Writing
Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language c. 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man (c. 50,000-30,000 BCE) which appear to express concepts concerning daily life. These images suggest a language because, in some instances, they seem to tell a story (say, of a hunting expedition in which specific events occurred) rather than being simply pictures of animals and people.
Written language, however, does not emerge until its invention in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. 3500 -3000 BCE. This early writing was called cuneiform and consisted of making specific marks in wet clay with a reed implement. The writing system of the Egyptians was already in use before the rise of the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150 BCE) and is thought to have developed from Mesopotamian cuneiform (though this theory is disputed) and came to be known as heiroglyphics.
The phoenetic writing systems of the Greeks («phoenetic» from the Greek phonein – «to speak clearly»), and later the Romans, came from Phoenicia. The Phoenician writing system, though quite different from that of Mesopotamia, still owes its development to the Sumerians and their advances in the written word. Independently of the Near East or Europe, writing was developed in Mesoamerica by the Maya c. 250 CE with some evidence suggesting a date as early as 500 BCE and, also independently, by the Chinese.
Writing & History
Writing in China developed from divination rites using oracle bones c. 1200 BCE and appears to also have arisen independently as there is no evidence of cultural transference at this time between China and Mesopotamia. The ancient Chinese practice of divination involved etching marks on bones or shells which were then heated until they cracked. The cracks would then be interpreted by a Diviner. If that Diviner had etched Next Tuesday it will rain' andNext Tuesday it will not rain’ the pattern of the cracks on the bone or shell would tell him which would be the case. In time, these etchings evolved into the Chinese script.
History is impossible without the written word as one would lack context in which to interpret physical evidence from the ancient past. Writing records the lives of a people and so is the first necessary step in the written history of a culture or civilization. A prime example of this problem is the difficulty scholars of the late 19th/early 20th centuries CE had in understanding the Maya Civilization, in that they could not read the glyphs of the Maya and so wrongly interpreted much of the physical evidence they excavated. The early explorers of the Maya sites, such as Stephens and Catherwood, believed they had found evidence of an ancient Egyptian civilization in Central America.
This same problem is evident in understanding the ancient Kingdom of Meroe (in modern day Sudan), whose Meroitic Script is yet to be deciphered as well as the so-called Linear A script of the ancient Minoan culture of Crete which also has yet to be understood.
The Invention of Writing
The Sumerians first invented writing as a means of long-distance communication which was necessitated by trade. With the rise of the cities in Mesopotamia, and the need for resources which were lacking in the region, long-distance trade developed and, with it, the need to be able to communicate across the expanses between cities or regions.
The earliest form of writing was pictographs – symbols which represented objects – and served to aid in remembering such things as which parcels of grain had gone to which destination or how many sheep were needed for events like sacrifices in the temples. These pictographs were impressed onto wet clay which was then dried, and these became official records of commerce. As beer was a very popular beverage in ancient Mesopotamia, many of the earliest records extant have to do with the sale of beer. With pictographs, one could tell how many jars or vats of beer were involved in a transaction but not necessarily what that transaction meant.
In order to express concepts more complex than financial transactions or lists of items, a more elaborate writing system was required, and this was developed in the Sumerian city of Uruk c. 3200 BCE. Pictograms, though still in use, gave way to phonograms – symbols which represented sounds – and those sounds were the spoken language of the people of Sumer. With phonograms, one could more easily convey precise meaning and so, in the example of the two sheep and the temple of Inanna, one could now make clear whether the sheep were going to or coming from the temple, whether they were living or dead, and what role they played in the life of the temple. Previously, one had only static images in pictographs showing objects like sheep and temples. With the development of phonograms one had a dynamic means of conveying motion to or from a location.
Writing & Literature
This new means of communication allowed scribes to record the events of their times as well as their religious beliefs and, in time, to create an art form which was not possible before the written word: literature. The first writer in history known by name is the Mesopotamian priestess Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who wrote her hymns to the goddess Inanna and signed them with her name and seal.
The so-called Matter of Aratta, four poems dealing with King Enmerkar of Uruk and his son Lugalbanda, were probably composed between 2112-2004 BCE (though only written down between 2017-1763 BCE). In the first of them, Enmerkar and The Lord of Aratta, it is explained that writing developed because the messenger of King Enmerkar, going back and forth between him and the King of the city of Aratta, eventually had too much to remember and so Enmerkar had the idea to write his messages down; and so writing was born.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the first epic tale in the world and among the oldest extant literature, was composed at some point earlier than c. 2150 BCE when it was written down and deals with the great king of Uruk (and descendent of Enmerkar and Lugalbanda) Gilgamesh and his quest for the meaning of life. The myths of the people of Mesopotamia, the stories of their gods and heroes, their history, their methods of building, of burying their dead, of celebrating feast days, were now all able to be recorded for posterity. Writing made history possible because now events could be recorded and later read by any literate individual instead of relying on a community’s storyteller to remember and recite past events.
So important was writing to the Mesopotamians that, under the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (r. 685-627 BCE) over 30,000 clay tablet books were collected in the library of his capital at Nineveh. Ashurbanipal was hoping to preserve the heritage, culture, and history of the region and understood clearly the importance of the written word in achieving this end. Among the many books in his library, Ashurbanipal included works of literature, such as the tale of Gilgamesh or the story of Etana, because he realized that literature articulates not just the story of a certain people, but of all people.
