Britannica says writing is a “form of human communication by means of a set of visible marks that are related, by convention, to some particular structural level of language.” While this definition may be technically correct, it glosses over the significance of writing in our uniquely human nature. Writing shows the individuality of the human race and gives us a permanence not found in any other species. After death, other species are reduced to bones, through which we can only hope to glean insights into their lives. Their life experiences, though sometimes very advanced, are always temporary and transient. The act of writing allows us to leave a mark on our communities and create lasting impacts, cementing our existence through a narrative we control.
Throughout history, the birth of writing places a stark spotlight on the priorities of humans. Its Mesopotamian origins in the recordkeeping of trades show that economics has driven our civilization for millennia, and our constant desire for growth and expansion led us to the creation of an entirely new form of communication. As cities expanded, the basic partial script from Mesopotamia was adapted to fit society’s needs and became a more complex alphabet. This allowed people to write about more conceptual ideas, enabling the rapidly developing cities and kingdoms to exist. The alphabet opened the door for the formation and documentation of common myths that religion society is founded on: law, states, social order, and even money.
The complete system of alphabetic writing as we know it was developed only once in history, while multiple non-alphabetic partial scripts were developed separately across the globe. The earliest writing system in the world started in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) dating back to between 3400-3300BC (Clayton, 2019). Two types of early pictorial signs were developed and engraved into clay. The first was to represent numbers, with signs for 1, 10, 60, 600, 3600, and 36000 (Harari, 2015) giving us an insight into the key economic reasoning behind the invention of writing. The second type of pictorial sign represented objects and ideas such as people, animals, merchandise, territories, and dates.
One of the first written objects we have is a clay tablet with administrative text from Uruk between 3400BC and 3000BC, signed with the word Kushim (Harari, 2015). If Kushim is a name and not a generic title of an office holder, then there is a reasonable chance that Kushim is the first person in history whose name we know. These early pictorial signs developed into more complex characters, representing the sounds of Sumerian, the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia, and various other local languages. From 2900BC (Clayton, 2019), the reed stylus used to carve the signs into clay was refined and sharpened, allowing for more precision and detail in conventionalising symbols. This simple Sumerian script took on the name of cuneiform (from the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge) reflecting the shape of the strokes making up the symbols. The signs also developed from pictograms to phonograms, with symbols representing common sounds in the language rather than common meanings.
Over the next 600 years, the process of writing cuneiform became increasingly efficient as curves were eliminated, signs simplified, direct connection between the symbols and their original reference objects was lost. Reading also evolved from top to bottom, to left to right, and symbols rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This all gave a growing significance to the language, allowing it to spread and take hold throughout Mesopotamia. Cuneiform had been used bilingually to write in Akkadian, which was the language of the northern Semitic Akkadian people who co-existed with the Sumerians. In 2340BC (Clayton, 2019), when the state of Sumer fell to Sargon, king of the Akkadian people, an empire was built from present day Lebanon all the way down to the ‘nether sea’ of the Persian Gulf. This resulted in over 15 languages using cuneiform-inspired characters. Furthermore, the written language of cuneiform outlasted the spoken language of Sumerian, which died out as the language of learning around 200BC, even as cuneiform lasted into the Christian era up to 75AD (Clayton, 2019).
Simultaneous to and yet likely independent of the Sumerians, the Egyptians were developing their own writing systems. The first evidence of Egyptian writing is from c3250BC, showing early hieroglyphic forms on ceremonial tombstones. These hieroglyphs are thought to show an ‘Offering List’, which detailed gifts and objects owed to the person in death and why they deserved them. Hieroglyphs were then found on small ivory tablets which were used as labels for grave goods. A good example of this is found in the tomb of King Scorpion at Abydos. The other use of hieroglyphics was on ceremonial surfaces such as on the Narmer Palette, a purely cosmetic piece showing King Narmer conquering his enemies.
Is it possible that the Egyptian writing systems were influenced by Sumerian writing systems? It’s possible, but not likely. Had the Egyptians gained outside influence, they would have bypassed the developmental stage of using pictograms and adopted phonograms to expand their language. This did not happen – instead, pictorial hieroglyphs prevailed for a significant period of time. In order to overcome the limited function of pictographs, the Egyptians developed logograms – symbols which represent words, before later adopting phonograms.
British Egyptologist Rosalie David explains that “there are three types of phonograms in hieroglyphics: uniliteral or alphabetic signs, where one hieroglyph (picture) represents a single consonant or sound value. Biliteral signs, where one hieroglyph represents two consonants and triliteral signs where one hieroglyph represents three consonants.” These hieroglyphs directly led to the development of a 24-uniconsonantal alphabet, with an additional 800 determinative symbols to distinguish meaning. Despite being monumental in aiding the building of the modern alphabet, it was an unnecessarily complex system and was incredibly labour intensive for scribes.
Not including the unique development of the Chinese writing system would be an enormous oversight because today, it is seen as the origin of most East Asian languages. By 1300BC (Clayton, 2019), the Chinese had a fully operational writing system. Our earliest examples of writing in China are from a tributary of the Yellow River 500km south of Beijing, where the Kings of the late Shang Dynasty founded their capital and performed divination rituals using animal bones. There are over 150,000 examples of these ‘oracle bones’ with more than 4,500 symbols, many of which can be identified as the ancestors of modern Chinese characters.
The Chinese language is a clear example of a purely logographic system, where each symbol represents a meaningful unit of the language. Unlike cuneiform, this left no room for confusion as each symbol (even if the words sounded similar when spoken) was denoted by a separate character. By 1400BC (Clayton, 2019), the language included 2,500 to 3,000 characters with the majority of them still readable today. The Chinese removed ambiguity from their written language, and thus introduced complexity into their characters (Olson, 2020). This means that their written language has endured through dynamic changes to their spoken language and has always been clear to the reader.
