ABG, evolved under Etruscan management into ABC because the letters C and G are closely related and thus easily confused. In the process of this shift, not only did G end up being removed and replaced by C but later it had to be re-inserted into the alphabet to restore the g-sound. This also left the alphabet with two hard c-sounds represented by C and K, the way it still is today. It would have made sense to eliminate either C or K, if that didn’t entail effecting a fundamental change in the presentation of the alphabet, a structure rarely so liberal as to admit that sort of editing.

Several other changes occurred as a result of the importation of the Greek alphabet into Italy. One entailed the letter Z, a sound which the Romans didn’t use until they came under the influence of the Greek civilization and began borrowing words with zeta in them, the letter that represented that sound in Greek and seen in English words of Greek derivation like zeal, zone and Zeus. In the Greek alphabet zeta comes rather early, immediately after epsilon (the Greek equivalent of E).

While early Italians had inherited zeta along with the rest of the Greek alphabet, they had no words with the z-sound in them and, having no immediate reason to keep the letter, had omitted it from their earlier version of the alphabet. When the later Romans found that they did, in fact, need it, they re-introduced Z into their alphabet, putting it at the end where it wouldn’t disrupt the order of letters which was by then well-established. And that’s why Z comes last in the Roman alphabet and all its descendants, including ours.

Another such change involved the letter which has come down to us as F. Called digamma in Greek, it originally signified not the f-sound but was the equivalent of our /w/. Before the Classical Age, however, it had fallen into disuse because all w-sounds disappeared from the Greek language. Even though not in use, digamma remained for a long time in the Greek alphabet and, as such, was exported wherever the Greek alphabet traveled, to early Rome for instance. And because the Romans needed a letter to represent the f-sound which they had but Greek didn’t, they simply re-assigned digamma the value of /f/, the sound it has signified in Western writing ever since.

The Medieval Alphabet

After the disintegration of the Roman synthesis in the fifth century ending classical antiquity, literacy in the West relapsed into near extinction. This again opened up the possibility for substantive changes to be made in the alphabet—the fewer people who know something, the easier it is to revise it—despite that, however, not many modifications of any real significance actually took place in alphabetic writing during the Middle Ages. And those few that did remained generally true to the inherited letter forms in order, sound and shape. So, even amidst several changes in scripts, ABC and its literal successors still held sway.

One of the few notable changes which took place was the separation of I and J, letters which come from the same original character in the Roman alphabet. Originally, the Phoenician letter yod (“hand”)—a hand held up with fingers closed still resembles the upright form of the letter I—had developed into the Greek iota, one of the vowel-sounds the Greeks introduced into the alphabet. This subsequently passed to the Romans as the letter I, used in Latin to represent both the vowel sound /i/ and the consonant sound /y/.

In the Middle Ages, this caused confusion since the i-sound and y-sound are different, even though closely related. To distinguish them, Medieval writers added a curved tail onto I when it was being used as a consonant, rendering the modern form J. Even though this letter later took on a different value, the sound which begins modern English words like “jar” and “joint,” many modern languages still retain the letter’s original vocal quality, the y-sound. So, for instance, a German word like jung is pronounced “yung.” Thus, the creation of J out of I explains not only why these letters look alike but also the reason they sit next to each other in the alphabet.

In similar fashion, Roman U replicated during the Middle Ages, but into three different letters: U, V and W. Just like I and J, this trio evolved to reflect separate sounds, the vowel (U) and consonants (V, W), all forms of front rounded sounds, that is, what comes out of the mouth when the vocal chords are used and the lips pursed. The similarity of shape U, V and W share shows their common origin, too.

The Alphabet and Spelling

The complexity we’ve just reviewed—though it’s not so complex if you take into account the many centuries the alphabet has been around and all the evolution it might have undergone—the variety of changes in form and value which alphabetic signs have embraced raises the difficult issue of its general usefulness in modern society. That is, it’s supposed to be a simple way of writing, but it’s not. So then is the alphabet really a good idea? After all, if the spelling of words today has become so obtuse that English speakers can hold spelling bees and people need dictionaries just to figure out how to spell a word—and what would the inventors of the alphabet have to say about that?—we’ve definitely lost the sight of the original purpose of the alphabet, to simplify writing and make it easier to learn and do.

