writing (2024)

The history and prehistory of writing are as long as the history of civilization itself. Indeed the development of communication by writing was a basic step in the advance of civilization.

Yet writing is little more than 5,000 years old. The oldest writings that have come down to the present day are inscriptions on clay tablets made by the Sumerians in about 3100 bc. The Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Egyptians in the Nile River valley developed writing about 100 to 200 years later (see Egypt, ancient).

Writing is sometimes spoken of as humankind’s greatest invention. It was developed by many people, in many places, and over a long period of time. The identity of the individuals responsible for the major steps in the development of writing is not known. Their names, like those of the inventors of the wheel, are lost forever in the dimness of the past.

Long before the earliest writings of the Sumerians and the Egyptians were developed, people communicated with each other by a number of different methods. Early humans could express thoughts and feelings by means of speech or by signs or gestures. They could signal with fire and smoke, drums, or whistles.

These early methods of communication had two limitations. First, they were restricted as to the time in which communication could take place. As soon as the words were spoken, the gesture was made, or the smoke was blown away by the wind, they were gone and could not be recovered, except by repetition. Second, they were restricted as to space. They could be used only between persons more or less close to each other.

The need for communicating in a form less limited by time and space led to drawings or markings on objects of any solid material. These messages lasted as long as the materials themselves. Humans had been drawing pictures from earliest times. The prehistoric cave paintings were artistic and realistic representations of the world of primitive humans (see human origins). If the pictures were intended to record an event or to convey a message, they were a form of writing.

A great number of such pictures, drawn on or carved in rock, have been found in the western mountains of the United States and Canada. They are called petrograms if they are drawn or painted and petroglyphs if they are carved.

Such pictures convey ideas, or meanings, directly to the mind without the use of words, sounds, or other language forms. This primitive method of communication is known as pictography (picture writing) or ideography (idea writing), and it formed the basis of the Chinese and Japanese characters used today.

Idea, or meaning, writing has many limitations. If he wished to communicate the simple message “I killed five lions,” the writer could start by drawing five separate pictures of lions. “I killed” still had to be expressed. Remembering the way he actually killed the lions, whether with a spear, a club, or a bow and arrow, the writer would draw the figure of himself holding the weapon that he had used in the act.

There were several roundabout ways the writer could make sure that other people understood it was he and no one else who killed the lions. If he were long-legged, he could draw himself with extra-long legs. He could draw himself with a special hairdo or headdress. He could also use the device, widely employed among Indians, of adding a picture standing for his name—for instance, White Buffalo or Red Shirt—near the head of the figure. All this was cumbersome and involved a great deal of thought in finding the right pictures to express the intended meanings. This system of writing was employed by the Plains Indians and the Aztecs.

The ideographic method of communication may have been sufficient in the simpler societies of hunters and nomads. It could not, however, meet the needs of urban societies with their highly developed commerce, industry, agriculture, and state organization, all of which involved the need to keep records.

The first of the urban societies arose in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Here the ancient Sumerian civilization flourished. Some time later in the Nile River valley the Egyptians developed their civilization.

Early writing was influenced by a number of factors, particularly by the materials available. The people of ancient Egypt developed beautiful signs, called hieroglyphics, for writing inscriptions on tombs and monuments and for writing religious texts and important documents on papyrus. The word hieroglyphic is from the Greek hieros, meaning “sacred,” and glyphein, meaning “to carve.”

Because the people of southern Mesopotamia lacked both stone and material suitable for making paper, they pressed signs into wet clay tablets with the end of a reed or wooden stylus. This produced wedge-shaped marks; hence such writing is called cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, meaning “wedge.” When preservation of the tablets was desired, they were baked. (See also Babylonia and Assyria.)

The basic idea in the new writings was to express words of the language rather than ideas and meanings. Such a message as “I killed five lions” would not be expressed by pictures drawn in any order. It would instead be expressed in picture signs drawn in the order of the words in this sentence. The word “I” might be expressed by the picture sign of a head with the hand pointing to the nose; “killed” by the picture sign of a spear; “five” by five strokes; and “lion” by the picture sign of a lion.

The scribe no longer had a choice of using one sign or another according to the situation he was trying to describe. Whether the killing was done with a spear, a club, or a bow and arrow, the scribe could use for the word “kill” only that sign which he had learned to associate regularly with the word. If in Sumer the killing of animals or humans was done normally with a spear, then the picture of a spear would most likely have been chosen as the sign for the word “kill.”

A system of writing in which individual signs stand for individual words of the language is called logography (word writing). The signs in such a system are called logograms (word-signs).

Word writing represented a tremendous advance over idea writing. It too, however, was not practical. Thousands of signs for thousands of words had to be invented and—what was worse—learned by students. It was still difficult to express some abstract ideas, such as “life”; proper names which have no known meanings, such as Thomas or New York; and grammatical forms, such as the endings -ed and -s in the sentence “I killed five lions.”

A way to overcome these difficulties was found in the use of the phonetic principle, or rebus device. An example would be writing the English word “belief” by drawing pictures of a bee and a leaf. In Sumerian the abstract word ti (life) was difficult to express in a picture sign. The scribe therefore wrote the word with an easy-to-draw picture sign of an arrow, which also had the sound of ti in Sumerian. Thus a picture sign stood for a speech sound.