The Alphabet
The role of the poet in preserving heroic legends would become an important one in cultures throughout the ancient world. The Mesopotamian scribe Shin-Legi-Unninni (wrote 1300-1000 BCE) would help preserve and transmit The Epic of Gilgamesh. Homer (c. 800 BCE) would do the same for the Greeks and Virgil (70-19 BCE) for the Romans. The Indian epic Mahabharata (written down c. 400 BCE) preserves the oral legends of that region in the same way the tales and legends of Scotland and Ireland do. All of these works, and those which came after them, were only made possible through the advent of writing.
The early cuneiform writers established a system which would completely change the nature of the world in which they lived. The past, and the stories of the people, could now be preserved through writing. The Phoenicians‘ contribution of the alphabet made writing easier and more accessible to other cultures, but the basic system of putting symbols down on paper to represent words and concepts began much earlier.
Early writing systems, imported to other cultures, evolved into the written language of those cultures so that the Greek and Latin would serve as the basis for European script in the same way that the Semitic Aramaic script would provide the basis for Hebrew, Arabic, and possibly Sanskrit. The materials of writers have evolved as well, from the cut reeds with which early Mesopotamian scribes marked the clay tablets of cuneiform to the reed pens and papyrus of the Egyptians, the parchment of the scrolls of the Greeks and Romans, the calligraphy of the Chinese, on through the ages to the present day of computerized composition and the use of processed paper.
In whatever age, since its inception, writing has served to communicate the thoughts and feelings of the individual and of that person’s culture, their collective history, and their experiences with the human condition, and to preserve those experiences for future generations.
Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/writing/
Who invented 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?
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.
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 18th and 19th 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 20th century by US scholar David Stuart, drawing on work by Russian scholars Yuri Knorosov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff.
Source: https://www.languageonthemove.com/who-invented-writing/
Why did humans start writing?
We travel back to the ancient Middle East, to look at why, over 5,000 years ago, we first came to write.
While not all human cultures have needed to develop writing, we appear to have been using signs to communicate with each other, or simply to help remember things, for tens of thousands of years. In ancient times we find engraved or painted marks on the walls of human dwellings, portable objects and mnemonic devices. And today, we engage in similar mark-making.
People developed writing to communicate across time and space, carrying it with them as they traded, migrated and conquered. From its first uses for counting and naming things and communicating beyond the grave, humans have altered and enriched writing to reflect their complicated needs and desires.
Keeping count
It has been argued that writing in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) grew from a counting system of clay tokens used to record transactions of goods. The goods represented were inferred by the shape of the tokens: spheres, cones and discs stood for measurements of grain, while cylinders stood for livestock. This counting system was used from 7500 BC onwards across the Fertile Crescent, from the Mediterranean coast down to the Persian Gulf.[1]
Around 3350 BC we find simple tokens supplemented by more complex ones with incised marks inside a temple complex of Inanna (the goddess of love), situated in Uruk, one of the most important cities in Mesopotamia.
Tokens were sometimes stored in clay ‘envelope’ balls: the tokens inside were impressed into the damp clay of the envelope so that the contents might remain known even when the ball was sealed. Eventually, the tokens were replaced by the signs made by their impressions onto the clay balls, or tablets.
However, whereas simple tokens could be pressed into the surface and easily recognised, complex tokens with their incised patterns could not be so clearly distinguished. So their shape and markings were drawn directly onto the surface of the clay ball or tablet with a cut reed.
Naming and claiming
From around 2900 BC onwards, temple scribes in Mesopotamia appear to have begun recording the names of individuals featured in their transactions. Compared to simple account-keeping of things coming and going, registering names presented a new challenge. Some of the names would have contained complicated sounds that were not represented by their current writing system.
In order to overcome this, they extended their use of some of their signs from their basic semantic value, to represent their sound value too. This principle could work especially well in Sumerian (the language spoken in Sumer, Southern Mesopotamia) as it contained an unusually high number of homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings.
Using a sign such as a circle that originally stood for an object like the sun, to stand in addition for the word ‘son’, is a concept that we call the rebus principle. Rebus in Latin means ‘by things’ so the meaning here is that sounds can now be represented by pictograms or pictures of things.
If we applied the principal today to a surname like Sontag we could write the name using a circular disc and then add a drawing of a label for ‘tag’, and we could pronounce the whole word by ‘reading’ just two symbols. It was a kind of visual game of punning, but it represented an important cognitive flip.
Speaking beyond the grave
Evidence from the royal tombs of Ur dating from between 2700 and 2600 BC shows that writing was extended to a new use, with phonetic signs now being engraved in objects: precious golden bowls, statues and the grave goods of the dead. This new context for inscriptions brought other factors into play.
Sumerians believed in an afterlife, but it was a grim, dark and dusty place. The worst fate was to be forgotten by those alive in the world above. There were monthly ceremonies where the dead were remembered, fed with offerings and most significantly, their names were spoken aloud. This pronouncing of the name of the deceased saved them from oblivion; it gave them a satisfactory afterlife.
