The origins of writing
Humans arrived on the planet 200,000 years ago. We took our time to settle in, though, and the origins of writing are perhaps surprisingly recent.
Humans have written for only about 5,500 years. Just a blink in our history. The earliest writing system we know of dates only from about 3500BC. Perhaps others lurk in dark corners of the world. But they remain undiscovered.
Publishers, copy-editors, proofreaders and authors owe their livelihoods to Sumerians and Egyptians who ingeniously developed methods of recording words on clay, rock, stone and bone.
Mesopotamian genius
Mesopotamia is very roughly modern Iraq. But an Iraq not wrecked to ruination and rubble by war lords, Saddam and the rapacious West. Imagine Britain 5,500 years ago. Then conjure up Mesopotamia, a land where humans could devise a sophisticated code to capture thought and words. (We Brits were pretty handy when it came to heaving big rocks about, though! And we’d figured out where the sun rose and set.)
Sumerians to the rescue!
The Sumerians from the south of the country began to develop cuneiform (wedge-shaped) symbols from the pictorial system they had had for many thousand years. Eventually this cuneiform script was transcribed onto clay tablets using a nib formed from a reed.
Symbols were read from the top of the tablet to the bottom. Gradually the modern system of left to right reading developed.
Cuneiform lasted for about 4,000 years and became the established writing form in about twenty languages for education, the Church and secular purposes.
Egyptian potboilers
In Egypt we find that an independent system of writing began slightly later, about 3200 BC. The coincidence in timing is remarkable. You wait 195,000 years for a bus… The carved and painted letters seen on Egyptian tombs and sacred sites are called hieroglyphs. Small ivory tablets were used to bear inscriptions. The Egyptians were the first people to use ink. Writing with styluses dipped in ink was known as hieratic or priestly writing. Writing was both sacred and secular.
Alphabets
The first alphabet came from Egypt. It had twenty-four consonants. Phonetic sounds were also alphabetised, as were symbols denoting which meaning of a word was intended. Words could have several meanings (nothing changes), and the Egyptians wanted the sense to be clear.
Thank you for your letters
So the origins of writing lie with the ingenious Mesopotamians and Egyptians; we should offer a huge vote of thanks! The next writing system was from China in about 1200BC, and we didn’t catch on in the West until a good while later.
Still, Stonehenge is quite nice, isn’t it? Shame about the A303.