History is the study of the past through written sources. Writing, however, is a fairly recent innovation. In addition, most of the world’s 6,000 or so languages do not have a native written form and most of the world’s 7 billion people cannot read or write. While writing is seen by many scholars as one of the greatest inventions in human history, the invention that made history possible, most people in the world do not directly benefit from it.
While language appears to be innate and universal among Homo sapiens, writing is not. All human societies have fully developed languages and nearly all humans seem to be born with an ability to acquire language. Writing, on the other hand, is something many people struggle with as it does not seem to come naturally to them and many are unable to master it.
Like language and religion, writing is a symbol system. There are three basic symbol systems used in writing. First there is the logogram or logograph (word sign) in which each symbol represents a given word within a language. The logogram conveys both sound and meaning. Second, there is the phonogram (phonetic sign) in which symbols represent sounds which can then be combined to form words. In some writing systems, phonograms may have originated from pictographs. And third is the semantic sign which contains no sound values and is not linked to specific words and always appears alongside phonograms. A writing system may use all three of these systems. For example:
“John & Mary did what?”
Here we see a logogram (&), lots of phonograms (the letters that spell out the words, and semantic signs (“?”).
In some writing systems, phonograms are used only for consonants—there are no symbols for the vowels. The ancient Phoenician script, for example, contains 22 letters, all consonants. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician script to develop their own writing system, they added vowels to the script.
Maya, a Mesoamerican language unrelated to English, developed writing about 400 BCE. It has a writing system with about 500 signs, of which 100 are purely phonetic (i.e. phonograms) and 400 are logograms. There are no semantic signs in written Mayan.
Aztec, by the way, appears to have developed independently of the other Mesoamerican writing systems and was relatively short lived: it existed for only about three centuries. Aztec writing seems to have had 400 logograms and 50 phonograms. The Aztec language was Nahuatl and writing seems to have developed about 200 years prior to the Spanish conquest.
One of the popular misconceptions about writing is that it was invented only once, a concept known as monogenesis. Writing developed independently in at least five and possibly as many as eight different hearths (locations of origin) at different times. During the fourth millennium BCE, writing developed in Sumer, in Egypt, and in China. It developed in Elam about 3000 BCE, in the Indus Valley about 2200 BCE, and in the Aegean sometime in the second millennium BCE. Finally, it developed in Mesoamerica among the Maya about the first century BCE.
Writing developed initially in socially stratified societies: that is, societies which were divided into groups which did not share equally in the resources. With the emergence of stratified societies, there is also an emergence of the concept of gods and of creation stories which explain why some people are entitled to more material wealth than others. It is within stratified societies that the priesthood developed. In order to enhance spiritual and political power, writing was initially seen as a skill which was to be restricted to a priestly elite. Most people, including the kings, remained illiterate.
Another popular misconception about writing is that it developed originally to serve the administrative needs of early civilizations, such as keeping a record of taxes. While it is true that early writing in many civilizations was an important bureaucratic tool, there are a number of instances in which writing developed for other reasons. In China, for example, writing seems to have developed for ritualistic purposes, including divination. In Mesoamerica, writing was first used to record the names and lineages of kings.
The idea that writing was first used on clay tokens is another popular misconception. First of all, the use of clay tokens is primarily found in Mesopotamia and is not, therefore ancestral to writing in Egypt, China, or Mesoamerica. In addition, archaeologists have not identified any correlation between token shapes and first signs used in writing.
It should be pointed out that Sumarian and Akkadian, two of the ancient languages of Mesopotamia, were often written on clay tablets using a stylus. This form of writing is called cuneiform.
With regard to ancient writing, there are dozens of ancient scripts which are still undeciphered. In order for epigraphers to be able to decipher an ancient script, they must know what type of writing system is being used and they must know something about the language which was being written. They must also have a corpus, that is, a body of texts in that language which is large enough to provide comparisons. They also need something about the overall culture, such as place names, royal names, and titles. And finally, a bi-script—a text written in at least two writing scripts—is often the key to decipherment. The Egyptian Rosetta stone is a classical example of this.
If the underlying language of a written script is unknown, then decipherment of that script is impossible even though there may be a large number of works written in it. One example of this is Etruscan, a pre-Roman Italian civilization who adopted the Greek alphabet. The Etruscan civilization arose about 800 BCE and reached its height about 500 BCE. By 300 BCE, they had been swallowed up by Rome and their language soon disappeared. The Etruscan language is basically unknown today (only a few hundred words are known for sure) and thus the many Etruscan scripts cannot be deciphered.
One of the interesting and hotly debated possibilities for writing is the khipu developed by the Inka in the Andes. The Inka had a stratified, bureaucratic empire in which writing would have been important. Unlike other forms of writing, the khipu are knotted, colored threads. While many Europeans have dismissed the khipu as simply a mnemonic interpretive tradition, some scholars see it as a form of writing. For example, Gary Urton, in his book Signs of the Inka Khipu, sees the khipu as a writing system based on the manipulation of threads in three-dimensional space which involves binary coding.
The most notable development of writing among American Indian people was the development of the Cherokee alphabet by Sequoia during the first part of the nineteenth century. Sequoia, who did not speak or write English, was inspired by the European concept of writing and developed a system of symbols that communicated the Cherokee sound system (phonology). While Sequoia borrowed many letters from the European alphabet, they represent very different sounds in Cherokee.
Some Examples of Different Scripts:
Shown above is a Chinese sign.
Shown above is the Irish Ogham alphabet.
Shown above are some Irish Ogham stones.
Shown above are Egyptian hieroglyphs on display in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Shown above are some Scandinavian Runes.
Shown above is Sumarian cuneiform.