The fact that a king and queen were now sent into that afterlife with bowls, lamps and lapis lazuli seals that had the phonetic symbols for their names engraved on them for all perpetuity meant that funerary goods had become eloquent: they spoke their owners’ names. Perhaps they could accomplish even more than that though?
Between 2600 and 2500 BC funerary statues inscribed with their owners’ names also began to include more extended phonetic writing including short prayers and titles. It has been suggested that it was in the context of funerary rituals – where sound and spoken words carry special weight – that writing first became really important as a vehicle for recording speech and not just a system of marks that signified certain objects or numbers.[1]
The script continued to evolve. From around 2900 BC, pictograms had begun to become more stylised, leading to the cuneiform writing system.
Source: https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/why-did-humans-start-writing
Where did writing begin?
From Mesopotamia to the Americas, discover how different regions around the world adopted writing at different times and for different reasons.
Full writing-systems appear to have been invented independently at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, and shortly afterwards in Egypt at around 3200 BC. By 1300 BC we have evidence of a fully operational writing system in late Shang-dynasty China. Sometime between 900 and 600 BC writing also appears in the cultures of Mesoamerica.
There are also several places such as the Indus River valley and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) where writing may have been invented but it remains undeciphered.
Although these dates suggest that writing could have spread out from one central point of origin, there is little evidence of any links between these systems, with each possessing unique qualities.
Mesopotamian origins
Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.
From 2900 BC, these began to be impressed in wet clay with a reed stylus, making wedge-shaped marks which are now known as cuneiform.
The process of writing cuneiform stabilised over the next 600 years. Curves were eliminated, signs simplified and the direct connection between the look of pictograms and their original object of reference was lost.
Sometime during this same period, the symbols – which were initially read from top to bottom – came to be read from left to right in horizontal lines (vertical alignments were kept for more traditional pronouncements). In keeping with this, the symbols were also realigned, rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.
Eventually, in 2340 BC, Sumer fell to the armies of Sargon, King of the Akkadians, a northern Semitic people who had previously co-existed with the Sumerians. By this time, cuneiform had, for several centuries, been used bilingually to write Akkadian too. Sargon, the latest in a line of expansive Akkadian leaders, built an Empire that ran from present day Lebanon down to ‘the nether sea’ (the Persian Gulf). Eventually, as many as 15 languages would use cuneiform-inspired characters.
Sumerian lingered on as the language of learning until at least 200 BC. Cuneiform, the system invented to record it, however, outlived it by almost three centuries: it lasted as a writing system for other languages well into the Christian era. The last datable document in cuneiform is an astronomical text from 75 AD.
Egypt
New discoveries have pushed back the date for writing in Egypt close to that of Mesopotamia. Discoveries of large-scale incised ceremonial scenes at the rock art site of El-Khawy in Egypt date to around 3250 BC. They show features similar to early hieroglyphic forms. Some of these rock-carved signs are nearly half a metre in height.
From 3200 BC onwards Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared on small ivory tablets used as labels for grave goods in the tomb of the pre-dynastic King Scorpion at Abydos and on ceremonial surfaces used for grinding cosmetics, such as the Narmer Palette.
Writing in ink using reed brushes and pens is first found in Egypt. This ink writing came to be known in Greek as hieratic (‘priestly’ script), whilst the carved and painted letters we see on monuments are called hieroglyphs (‘sacred carvings’).
Carved and written characters are close in date. This suggests that from the earliest times, writing in Egypt had two functions: one was ceremonial, a display script (carved), the other was in the service of royal and temple administrations (written).
Within four centuries of the finds in King Scorpion’s tomb, hieroglyphs and Hieratic (a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian) developed a full range of characters. This included:
24 uni-consonantal symbols (an ‘alphabet’ containing various consonants only)
phonetic components representing combinations of sounds
determinative signs (signs with no phonetic value, used only to determine which of several alternative meanings for a word is meant in a particular context).
It is from this Egyptian writing that an alphabet would first evolve, sometime from 1850 BC onwards.
China
The earliest examples of writing in China were found near present-day Anyang, on a tributary of the Yellow River, 500km south of Beijing. Here, the kings of the late Shang dynasty (1300–1050 BC) had founded their capital and carried out divination rituals using animal bones.
For centuries, fragments of bones had been found by farmers and sold for use in Chinese medicine as ‘dragon bones’. It was not until 1899 that politician and scholar Wang Yirong (1845–1900) recognised characters carved into the surface of some of these bones and realised their significance. As the earliest written records of Chinese civilization found to date, these inscriptions extended Chinese historical and linguistic knowledge by several centuries.
These ‘oracle’ bones (the shoulder blades of oxen and turtle plastrons) record questions that were posed to the royal ancestors about topics as diverse as crop rotation, warfare, childbirth and even toothache. To date, nearly 150,000 examples of such bones have been found, containing over 4,500 different symbols, many of which can be identified as the ancestors of Chinese characters still in use today.
But Shang readers would not be able to read present-day Chinese and the majority of the characters on the oracle bones remain undeciphered. Even the characters that can be identified have evolved considerably in terms of their function and form. Not only did pictographic characters become gradually more abstract, but as the written vocabulary expanded, more compound forms developed.
Basic components were shared between characters to reflect similarities in pronunciation or meaning. In this way, since ancient times, Chinese characters have been able to represent both concepts and the sounds of spoken language to varying degrees.
