There can be little doubt that writing has been the most important tool in humankind’s intellectual development. Before the development of writing, the accumulated knowledge and experience of an individual or a community could only be passed on orally, inhibiting its volume and variety. Knowledge could be lost with the death of an individual, or distorted by the flaws of human memory.
Once there was writing, knowledge could be recorded and stored over time. Once books and libraries existed, people no longer had to rely on memory, and could potentially access the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
Attempts to leave permanent records can be traced back at least some 20,000 years, during the last ice age in Europe, when Palaeolithic hunters carved regular groups of incisions in bones and antlers that may have served a calendrical function, perhaps recording the migratory movements of prey animals such as reindeer.
But true writing has to be far more flexible. The written symbols have to convey the actual words and sounds of a spoken language, not just broad ideas. A single writing system may be used to represent a number of different languages. For example, the Roman alphabet, which is about 2,500 years old, is used to write a number of European languages, from Romanian to Norwegian.
Different writing systems arose independently in places as diverse as the Near East, Mesoamerica, the Indus valley and China. The earliest was that developed around 3100 BCE in Mesopotamia. This was cuneiform, a word meaning ‘wedge-shaped’, referring to the marks the scribes incised with a stylus in their clay tablets.
Different writing systems
There are three main types of writing. In logographic scripts, such as Chinese, each symbol stands for a whole word. In syllabic systems, such as ancient Babylonian cuneiform and Japanese, each symbol represents a single syllable. In alphabetic systems, such as Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and our own Roman system, each symbol generally represents a single sound.
Writing first arose in early urban societies, which were more stratified than in pre-urban times. The ruling elite needed it as a means to keep control over masses of commodities and numerous subjects. The monumental inscription of a ruler’s name – as found for example on stone slabs in Mesoamerica and on ancient Chinese oracle bones – helped to reinforce his or her unique and powerful status.
In due course most (but not all) literate societies began to use writing for a wider variety of purposes: business contracts, letters, religious rituals and laws, both religious and non-religious. Written literature arrived later: for example the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh , originally transmitted orally, was not written down until the 7th century BCE .
While we talk about the earliest ‘literate societies’, there were in fact very few people who could read and write. Those who could were usually trained scribes; even the rulers, the chief beneficiaries of writing, may often have been illiterate. Indeed, all through the ancient world and through the Middle Ages, literacy was restricted to only very small minorities. It was not until the coming of printing that the benefits of writing began to spread more widely (see here ).