But it’s not the alphabet’s fault really. At the heart of modern people’s problems with writing in English is the strange misfortune that our spelling has not been comprehensively revised for centuries. So, we can’t blame the alphabet itself but our own tendency not to reform the way we deploy it, not only the shape and order of its letters but their application in writing as well. Our reluctance to renovate this long-standing tradition in our society is what leaves us in such dyer straights—I mean “dire straits”?

Yet, conservatism is a hallmark of the alphabet’s nature. History certainly documents that much. If that weren’t true and the alphabet didn’t constitute so basic an element of our culture, we could easily eliminate much of the confusion in spelling, for example, taking out either C or K and having only one way of writing the hard c-sound. But it doesn’t seem very likely we’ll ever be able to do that—in fakt, one kould kall it klose to inkonkeivable to akkomplish!—because both the letters and the ways we use them are too deeply entrenched in our civilization today.

The result is a cacophony of sound symbols, a confused writing system chock-full of archaic spellings like “knight,” originally pronounced “kuh-nee-guh-tuh” which might have been fine for Chaucer but not for anyone alive now. To that can be added a long litany of lost consonants—gnat, gnaw, folk, would, aisle, eight—all pronounced at one time but now the fossil imprints of defunct phonemes. Multiply that with foreign borrowings like buffet and chutzpah which bring with them exotic letter clusters (-et = –ay) or foreign sounds (ch– = guttural) and the situation comes close to untenable. All in all, nothing says absurdity quite like garbage: one word, two g’s, and each pronounced differently.

In fact, spelling in English has reached such a pitch of insanity certain sounds are expressed with a ludicrous array of letter configurations. For instance, the /sh/ sound can be represented at least eight different ways in English: shoe, sugar, passion, ambition, ocean, champagne, Confucius, and Sean . The long-o sound shows up in as many manifestations, too: go, beau, boat, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot. Worse yet, even the simplest words aren’t consistent in their spelling. Consider four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, but forty. They all sound the same, so what happened to the u in forty?

This astounding and needless confusion has inspired many an attempt at reform. Among those who have attempted to revise English spelling are some of the most notable exponents of our language ever: Noah Webster, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Carnegie and Brigham Young. But all these influential voices have run up against one impassable obstacle: which pronunciation is one to use in revising the spelling of words?

Take girl, for instance. To which spelling do we “correct” it: gal (American dialect), goil (New York), gull (Irish), gel (London), gill (South African) or gairull (Scottish)? Because alphabets are tied to pronunciation, spelling accordingly fragments as languages break up into dialects. And even if we could come up with a quick and ready solution for our pressing literal woes, changing times would demand revisions in spelling almost as soon as repairs had been effected. That’s the disadvantage of using a writing system based on spoken language, the dark counterpart to its great advantage, how easy it is to learn.

Except, it’s not easy to learn, not any more at least. If we go without revising English spelling much longer, the letter forms will have so little affinity with the sound of words we speak, the alphabet might as well be an ideographic system. We claim, for instance, it’s easier to learn to write alphabetically than memorize all the characters a Chinese student has to but, with a century or two more of disjunction in spelling and sound, it won’t be. And even as it is, most English-speaking adults have yet to master our incomprehensable spelling completely. Or is that incomprehensible?

And how complex is the Chinese writing system really? There, every word is a separate symbol, each based on about 212 fundamental radicals (basic forms). More complicated ideas employ a combination of symbols, such as “eye” + “water” = “teardrop,” or a sign with two symbols for “women” means “quarrel,” and with three it means “gossip.” Though there are around fifty thousand symbols total, only four thousand are in common use because the combination of symbols allows the system to reach out broadly across the continuum of thought.

Chinese

Typing Chinese is, granted, a nightmare. The best typists manage about ten words a minute, and the old mechanical typewriters were comical to observe in use, so long that typists had to run up and down the keyboard, literally. And Chinese dictionaries are hard to organize, too, since how do you alphabetize words when there’s no alphabet? Needless to say, there are no Chinese crossword puzzles, Scrabble® or Morse code.