The bones show a fully developed writing system which must have been formed many years – perhaps centuries – earlier, although earlier materials have not yet been discovered and may not have survived.
Mesoamerica
Recent discoveries have pushed the evidence for writing in this area – which runs from southern Mexico to Costa Rica – close to 900 BC.
The discoveries have also widened the range of cultures and languages that we know used writing from the Maya, Mixtecs and Aztecs to include the earlier Olmecs and Zapotecs.
There were two types of writing systems in pre-colonial Mesoamerica:
- Open systems were means of recording texts that were not linked to the grammatical and sound structures of specific languages. They functioned as mnemonic devices, guiding readers through the narratives of texts without relying on the linguistic background of the given audience. These were common among the Aztecs and other Mexica communities of central Mexico.
- Closed systems were tied to the sound and grammatical structures of specific languages. These were targeted at particular linguistic communities and functioned similarly to the writing we know today. Examples of these closed systems can be found among the Maya.
The position of scribe was of high status. Maya artists were often younger sons of the royal family. The Keepers of the Holy Books, the highest scribal office, acted as librarians, historians, genealogists, tribute recorders, marriage arrangers, masters of ceremonies, and astronomers.
Just four Maya books survive from the pre-colonial period and fewer than 20 from the entire region. These codices are painted onto deer skin and tree bark, the writing surface coated (as were many of the buildings) with a polished lime paste or gesso.
Indus River valley (Pakistan and northwest India)
In the Indus River valley of Pakistan and northwest India, symbols have been found on objects that may be writing. The society that used these symbols was the culmination of a historical settlement in the Indus region that goes back to at least 7000 BC. A high urban culture flourished for 700 years, between 2600 and 1900 BC, at which point the cities declined.
Although we have about 5,000 known inscribed artefacts and the longest inscription consists of 26 symbols, most are just three or four signs long.
The 400 unique symbols that have been identified are too low in number for a viable logographic word-based writing system. This number of characters is similar to that found in pre-dynastic Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Sumerian script. Scholars have therefore suggested that like these two systems, the Indus River Valley script may contain a mixture of logographic and syllabic components.
Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Polynesia)
Around two dozen wooden tablets inscribed with glyphs were discovered on Rapa Nui in the 19th century. Rongorongo, a term the Rapa Nui themselves applied to these objects, was interpreted by missionaries at that time to mean ‘lines incised for chanting out’. But knowledge of how to use the tablets had already been lost by that time.
The characters reflect human, animal and plant motifs. There are 120 elementary (un-joined) glyphs, which have been used to write texts as long as 2,320 characters and as short as just two.
Whether rongorongo is purely a mnemonic device or a system of logographic and syllabic symbols remains an open question, as does its claim to be a unique sixth point of origin for a writing system.
Source: https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/where-did-writing-begin
Where Did Writing Come From?
Archaeological discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly modern Iraq) show the initial power and purpose of writing, from administrative and legal functions to poetry and literature.
Mesopotamia was a region comprising many cultures over time speaking different languages. The earliest known writing was invented there around 3400 B.C. in an area called Sumer near the Persian Gulf. The development of a Sumerian script was influenced by local materials: clay for tablets and reeds for styluses (writing tools). At about the same time, or a little later, the Egyptians were inventing their own form of hieroglyphic writing.
Even after Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 B.C., it survived as a scholarly language and script. Other peoples within and near Mesopotamia, from Turkey, Syria, and Egypt to Iran, adopted the later version of this script developed by the Akkadians (the first recognizable Semitic people), who succeeded the Sumerians as rulers of Mesopotamia. In Babylonia itself, the script survived for two more millennia until its demise around 70 C.E.
Writing began with pictographs (picture words) drawn into clay with a pointed tool. This early administrative tablet was used to record food rations for people, shown by a person’s head and bowl visible on the lower left side. Pictographs and numbers show amounts of grain allotted to cities and types of workers, including pig herders and groups associated with a religious festival.
Tablets like these helped local leaders organize, manage, and archive information. This tablet reflects bureaucratic accounting, but similar lists were used in the following centuries by individuals to keep track of personal property and business agreements.
From Pictures to Writing in Everyday Life
Writing evolved when someone decided to replace the pointed drawing tool with a triangular reed stylus. The reed could be pressed easily and quickly into clay to make wedges. At first, the wedges were grouped to make pictures, but slowly the groups evolved into more abstract signs and became the sophisticated script we call cuneiform (“wedge-shaped” in Latin). About one thousand signs represented the names of objects and also stood for words, syllables, and sounds (or parts of them).
Cuneiform records provide information about bureaucracy and authority, but they also document many fascinating aspects of daily life. Written texts reveal how individuals and families expressed their wishes, married and had children, did business, and worshipped. People wrote mainly on clay, but also on more expensive materials such as the golden plaque shown above.
In this clay marriage contract, which includes an oath to the chief god of Kish where the marriage would have taken place, a father gives his daughter to her new husband. In turn the husband pays a bride-price of silver to three men, perhaps her brothers. The document is enclosed in a clay envelope. Witnesses each rolled personal seals, inscribed cylinders like small rolling pins, across the left side of the envelope to impress a form of signature in relief.