Two distinct reasons underly the invention of writing and emphasise the idea of unifying populations. As humans, we seek out connection, and this connection is needed to successfully maintain cities and empires. But connection alone cannot achieve this because societal systems are also necessary. The development of writing is a direct manifestation of the priorities and needs of a society and how it holds itself together. Economics is the first of these unifying systems that is behind the invention of writing. Cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia to execute simple bookkeeping during the rise of cities in 3500BC. As trading began to advance, records were needed to keep track of them. Assyriologist Pierre Amiet of the Louvre (with further input from French-American archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat) theorised that this was accomplished through clay tokens shaped like jars or animals and inserted into clay envelopes. The tokens represented agricultural goods like grain, sheep, and cattle, and could be used to record trading. Shapes corresponding to the tokens inside were impressed on the clay envelope, which meant there would be no need to break it open to view its contents. The tokens themselves quickly became obsolete and the newly imprinted envelope was flattened, producing early writing on a clay slate.
This Sumerian writing was incredibly useful for the narrow range of economic functions that it was developed for, including record keeping, trades, sales, and property ownership. Historian Yuval Noah Harari stated that the mathematical aspect of writing was its most important function. Even as full scripts were developed, storing economic transactions and mathematical data remained the central purpose of writing. Economics also pushed a new partial script to be developed sometime before the 9th century AD, which was ten signs representing the numbers 0 to 9 (Harari, 2015). Despite being invented by the Hindus, these signs became known as the Arabic numerals due to the Arabs refining and spreading them through the Middle East and Europe. This partial script became, and still remains, the world’s dominant language. Numbers are the only truly universal language, spoken by all and unifying all. Economics was the driver for the development of both pictorial characters and numbers and is arguably the most important reason behind the invention of writing.
The second reason writing was invented was to strengthen and support the common myths which bind societies together. Yuval Noah Harari states that “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” These common myths allow us to function in an intricate and complex society, and writing allows us to organise and document them.
Egypt provides a clear example of the development of writing being directly linked to the common myth of the afterlife and ceremonies relating to death. As discussed, the first evidence of Egyptian writing is on a ceremonial tomb in the form of Offering Lists. Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim writes that, “The Offering List grew to enormous length till the day on which an inventive mind realized that a short Prayer for Offerings would be an effective substitute for the unwieldy list. Once the prayer, which may already have existed in spoken form, was put into writing, it became the basic element around which tomb-texts and representations were organized.” This shows the power of writing in aiding ceremonial practices, by making them easier and more efficient. More importantly, though, it shows that ceremony was one of the first applications of hieroglyphs. This suggests that writing was not just used in ceremony but created for ceremony. Interestingly, these lists and prayers eventually developed into the first Egyptian literature, in the form of the autobiography (Mark, 2016). China is perhaps an even stronger example of the development of writing being linked to our societal common myths. Many of the oracle bones found from the time of the Shang Dynasty recorded questions addressed to royal ancestors. These questions covered countless topics ranging from crop rotation to warfare to childbirth to toothache (Clayton, 2019). This demonstrates that from the very beginning of writing, citizens were using this form of communication to uphold the idea of dynasty and social order; two myths created to organise and unite populations.
Perhaps that the creation of writing was inevitable, because human brains are poor databases (Harari, 2015). Humans have a limited memory, which means that an immense amount of information would be lost without written records. Additionally, the human brain is adapted to store only botanical, zoological, topographical, and social information. It did not adapt to include other types of information which became more important with the rise of civilisations, like numbers needed for tax, payments, debts, fines, and censuses (Harari, 2015). No other animal participates in trade in the way humans do. Our trade networks were, and still are, based on fictions which we subscribe to. As Harari says, “…large systems of cooperation that involve not twenty-two but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge amounts of information, much more than any single human brain can contain and process.” Writing, therefore, was created to allow us to pass down not just information, but also ideas and structures which are not ingrained in our DNA and yet still necessary to our societies.
The impact of our knowledge and opinions as a species are also enhanced when written down. In Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen wrote about the Kikuyu tribesmen’s first exposures to written texts, saying, “I learned that the effect of a piece of news was many times magnified when it was imparted by writing. The messages that would have been received with doubt and scorn if they had been given by word of mouth were now taken as gospel truth.” Writing gives gravity to opinions, facts, and ideas that may not have survived or been believed otherwise. For example, the Hebrew Bible, Greek Iliad, Hindu Mahabharata, and Buddhist Tipitaka all began as spoken works, and likely would have survived even if writing had not been invented (Harari, 2015). However, the birth of the alphabet and the ability to record and share these works united a great deal more people behind the ideas they were exploring.
The economic and societal reasons behind the development of writing are inextricably linked. One cannot argue that writing was invented for economic purposes without recognizing that those economics uphold the common myths of social order, trade, and money. Likewise, one cannot state that writing was invented to uphold common myths without the acknowledgement that many of the common myths only exist because economics brought people together to create them. The inherently human desire for connection led to the growth and development of societies, which in turn accelerated trade. The very first partial scripts and the beginnings of writing can be accredited to this trade. Then, the systems that people lived under brought forth fully developed written scripts and alphabets for literature, religion, and government. The story of writing is a powerful and global one, showcasing humankind’s utmost needs and greatest ambitions. More than anything, it highlights how the very ideas that bound us together thousands of years ago still unify us today.
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