But in spite of all that, the Chinese system offers some enormous advantages, such as not having to be modified according to changes in dialect or as spoken language evolves. Actually, in some respects Chinese writing hasn’t had to evolve at all, no more at least than our form (“star”) which is represented today by an asterisk (*, literally “little star” in Greek), a symbol which has remained essentially the same since the time of ancient Babylon. Not only that but the ideographic system used in China can be understood any place the system is known, even where spoken language isn’t. Thus, the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, who would hardly understand a single spoken work today, would be able to read many parts of a modern newspaper. His Western counterpart, Socrates, who lived more than a millennium after Confucius, would be totally at sea in print or conversation.

All this raises the difficult question of whether or not we should perhaps entertain the idea of adopting an ideographic scheme of writing like the one the Chinese employ, and give up on seeking ways to revise the alphabetic system we currently employ. Alphabets inherently bring with them such profound problems—archaisms like “knight,” confrontations between what’s said and what’s written like “girl/gal/goil,” letters with multiple values like the g‘s in garbage, various ways of construing the same sound like /sh/ (ocean, notion, passion, fashion, etc.) and, worst of all, a tendency toward traditionalism which obstructs even the most fundamental and necessary revisions—it seems impossible to come up with a solution that will have any general applicability or appeal. And given the “great men” who have tried, I doubt we ever will. So, in the end, we have to ask: ABC?

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The Phoenician abjad – the ancestor of almost all scripts in use today (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Today, literacy has become near universal with the global literacy rate around 85 percent. Even the minority who remain illiterate are likely to be aware of the existence of written language (and their exclusion from its benefits). Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of humanity and dates from the 19^th century, with literacy rates steadily increasing over the past 200 years. Before then, literacy was restricted to a tiny elite in those societies where literacy existed and there were many societies that were not familiar with written language at all.

Can you image living in a society that does not have any writing? Why and how would anyone in such a society invent writing?

Inventing writing by imitation

Most writing systems that have been invented through the ages took inspiration from another writing system: the Latin alphabet was inspired by the Greek alphabet; the Greek alphabet was inspired by the Phoenician abjad; the Phoenician abjad was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs. In another line of transmission, the Phoenician abjad (which, with the exception of the Chinese script, is the ancestor of all writing systems in use today) also inspired the Old Hebrew script (ca. 1000 BCE), which inspired the Aramaic script, which inspired the Syriac script (ca. 500 CE), which inspired the Sogdian script, which inspired the Uighur script (ca. 800 CE), which inspired the Mongolian script (1200 CE).

The details of most of these relationships of inspiration and imitation are lost in history and must be credited to anonymous traders, missionaries, or soldiers. Individual inventors of a writing system are rare exceptions, such as King Sejong, who invented the Korean script. King Sejong took inspiration from the Chinese script.

Creating a new writing system for a language by drawing on an existing model from another language, as King Sejong did for Korean, is undoubtedly an enormous achievement. However, it pales in comparison to the achievement of those inventors who created writing from scratch, at a time when writing did not exist anywhere else in their known world.

Why was writing invented?

Proto-Cuneiform tablet, ca. 3000 BCE (Image credit: Metmuseum)

Living in a highly literate society, it is tempting to imagine that those first inventors wanted to write down stories and transmit them to posterity. Unfortunately, you’d be mistaken. The transmission of stories worked really well orally. Our ancestors had much better memories than we have (and how literacy has affected our brains is another story), as is evidenced from the great epics or the extensive Aboriginal Dreamtime stories that were transmitted orally over thousands of years.

This means that in a preliterate society no one had any need to write down the knowledge that was encoded in stories, myths, legends, or genealogies. And we can be sure that no one just thought one day, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could write down spoken language?”

Writing is a technology that emerged together with urbanization. The first city states constituted a new form of social organization that created specific problems of record keeping: how to account for the surplus created by agriculture and trade, and the activities it resulted in. As humans founded city states and empires, practical problems such as these arose: How much arable land is there? How many heads of cattle can be kept on a particular plot of land? How much tax should be extracted from a farming household of a particular composition? How can we be sure that Farmer So-and-so has already paid his taxes and does not just say they paid? How many slaves need to be captured to build a new temple? How many soldiers need to be kept in the army to protect the city, and how much provisions and equipment will they need to invade the next city down the river and incorporate it into one’s kingdom?