Cylinder Seals as Signatures on Clay
To sign a clay document and sometimes to guarantee that it was officially closed, Mesopotamians used seals, mostly of durable and sometimes expensive materials. Many could be worn or pinned on like jewelry.
The cylinder seal above is inscribed with the name of a palace baker. He shows himself standing before an important seated divinity, being introduced by a lesser goddess. In the impression made by rolling the seal, you can see the text and first standing figure start to repeat on the right side.
Seals required special care. Image and text were reversed when pressed into clay, so on the seal a scribe and artist had to create mirror images and inscriptions. In addition, writing on hard materials required totally different techniques from writing directly on clay.
Who Wrote Cuneiform?
Professional writers of cuneiform were called “tablet writers”—scribes. In slow stages of schooling, they learned hundreds of cuneiform signs and memorized texts and templates in different languages. Most were men, but some women could become scribes.
Students’ interests and skills varied, and a proverb noted: “A disgraced scribe becomes a man of magical spells.” This was a pointed reminder that less-committed students might end up making an uncertain living writing common incantations. Working harder could lead to a prosperous life composing legal documents—or even writing correspondence for a royal court. Those who persevered could become scholars with knowledge of mathematics, medicine, religious ritual, divination, laws, and mythology, or even authors of literature.
This tablet is one of more than 20 similar tablets (nicknamed “Schooldays”) that present the life of a young student in a scribal school. The days were long, filled with copying and memorizing. Older scribes oversaw these efforts, while the school was led by a headmaster.
On this day the boy feels successful, but on the next, his teachers repeatedly beat him for infractions such as tardiness, talking, and poor handwriting. In the end, the boy’s father invites the headmaster to dinner and gives him gifts and money. Appeased (and bought off, although such payments may have been expected), the headmaster declares to the boy: “You have carried out well the school’s activities. You are a man of learning!”
Many people may have learned the basics of reading and writing, including royals. The first known author was Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon, king of Akkad, the first king to conquer all of Mesopotamia. She was a priestess who composed religious poetry. Later, the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal praised his own literacy and scholarship. He is sometimes shown in royal art with a writing stylus stuck in his belt.
Although cuneiform endured for over three thousand years, as simpler alphabets became common the script was eventually used only for scholarly documents, and it faded away completely in the late-first century A.D. Within a few centuries, all understanding of the once-dominant writing was lost for about 1,800 years.
Source: https://www.getty.edu/news/where-did-writing-come-from/
History of writing systems
While spoken or signed language is a more or less universal human competence that has been characteristic of the species from the beginning and that is commonly acquired by human beings without systematic instruction, writing is a technology of relatively recent history that must be taught to each generation of children. Historical accounts of the evolution of writing systems have until recently concentrated on a single aspect, increased efficiency, with the Greek invention of the alphabet being regarded as the culmination of a long historical evolution. This efficiency is a product of a limited and manageable set of graphs that can express the full range of meanings in a language.
The Polish American Assyriologist Ignace Gelb distinguished four stages in this evolution, beginning with picture writing, which expressed ideas directly; followed by word-based writing systems; then by sound-based syllabic writing systems, including unvocalized syllabaries or consonantal systems; and concluding with the Greek invention of the alphabet.
The invention of the alphabet is a major achievement of Western culture. It is also unique; the alphabet was invented only once, though it has been borrowed by many cultures. It is a model of analytic thinking, breaking down perceptible qualities like syllables into more basic constituents. And because it is capable of conveying subtle differences in meaning, it has come to be used for the expression of a great many of the functions served by speech. The alphabet requires little of the reader beyond familiarity with its orthography. It allows the reader to decipher words newly encountered and permits the invention of spellings for new patterns of sound, including proper names (a problem that is formidable for nonalphabetic systems). Finally, its explicitness permits readers to make a relatively sharp distinction between the tasks of deciphering and interpreting. Less explicit orthographies require the reader first to grasp the meaning of a passage as a whole in order to decide which of several possible word meanings a particular graphic string represents.
It must be remembered, however, that efficiency depends not only on the nature of the writing system but also on the functions required of it by its users, for orthographies are invented to serve particular cultural purposes. Furthermore, an orthography invented to satisfy one purpose may acquire new applications. For instance, writing systems invented to serve mnemonic purposes were subsequently elaborated and used for communicative and archival purposes. Orthographies were not invented as art forms, but, once invented, they could serve aesthetic functions.
Notions of explicitness of representation depend on the morphophonemic structure of the language. An alphabet was a notable advance for representing the Greek language but not necessarily for representing a Semitic language. Moreover, for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which have simple syllabic structures and a great number of homophones, a writing system that depended on phonological structure, such as a syllabary or an alphabet, would be extremely inefficient. It is with such factors in mind that late 20th-century accounts of writing systems stressed how many different orthographies may function efficiently, given the particular language they are used to represent. Just as linguists have abandoned the notion of progressive evolution of languages, with some languages ranking as more primitive than others, so historians of writing have come to treat existing orthographies as appropriate to the languages they represent.
Nonetheless, all contemporary orthographies have a history of development, and there are many common features in these histories. It is unlikely that writing was invented only once and then borrowed by different cultural groups. While all Western writing systems may be traced back to the beginnings of symbol making in Sumer, there is no reason to believe that Asian writing systems were borrowed from the Sumerian form. Consequently, there are two quite separate histories of writing, that of the writing system developed by the Sumerians and that of the one developed by the Chinese.