With the rebus device new horizons were opened to the expression of all linguistic forms, no matter how abstract. It was no longer necessary to go through a process of mental gymnastics to figure out how to express such a word as “date” meaning an agreement made between a boy and a girl to meet at a certain time and place. Should the word be expressed by the picture of a boy and girl holding hands, by that of a tree and the moon, or by something else? With the rebus device this word could be written simply with the sign for “date” meaning a fruit. Its sign is easy to draw, and it sounds like the other “date.” Furthermore, the sign for “date” (fruit) might be used phonetically in every word in which the syllable “date” appears, such as “validate,” “consolidate,” or “candidate.”

Systems of writing in which signs are used either for full words of definite meaning or for syllables are called word-syllabic or logo-syllabic writings. Such word-syllabic writings were widespread in ancient times, among the Sumerians and Egyptians, among the Hittites in Anatolia (Asia Minor), among the Minoans and Mycenaeans in the Aegean area, and among the Chinese. The still undeciphered writings of the Elamites in southern Iran and of an unknown people who lived in India in very ancient times were also logo-syllabic. The Maya of Central America developed a system which lies somewhere between the ideographic stage of the Aztec and such fully developed word-syllabic systems as those of the Sumerians and the Egyptians.

Like the primitive ideographic writings, all the word-syllabic writings were originally pictographic; that is, they contained signs in which one could easily recognize pictures of humans and objects such as animals, plants, and mountains.

The ideographic systems retained their pictorial characters from the beginning to the end of their existence. In the course of time, however, the word-syllabic writings developed cursive, linear forms. These became abbreviated and greatly changed through constant use. It is impossible to recognize in the great majority of them the pictures they originally represented. In Egypt three forms were used at the same time. There was a hieroglyphic form, which was a carefully drawn picture writing found mainly on public and official monuments. There were also hieratic and demotic forms, which were abbreviated, cursive writings used mainly for private and business correspondence.

Next in the history of writing was the syllabic stage. All syllabic writings were derived from the word-syllabic systems. They were either identical with or simplified from the syllabaries of those systems. A syllabary is a list of characters, each one of which is used to write a syllable.

The Babylonians and Assyrians, who superseded the Sumerians in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates, accepted almost without change the Sumerian word-syllabic system. The foreign Elamites, Hurrians, and Urartians, who lived north of the Assyrians and Babylonians, felt that the task of mastering the complicated Sumerian system was too heavy a burden. They merely devised a simplified syllabary and eliminated almost entirely the many word-signs of the Sumerians.

The Japanese developed a simple syllabary from the Chinese word-syllabic writing. Japanese children are still taught this in the lower grades. In the higher grades they learn also a number of word-signs borrowed from Chinese, which they use side by side with their syllabary. This is similar to the writing, in English, of the word “plus” either as a word-sign “+” or alphabetically as “plus.”

The most radical changes took place in the system which the Semites of Syria and Palestine developed from the Egyptian word-syllabic writing between 1500–1000 bc. They eliminated all the word-signs and all the syllabic signs with more than one consonant. They limited their syllabaries to about 30 signs beginning with a consonant and ending in any vowel.

The most important Semitic writing was developed around 1000 bc by the Phoenicians in the ancient city of Byblos. Their writing consisted of 22 syllabic signs beginning with a consonant and ending with a vowel. This is the writing which was destined to play a most important role in the history of civilization. Due to its great simplicity, the Phoenician writing spread rapidly. It was accepted gradually by other Semitic peoples, such as the Hebrews, Arameans, Arabs, and Abyssinians. In its march eastward it spread among the peoples of Persia and India. In its westward drive it was adopted in Greece, Italy, and the rest of Europe.

Because the vowels were not indicated in the Phoenician syllabic signs, these signs are called consonantal or even alphabetic by some scholars. The creators of a true alphabet, however, were not the Phoenicians but the Greeks.

There were three great steps by which writing evolved from primitive ideography to a full alphabet. First came the use of signs to stand for word sounds, leading to a word-syllabic writing. The Sumerians were the first to develop this stage of writing.

Second came the creation of a Semitic syllabary of some 22 to 30 signs. The greatness of the Phoenician writing did not lie in any revolutionary change but in its simplification. It excluded all the word-signs and signs with more than one consonant of the Egyptian system, and it was restricted in syllabary to a small number of open syllabic signs. This writing became the prototype of all alphabets.

The third great step was the creation of the Greek alphabet. This was accomplished by the systematic use of vowel signs. When these were added to the syllabic signs borrowed from the Semitic system, the result was to reduce the values of those syllabic signs to alphabetic signs.

In reaching its final development, whatever its forerunners may have been, writing had to pass through these three stages—word, syllabic, and alphabetic—in this, and no other, order. No stage of development could be skipped. No writing could start with a syllabic or alphabetic stage unless it was borrowed from a system which had gone through the previous stages. A system of writing could stop at one stage without developing further. The Plains Indians of North America never progressed beyond pictographic writing. Japanese and Chinese writings remained word-syllabic.

Writing rarely developed through all stages within any one area. People were usually conservative and attached to their own kind of writing. In Egypt and Babylonia religious interests, and in China political interests, were responsible for maintaining a difficult and obsolete form of writing and making its general use by the people impossible. It was therefore foreign peoples, not bound by local traditions and interests, who were frequently responsible for introducing new and important developments in the history of writing. Thus it was the Phoenicians who simplified Egyptian writing, and the Greeks who developed the alphabet they derived from the Phoenicians.

Ignace J. Gelb