The History of Writing

By Catherine Rose

December brings with it one of the biggest annual tasks – sending out our Christmas cards! But while you are busy penning your festive wishes to friends and family, you are also taking part in one of humankind’s greatest achievements: communication through the art of writing. Writing has only been in existence for around five thousand years. It was invented a long time after spoken language, which developed tens of thousands of years ago. What is astonishing is that all written languages, although very different in appearance, can be traced back to common origins and a lightbulb moment in writing’s development known as the Rebus Principle. Universally amongst human cultures, history has always been passed down verbally over time through songs, poetry and stories. The human impulse to be creative has also led to expression through art, and the earliest forms of written communication were through pictographs and pictograms: drawings of objects and illustrations of a concept the artist wanted to communicate. Illustrations like this can be seen in the oldest cave paintings. Early pictographs were also used as accounts, such as listing belongings that were to be traded or sacrificed; for example, a sheaf of wheat or a cow. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics famously used a variety of pictograms. However, people quickly found that pictograms alone were not always enough to convey complex ideas, so they were adapted to not only represent what they were, but to additionally stand for spoken sounds. Words could then be built up using images that did not necessarily relate to the objects themselves but could be sounded out to obtain another meaning. This was the Rebus Principle – rebus meaning ‘by things’ in Latin. It meant that people’s names could be written down, as well as their possessions and transactions. As an example, ‘sun’ and ‘son’ have different meanings but because they sound the same, they could be represented by the same symbol. The earliest form of writing using symbols – or phonograms – to represent sounds is known as ‘cuneiform’. It was invented in ancient southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) by the Sumerians in order to facilitate trade. Cuneiform used a system of triangular marks made with a reed that were impressed on wet clay tablets. Examples can be seen in the British Museum. At the same time in China, etched and (later) calligraphically painted characters, which had originally depicted objects, evolved to represent more complex words and ideas. As there are many sounds in Chinese language that are the same but mean entirely different things, extra marks or qualifiers were added to the written characters to explain the correct context of the words. The earliest examples of Chinese writing have been found on oracle bones. These were animal bones on which a prediction or question was etched. The bone was then heated and the way it cracked could be read by a diviner to confirm the prediction or answer a question.

In Mesoamerica, glyphs were used to represent the written form of language. Consequently, it is believed that writing was invented in three separate areas of the world along similar principles. Alphabets we use today have common origins in the Semitic language. The Semites worked as labourers in ancient Egypt and adapted hieroglyphs to represent twenty-four different sounds, producing their own written letters. The Phoenicians adapted this alphabet and it was spread across the Mediterranean by travelling merchants. The Greeks and Romans also adopted it for their own written languages, Greek and Latin. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was an important development in deciphering these links, because it was written in three different scripts and could therefore be used as a codebreaking tool. Today, the origin of our alphabet can still be traced back to Semitic pictographs. The letter ‘a’ or ‘A’, for example, was originally an ox’s head or aleph and was therefore given the sound a. The Greeks subsequently called this first letter alpha. Because of differences between cultures in reading left to right or right to left, letters were turned and adapted. If you flip our capital letter A upside down, it still looks like an ox head. In the same way, the letter ‘b’ or ‘B’ was originally a drawing of a reed house or bet, producing a b sound. The Greeks subsequently called this letter beta. If you look at the original Semitic drawing of the letter, it is a square shape with a slight tail. Once again, flip it and our modern letter b is recognisable. As with spoken language, written language has evolved over time. Punctuation and the differentiation between capital and lower-case letters were a necessary evolution of reading long texts to indicate pauses, breaths and the separation of ideas for clarity of meaning. As with qualifying marks in Chinese, a comma can make a world of difference! But it was not until the invention of printing that punctuation was standardised. Writing has not only given us a means to post our good wishes at Christmas. It has also given us the gift of great literature and in our modern world has enabled global communication.