Sumerian writing
The outline of the development of the Sumerian writing system has been worked out by paleographers. It has long been known that the earliest writing system in the world was Sumerian script, which in its later stages was known as cuneiform. The earliest stages of development are still a matter of much speculation based on fragmentary evidence. The French American archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, building on a hypothesis advanced by the Assyriologist Pierre Amiet of the Louvre, demonstrated a series of small steps leading from the use of tokens for simple bookkeeping purposes to the development of written tablets on which graphs of the script stand for morphemes of spoken Sumerian. Archaeologists have discovered in lower Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) large numbers of small, distinctively shaped clay objects. These are thought to date back to as early as 8000 BCE, about the time that hunter-gatherer societies were giving way to an agricultural way of life. A greatly elaborated set of these clay shapes—some shaped like jars and some like various animals and occasionally inserted in clay envelopes—dates from 3500 BCE, about the time of the rise of cities. Some of the envelopes have markings that correspond to the clay shapes inside. Moreover, these markings are more or less similar to the shapes drawn on clay tablets that date back to about 3100 BCE and that are unambiguously related to the Sumerian language. These markings are thought to constitute a logographic form of writing consisting of some 1,200 different characters representing numerals, names, and such material objects as cloth and cow.
The theory advanced by Schmandt-Besserat to explain this transformation is that the clay shapes are tokens representing agricultural goods such as grain, sheep, and cattle and that they were used as a form of bookkeeping. The multiplication of types of tokens could correspond to the increase in the number of kinds of goods that were exchanged with the rise of urbanization in the 4th millennium BCE. Tokens placed in an envelope might have constituted a sort of “bill of lading” or a record of indebtedness. To serve as a reminder of the contents of the envelope so that every reader would not need to break open the envelope to read the contents, corresponding shapes were impressed upon the envelope. But if the content was marked on the envelope, there was no need to put the tokens in an envelope at all; the envelope could be flattened into a convenient surface and the shapes impressed on it. Now that there was no need for the tokens at all, their message was simply inscribed into the clay. These shapes, drawn in the wet clay with a reed stylus or a pointed stick, constituted the first writing.
The historical record is much more explicit after 3200 BCE and reveals clearly the stages involved in the evolution from a limited system of notation suitable for recording particular events into a full general-purpose orthography. Archaic Sumerian used mostly graphs representing numerals, names for objects, and names of persons. Graphs for numerals were geometric shapes, while those for objects were often stylized pictures of the things they represented. Yet the system was a genuine logographic writing system generally adequate to economic and administrative purposes. With the substitution of a blunt writing stylus for a pointed one, the symbols become less picturelike and more conventionalized. The writing system takes the name cuneiform from the shape of the strokes that form the symbols (from Latin cuneus, “wedge”).
The next major stage in the evolution of Sumerian writing was the adoption of the phonographic principle, the use of a sign to represent a common sound rather than a common meaning. For example, the graph representing “water” appears to have been used also to represent the locative suffix “in,” because the latter sounded the same as, or similar to, the word water. It is as if in English a person used the word ball to stand for a person named Bill on the grounds that it is easy to represent the ball with a circular graph while there is no obvious way to represent Bill, and the two words sound similar. The Sumerian script, however, remained primarily logographic and resorted to phonographic signs only when forced to, for representing unpicturable words and for distinguishing ambiguous graphs.
Sumerian script was adopted in the 3rd millennium BCE by the Akkadians, who greatly expanded the phonographic properties of the script. The Assyrians and the Babylonians, both speaking dialects of the Akkadian language, were responsible for most of the cuneiform writing in a form known today as Akkadian cuneiform.
Alphabetic systems
While cuneiform had many graphs that represented syllables, many syllables were not represented. The methods used for representing syllables that did not have distinctive graphs were quite unsystematic. The first writing system consistently based on the sound structure of a language was Linear B, a Mycenaean Greek orthography developed about 1400 BCE and deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, an English architect and cryptographer. The script is strictly syllabic; each consonant-vowel pair is given a distinctive graph. As an example, a set of syllables that an alphabetic system would represent with the consonant p plus a vowel are all represented in Linear B by different graphs. Although the script is highly systematic, it provides a limited representation of the phonology of Mycenaean Greek. Greek contains many syllables that are not simple consonant-vowel combinations, and not all consonantal sounds are followed by vowels. Linear B is thus an incomplete script for representing the phonological structures of the spoken language. Hence, there are usually several ways of reading a series of Linear B graphs, and a correct reading depends upon the reader’s knowing what the text is about.
The final stage in the evolution of writing systems was the discovery of the alphabetic principle, the procedure of breaking the syllable into its constituent consonantal and vowel sounds. (See also alphabet.) According to the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, “Most, and probably all, ‘alphabetic’ scripts derive from a single ancestor: the Semitic alphabet, created sometime in the 2nd millennium [BCE].” The Semitic script was invented by speakers of some Semitic language, possibly Phoenician, who lived in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Modern versions of Semitic script include the Hebrew script and the Arabic script. Their most prominent characteristic is that they have graphs for consonants but not for vowels.