Not necessarily pretty questions that inspired writing invention! Writing was not invented for some lofty intellectual pursuits but as a technology of power. Writing was invented as a means of record keeping. It is an information technology that emerged in the domains of state administration and bureaucracy, trade and commerce, and religion.

Early writing had little to do with language and everything to do with keeping a quantitative record of something. Think of it this way: our writing-inventing ancestors needed spreadsheets. It was only over time that these “spreadsheets” became writing: a visual form of language associated with a particular spoken language.

Who invented writing?

In fact, not all “spreadsheet systems” became fully-fledged writing systems. So, who invented writing? The answer you’re probably familiar with is: the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. That’s true but it’s not the whole story because writing was invented multiple times, in response to social developments similar to those I outlined above.

Mayan glyphs (Image credit: Ancient History Encyclopedia)

To the best of our knowledge, writing was invented independently at least three times: Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia (ca. 3400 BCE), Chinese characters in China (ca. 1200 BCE) and Mayan glyphs in Mesoamerica (ca. 300 BCE). Of these, only the Chinese script is an unbroken living tradition.

I’m saying “at least three times” because it may well have been more often. Our knowledge is limited in three ways.

First, the archeological record is incomplete and only the most durable early writing (pressed in clay or chiseled in stone) has survived while the record for less durable materials (drawn on paper, velum or bark in natural colors, scratched in bone) has disintegrated and only accidental fragments may or may not have survived.

Second, the relationship between different writing systems is unclear. For instance, there is debate whether Egyptian hieroglyphs (the earliest of which date back to ca. 3250 BCE) constitute an independent invention or were inspired by Sumerian cuneiform. Similar uncertainties exist related to the Indus Valley script (ca. 2600 BCE) or Linear B from the island of Crete in Greece (ca. 1450 BCE).

Third, the history of writing has largely been written by Europeans and is embedded in colonial epistemologies. This limits our knowledge in various ways.

These limitations are well illustrated by our scant knowledge of Mayan writing. To begin with very little research efforts are dedicated to that striking writing system, which only survives in a small number of stone inscriptions and four book manuscripts. This small number is not only due to natural degradation but is the result of active destruction by the Spanish colonizers. “We burned them all”, as Bishop Diego de Landa reported in 1566. Not only the products of Mayan writing were destroyed but transmission was suppressed and eventually knowledge of Mayan writing disappeared.

Deciphering ancient scripts became a European passion in the 18^th and 19^th century. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822 and the German scholars Karsten Niebuhr Georg Friedrich Grotefend deciphered Sumerian cuneiform in 1837. These developments created a lot of excitement and working on ancient documents became all the range in certain academic circles. However, interest in Mayan glyphs remained limited. Partly this was due to the fact that documents written in that script were far less accessible to European scholars than Middle Eastern documents. But it was also due to the fact that – in yet another colonial way of seeing – they thought the glyphs weren’t really a script and just some non-linguistic code. Mayan glyphs were only deciphered in the late 20^th century by US scholar David Stuart, drawing on work by Russian scholars Yuri Knorosov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.

In the end, not even a topic as seemingly straightforward as the invention of writing has a single story.

Want to learn more?

If you want to find out how our clever ancestors turned their “spreadsheet proto-writing” into visual language, head over to Youtube to listen to my lecture about “The invention of writing” (36:23 mins)

If you don’t have that kind of time, “The invention of writing” also exists as a Twitter thread.

Listen up, boys and girls, because I’m going to tell you the story of the greatest inventors of all times: the inventors of #writing

Can you imagine a world without writing? No writing on screens, no writing on paper, no writing on stone, no writing on clay tables, nothing … pic.twitter.com/9SDjQWONeh

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

Although the content of these three versions is largely the same and although all three versions have the same author, myself, the “story” changes even within these narrow parameters of identical topic and author. Can you spot the differences? How does content and presentation change across the written, spoken, and digital formats? And, with it, how does your learning experience and response change? What are the affordances and limitations of each medium?