How writing began

The oldest writing we have is mostly receipts: barley, beer and sheep counted on clay in Uruk about 5,300 years ago.

Before writing: counters and seals

People counted long before they wrote. In the Near East, small clay tokens of different shapes stood for goods, and cylinder seals rolled across wet clay guaranteed that a jar or a door had not been opened. The Met describes the invention of writing, around 3300 BCE, as one more step in this administrative toolkit of the first cities. Scribes in Uruk began drawing signs on damp clay tablets with a pointed tool: a sign for barley, a sign for a sheep, and pressed marks for numbers. This earliest stage is called proto-cuneiform.

From pictures to wedges

Over a few centuries the pictures became simpler, and scribes stopped drawing them and instead pressed them into the clay with the cut end of a reed. The marks were wedge-shaped, which is what "cuneiform" means (from Latin cuneus, wedge). Signs also came to stand for sounds and syllables, so scribes could write names, verbs and whole sentences rather than only lists. The British Museum notes that cuneiform was used for more than 3,000 years, for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and other languages, until the 1st century CE.

At least four inventions

The British Museum notes that writing was invented independently in at least four places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Of these, Egyptian and Sumerian writing are the oldest known, from about 3300 to 3250 BCE onward. Small bone and ivory labels from tomb U-j at Abydos, dated to roughly 3300 to 3200 BCE, carry some of the earliest Egyptian signs. Whether Egypt took the idea of writing from Mesopotamia or arrived at it alone is still argued. Chinese writing on oracle bones dates from about 1250 BCE, and writing in Mesoamerica appears during the 1st millennium BCE.

Three ways a sign can work

Writing systems use signs in three basic ways. A logogram stands for a whole word, as a drawing of the sun might mean "sun" or "day". A syllable sign stands for a sound such as "ba" or "ku". An alphabet uses one letter for one sound. Most early systems mixed word signs with sound signs; cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters all do. Mixing lets a scribe write a name or a foreign word that has no picture of its own.

The alphabet

A script with only a few dozen signs began in Sinai and the Levant during the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, often dated around 1700 BCE (estimates run from about 1850 to 1550 BCE), borrowed the shapes of a few Egyptian hieroglyphs to write a Semitic language, one sound per sign. The Phoenician version, with 22 consonant letters, is conventionally dated from about 1050 BCE and was carried around the Mediterranean by traders. The Greeks added vowels around 800 BCE, and from Greek came the Etruscan and Latin alphabets.

Reading lost scripts again

Scripts can be forgotten and recovered. Champollion read Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822 with help from the Rosetta Stone. Cuneiform was decoded in the mid-19th century, helped by the three-language inscription of the Persian king Darius I carved on a cliff at Behistun in Iran. Linear B was read in 1952. The Indus script and Linear A remain unread. Each success needed the same things: enough text, a guess about the language, and often a bilingual inscription.