The inventors of the Semitic orthography apparently took the acrophonic principle, that of representing sounds by pictures of things whose names begin with that sound, from Egyptian hieroglyphic, a form of writing not different in principle from Akkadian cuneiform. The hieroglyphic sign 
, depicting waves of water, represented the sound /n/, the first sound of the spoken word for water. By means of this principle a 22-graph system was constructed with a memorized order, beginning alef, bet, gimel, that was suitable for representing a full range of meanings. These graphs represented the consonants of the language, vowels remaining unrepresented. This fact has led some scholars, notably Gelb and Havelock, to claim that Semitic scripts are not true alphabets but rather unvocalized syllabaries. Other scholars, noting that the graphs represent consonants rather than syllables—for example, pa, pe, pi, po, and pu would all be represented by the same character—insist that the script is an alphabet. The controversy is circumvented by referring to Semitic scripts, following Sampson, as consonantal writing systems. While such a script would be greatly limited in explicitness or completeness for a language with complex syllable structure such as English, it is relatively complete for Semitic languages in which vowel differences are rarely contrastive.
To illustrate, the following oral forms have in common the three consonantal phonemes /k/, /t/, and /b/ with different vowel sounds interdigitated. The meanings all contain the root meaning “write,” and the vowel differences mark subject, tense, and aspect: katab ‘he wrote,’ katabi ‘I wrote,’ katebu ‘they wrote,’ ketob ‘write,’ koteb ‘writing,’ katub ‘being written.’ All are written simply ktb.
Because vowel sounds generally distinguish grammatical rather than lexical meaning, some Semitic writing systems never developed any device for representing them. This is not necessarily a flaw in the orthography. Indicating the vowels could cause some confusion for the reader because, instead of a single root, there would now be a multiplicity of written words, each reflecting a particular grammatical context. Nonetheless, ignoring the vowels does result in an orthography that is far from explicit or complete; many ambiguities in decoding remain. Consequently, some scripts, such as Hebrew, added matres lectionis, literally “mothers of reading,” a pointing system to distinguish the vowel sounds. These were used especially for preserving the precise reading of sacred texts. To this day they are used in books written to be read by beginning readers and in poetry and other writings of which the prior knowledge of the reader may not be sufficient to reduce the residual ambiguity.
The transition from consonantal writing to alphabetic writing, writing with full representation of both consonants and vowels, occurred when the Semitic script was adapted to the Greek language. This occurred about 1000–900 BCE. Scholars have traditionally considered the Greek invention as a stroke of genius. While not minimizing the significance of the Greek invention, it is now recognized that the invention of the alphabet was in fact the rather straightforward consequence of applying a script invented for representing one kind of language to a quite different kind.
The letters used by the Greeks to represent consonantal sounds were borrowed rather directly from the Semitic script. What was distinctive was that the Greeks used six of the Semitic letters, those that represented sounds that did not occur in Greek, to represent vowel sounds. Greek, like English, is an Indo-European language that uses vowel distinctions to make lexical contrasts. Moreover, words may consist simply of vowels, words may begin with vowels, and words with adjacent vowels are not uncommon. Such forms are rare in Semitic languages in which simple consonant-vowel syllable structures predominate and in which vowel differences usually mark only grammatical inflections. Sampson suggested that in the Semitic language some of the consonants that preceded a vowel sound may have been nonphonemic to the Greeks, who thus in hearing the syllable would have heard only a vowel corresponding to a vowel already prominent in the Greek language.
The Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet (along with many Greek words and much of Greek culture) to form the Roman, or Latin, alphabet. Written “learned” Latin was the language of state and of scholarship in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. Further developments of the alphabet resulted from changes in the phonology of Latin and of the Romance languages that evolved from it. For English, the differentiation of all the 26 letters was completed only in the 19th century.
While the invention of logographic writing, the later invention of the principle of phonetization, the analysis of syllables into a consonantal writing system, and the addition of vowels to make a full alphabet do constitute progress toward an efficient, economical, explicit, and complete writing system, this progress was not simply a matter of increasing insight. Advances resulted from attempts to apply a writing system invented for one language to another language for which it was not completely appropriate. Yet the accumulated discoveries yielded an analysis of deeper and deeper levels of linguistic structure of the type associated with discoveries in the natural sciences. For this reason, writing has almost always been the means not only for transcribing speech but also for uncovering its underlying structure. That is, to a large extent, writing is what has made people conscious of the properties of speech.
Observation of children learning to read and write an alphabetic orthography suggests that children pass through some of the same stages in interpreting the code that the writing system itself passed through in the course of its development. The youngest child’s hypothesis about writing is that words must be similar in some way to the objects they represent. Thus, at the earliest stage, children think that the word train must be represented by a long word because it is a long thing. Similarly, they think that two little pigs must be represented by two words, one for each pig, and so on. Later they invent the hypotheses that writing represents words rather than things and that these words are series of sounds. At this point children may write the word with a series of consonants: cat becomes kt. Only later do they recognize the alphabetic principle that words must be written with both consonants and vowels.
Yet the evolution of the alphabet, an invention of enormous importance for Greek and for all Indo-European languages, was of little use for Semitic languages, in which the vowels played a smaller role than in Greek. And it was of no use at all for Chinese, which is a monosyllabic language with a great many homophones.
