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The invention of writing

Writing is not like language. It was an invention. Many societies get along perfectly well without it. Nevertheless it was one of the Great Inventions of Mankind, like metal-smelting, the wheel and, to my biased mind, the harnessing of steam.

On the other hand, unlike the wheel, it is probably a fairly natural development. Simple societies may not need it, but it’s difficult to imagine any serious civilisation getting far without some form of writing. Writing was indeed invented quite separately by at least two different cultures and possibly three.

I’ve read of a theory that the great ancient civilisations deliberately inhibited technological advance, because their elites were afraid of change (more). The other great inventions support this. It’s very difficult to get a handle on who made them. The breakthroughs seem to have been made by unsung peoples in ‘uncivilised’ areas.

Writing fits this pattern too, as far as I can make out. The Sumerians may have invented it. But it may have been the Egyptians. Or it may have been the Chinese. If it was the Sumerians, then it co-incided almost exactly with their emergence on to the world stage, about 5½ thousand years ago. One is entitled to wonder whether the writing came first, and made the emergence of a ‘civilisation’ possible. Once writing had emerged however, then the scribes could and did improve it no end over the centuries.

Writing was a gradual development. Proper writing seems to have appeared quite suddenly – and to have spread remarkably quickly around the ancient world. But I’ve read that pieces of stone have been found with scribe marks on them, dating back 100 thousand years. The marks are attributed to accounting rather than poetic thoughts. But the initial stimulus for inventing writing was commercial too. Whichever aspect of human development you investigate, you normally find that its roots go far further back than even the scientists often realise.

Writing comes in two forms, letters and ‘pictograms’. All writing forms started out as pictures. But over the centuries, they often became simplified and stylised until many of them were unrecognisable. Then some cultures went on to develop alphabetic scripts. An important principle of alphabetic writing is that a letter represents a sound rather than a ‘thing’. This makes it far more powerful. You can set down emotions and all sorts using an alphabetic script.

Of course it’s not as simple as that. The pictogram scripts developed a convention whereby different characters could also represent different sounds. No doubt the context made it clear usage was intended. But it takes a lot of complicated pictograms to write a word that way, so the system remained at a disadvantage.

I think the clay tablets above were found in Uruk in Sumeria, from 5.2 thousand years ago. They were discovered by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

The Sumerians wrote on wet clay, which was then fired to make the message permanent. It’s difficult to draw lines and curves on wet clay, presumably because the clay drags (I’ve not tried it). So they had an incentive to simplify their individual characters as much as possible. I’ve read that their language lent itself to alphabetic writing too. Having said that however, you will find on the Internet some superb pictures impressed into clay tablets.

This is how the cuneiform script evolved. It’s made with a stylus which is just pressed into the clay, in various ways, to produce a large number of different symbols – letters. The picture on the left illustrates the form. There are more examples on the Internet. The picture on the right is apparently a letter, though we don’t know who sent it to whom.

The concept of writing quickly spread to Egypt. According to Western Washington University, it appeared there quite suddenly just under 5 thousand years ago, as a fully developed alphabetic system. However I’ve seen an Egyptian source claiming that the Egyptians got there first. We won’t get involved in this debate.

The concept also spread to the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan. Some linguists believe that the Chinese got the idea from Sumeria too. There were certainly trade links between the two by that time. But I have to report that sources seem to differ on this (see below).

It’s from the Egyptians that we get our modern alphabet. The story is complicated and we won’t bogged down in it. But the Egyptians ended up with two quite different scripts. They had the hieroglyphics that we all hear about. This picture is from Wikipedia. It shows part of ‘the papyrus of Ani’ and shows ‘cursive’ hieroglyphs.

The Egyptians used papyrus to write on, which made complex hieroglyphs much easier to draw. Egyptian writing was the province of a small educated elite of scribes, who deliberately made it difficult to learn, to keep the riff-raff out. They formed “The Worshipful Company of Scribes” you might say.

The hieroglyphic script was used for important and religious documents. For the common stuff they also had a ‘popular’ or ‘demotic’ script. We don’t hear so much about this. It was developed around 2½ thousand years ago.

The Demotic script comprised a 26 letter alphabet, like ours today, whereas cuneiform writing had far more letters. The rendition below comes from Omniglot. I don’t understand it, but you might.

This picture of real-life demotic script comes from Wikipedia, and shows a part of the famous Rosetta stone. This is a stone, found by Napoleon, which gives the same text in 3 different scripts; hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. The Greeks were ruling Egypt at the time. It was the key that enabled both the Egyptian scripts to be deciphered.

The Greeks got their writing from the Egyptian Demotic script. The Romans probably got theirs from the Greeks and so on.

China acquired writing at about the same time as the Sumerians, or possibly earlier, or possibly later. Unfortunately I’ve read of a dispute between Chinese and western scholars over whether China acquired the idea from Sumeria, whether the Chinese invented it for themselves or even (shock, horror) whether the Sumerians got it from the Chinese. It’s sad. But scholars and scientists are human after all, just like the rest of us.

China is a huge country, with two quite different languages and many different dialects. Just over 2 thousand years ago (221 BC) the First Emperor of Quin unified the country. He couldn’t unify the spoken language, but he could and did unify the written one. There have been changes in calligraphic style since, but scripts written in his time are still perfectly intelligible today.

Chinese writing did not originally have any concept of a character meaning a sound – although I’m sure it does now. Instead a new character had to be invented whenever something new was introduced. This means that the number of characters is huge. In recent years a new writing method has been introduced, called Pinyin. It uses our normal western alphabet. More recently still, globalisation has forced the Chinese government to push it.

The invention of writing was the start of a major information revolution, probably far greater than any that we have seen since. The young may doubt this. But the Internet can only make available, information that has already been written down.