Chinese writing
At about the time the Semitic alphabet was being developed, the Chinese were working on their very different writing system, one that best suited their language. Chinese is a language with clearly distinguished syllables, each of which corresponds to a meaningful unit, a morpheme. As it is an “isolating” language, rather than an inflected language like Latin or, to a lesser degree, English, each morpheme is represented separately by a separate syllable. Whereas in English one word (for example, make) yields, when inflected, a family of related words (make, makes, making, made, etc.), in Chinese one character would represent one morpheme (e.g., make). Because each morpheme is represented by a different character and because the number of morphemes in a language is far larger than the number of syllables, such a writing system needs an extremely large number of characters or graphs. For a more detailed history of writing in Chinese, see Chinese writing.
As mentioned above, the system that developed for Chinese is logographic: basically, symbols represent meaningful units of the language. As in cuneiform writing, simple signs based on pictures soon gave way to complex signs that included reference to sound. Still, a very large number of characters were needed, and by 1400 BCE the script included some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can be read to this day. To resolve the remaining problem of ambiguity, characters were modified so that sounds and meaning together could differentiate them. Although spoken Chinese continues to include many possible meanings for a given syllable, the written form became unambiguous. The correspondence between morpheme and graph resulted in about 40,000 characters; a literate Chinese person needs to know perhaps 4,000. Attempts at simplification tend to reintroduce ambiguity and make the language more difficult to read; the existing written system has endured intelligibly through many changes in the spoken language. For a more thorough treatment of the relationship between writing and language in Chinese, see Chinese languages: Historical survey of Chinese.
Japanese writing
The Japanese came into contact with Chinese culture during the Chinese Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and they began to write their own language in the 5th century CE, basing their writing system on the Chinese model. But the two languages are fundamentally different in structure: whereas Chinese words are monosyllables, Japanese words often consist of several syllables, and, whereas Chinese is an isolating language, Japanese is an inflected language. To write such a language, the Japanese developed a mixed system, partly logographic, based on the Chinese system, and partly syllabic, using the same characters in a second way for their sound values. In kun writing Chinese characters were used to represent Japanese words that have a similar meaning, while other characters were adopted to represent sounds.
In the 8th century the phonographic principle was applied more systematically in a writing system called man’yōgana, a syllabary very similar in form to the Semitic alphabet. However, given the large number of homophones and the fact that man’yōgana was combined with kun writing, it was almost impossible to establish a single correct reading of a text. Indeed, scribes took pride in being able to read the same text in various ways.
In the 9th or 10th century two sets of syllabic signs evolved: hiragana, or “plain” kana, which consists of simplified outlines, written cursively, of Chinese characters, and katakana, or “partial” kana, which consists of carefully written parts of the original Chinese characters. Writing with the full Chinese characters is called kanji. The two sets of kana characters are limited as are other syllabaries in that they are not unambiguous; kanji are unambiguous but are very complex visually. Consequently, modern Japanese writing uses a combination of characters from all three of these systems. In 1946 a standardizing reform established a limited list of 1,850 kanji (enlarged to 1,945 in 1981) and encouraged the use of kana for all other words. Modern written Japanese uses many more hiragana graphs than kanji in a piece of text.
Even with modern reforms, written Japanese is difficult to read unambiguously because of the great degree of homophony in the vocabulary. The word kan, for example, is the equivalent of “sweet,” “be affected,” “print,” “be accustomed to,” “view,” “investigate,” “slow,” “tube,” “enjoy,” “a volume,” “Chinese,” and “Korean,” among other meanings. As a result, a reader must know rather precisely what is being discussed in order to read a text accurately. Poetry in particular takes quite a different form in Japanese than in Indo-European languages. (For more on the relationship between the language and the writing, see Japanese language: Linguistic characteristics of modern Japanese.
Korean writing
Korea too was greatly influenced by Chinese institutions and culture. Until the 20th century the normal medium of written communication was in Chinese, using the Chinese writing system. But beginning about the 6th century, the Chinese script was adapted to write Korean. The application of Chinese script to the Korean language created problems almost identical to those that arose in using Chinese to write the Japanese language. Yet the borrowed kanji script continues to be used for some purposes to this day. The most remarkable development in Korean writing was the invention of Hangul by King Sejong in 1446. It is a featural script consisting of some 24 letters that have a systematic visual structure directly related to the phonetic features of the phonemes. This writing system owes nothing to the Chinese orthography. The development of Korean writing is discussed in more detail in Korean language: Linguistic history and writing systems.
Because the principles employed by various writing systems vary greatly and because the languages they represent are organized so differently, it is difficult to state any general principles of the evolution of writing systems. Yet it appears that they all began with motivated pictorial signs representing objects. To turn such signs into a general orthography required the recognition that the signs must represent sound patterns and the consequent invention of the phonographic principle. Depending on the language, such sound-based systems developed in two directions. Western scripts went farthest in the phonographic direction, representing words by means of syllables and syllables by means of consonantal writing systems and eventually developing a full vocalic alphabet. Eastern scripts preserved the logographic principle even though some of the logographs were sound-based; each word was represented by a distinctive visual character. Only one practical orthography, Korean, adopted a featural system, and that invention bore little or no relation to neighbouring orthographies.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing/Literacy-and-schooling
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