The history of writing instruments, which humans have used to record and convey thoughts, feelings, and grocery lists is, in some ways, the history of civilization itself. It is through the drawings, signs, and words we've recorded that we've come to understand the story of our species. Some of the first tools used by early humans were the hunting club and the handy sharpened-stone. The latter, initially used as an all-purpose skinning and killing tool, was later adapted into the first writing instrument. Cavemen scratched pictures with the sharpened-stone tool onto the walls of cave dwellings. These drawings represented events in daily life such as the planting of crops or hunting victories. With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences but were easier and faster to draw. Over time, these symbols became shared and universalized among small, groups and later, across different groups and tribes as well. It was the discovery of clay that made portable records possible. Early merchants used clay tokens with pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These tokens date back to about 8500 BCE. With the high volume of and the repetition inherent in record keeping, pictographs evolved and slowly lost their detail. They became abstract-figures representing sounds in spoken communication. Around 400 BCE, the Greek alphabet was developed and began to replace pictographs as the most commonly used form of visual communication. Greek was the first script written from left to right. From Greek followed the Byzantine and then the Roman writings. In the beginning, all writing systems had only uppercase letters, but when the writing instruments were refined enough for detailed faces, lowercase was used as well (around 600 CE.) The Greeks employed a writing stylus made of metal, bone or ivory to place marks upon wax-coated tablets. The tablets were made in hinged pairs and closed to protect the scribe's notes. The first examples of handwriting also originated in Greece and it was the Grecian scholar Cadmus who invented the written alphabet. Across the globe, writing was developing beyond chiseling pictures into stone or wedging pictographs into wet clay. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink'. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. By 1200 BCE, the ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 BCE), became common. Other cultures developed inks using natural dyes and colors derived from berries, plants, and minerals. In early writings, different colored inks had ritual meanings attached to each color. The invention of ink paralleled that of paper. The early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews used papyrus and parchment papers began using parchment paper around 2000 BCE, when the earliest piece of writing on Papyrus known to us today, the Egyptian "Prisse Papyrus" was created. The Romans created a reed-pen perfect for parchment and ink from the hollow tubular-stems of marsh grasses, especially from the jointed bamboo plant. They converted bamboo stems into a primitive form of fountain pen and cut one end into the form of a pen nib or point. A writing fluid or ink filled the stem and squeezing the reed forced fluid to the nib. By the year 400, a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron-salts, nutgalls, and gum. This became the basic formula for centuries. Its color when first applied to paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black before fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in old documents. Wood-fiber paper was invented in China in the year 105 but was not widely used throughout Europe until paper mills were built in the late 14th century. The writing instrument that dominated for the longest period in history (over one-thousand years) was the quill pen. Introduced around the year 700, the quill is a pen made from a bird feather. The strongest quills were those taken from living birds in the spring from the five outer left wing feathers. The left wing was favored because the feathers curved outward and away when used by a right-handed writer. Quill pens lasted for only a week before it was necessary to replace them. There were other disadvantages associated with their use, including lengthy preparation time. Early European writing parchments made from animal skins required careful scraping and cleaning. To sharpen the quill, the writer needed a special knife. Beneath the writer's high-top desk was a coal stove, used to dry the ink as quickly as possible. Plant-fiber paper became the primary medium for writing after another dramatic invention took place. In 1436, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable wooden or metal letters. Later, newer printing technologies were developed based on Gutenberg's printing machine, such as offset printing. The ability to mass-produce writing in this way revolutionized the way humans communicate. As much as any other invention since the sharpened-stone, Gutenberg's printing press set forth a new era of human history. About 5,000 years ago, 30 goats changed hands between Sumerians. To record the transaction, a receipt was carved onto a clay tag, about the size of a Post-it. Simple geometric signs represented the livestock and purveyor. The indents of circles and semicircles denoted the quantity exchanged. Imagine how surprised these people would be to learn their receipt is now held in a museum. That’s because the tag is one of the earliest texts from the oldest known writing system, Mesopotamian cuneiform, developed around 3,200 BC in the area of present-day Iraq. Like most surviving records from the time, it’s economic in nature, and about as riveting as a checkbook ledger. But the interesting part is not what these early texts said. It’s how they came to be. These early texts beg the question: How was writing invented? That question has at least four answers because writing was independently invented at least four times in human history: in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. The scripts of these civilizations are considered pristine, or developed from scratch by societies with no exposure to other literate cultures. All other writing systems are thought to be modeled after these four, or at least after the idea of them. With future research, the number of pristine scripts could decrease, if archaeologists find evidence that any of these cultures copied the idea of writing from one another (most likely Mesopotamia and Egypt, because geography). And the number could grow, if other ancient symbol systems are deciphered and proven to represent true writing. But as it stands, most scholars believe that just these four scripts had independent origins. The Steps to True WritingTrue writing systems use graphic symbols to represent speech unambiguously. They allow literate people to write anything they can say, and have it read just as intended. Bones from Stone Age sites over 10,000 years old have been found with successive incisions, which some archaeologists argue were tallies, keeping track of events like successful hunts or lunar phases. (Credit: Overmann 2016 Quaternary International 405) Bones from Stone Age sites over 10,000 years old have been found with successive incisions, which some archaeologists argue were tallies, keeping track of events like successful hunts or lunar phases. (Credit: Overmann 2016 Quaternary International 405) Long before true writing — signs representing speech — people recorded ideas and information in other ways. For instance they drew pictures to depict events or used tallies to keep count of recurrent affairs. And today, long after the emergence of true writing, there are alternative systems like musical notation, mathematical symbols and the cartoon instructions for building IKEA furniture. These systems convey certain concepts more efficiently or effectively than writing could. But they’re limited to particular kinds of information, and don’t transcribe speech word-for-word. We might (struggle to) build the IKEA desk the same way, but two people wouldn’t use exactly the same words to describe the steps (or expletives to mark the missteps). Perhaps someday scientists will understand this script. Perhaps someday scientists will understand this script. The revolutionary idea to have signs that represent speech arose in distinct cultures and at different times: around 3,200 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt, around 1,200 BC in China and around 400 BC in Mesoamerica. Although the history of these scripts differs, they underwent broadly similar developmental stages. The oldest surviving texts come from very specific contexts, such as economic transactions in Mesopotamia and divination rituals in China. The first characters were mainly pictographic signs, depicting exactly what they referred to. For example, in ancient Chinese script, “fish” was represented by a recognizable picture of a fish. Some signs were also borrowed from preexisting symbolic systems, such as emblems, tokens and pottery motifs, with which people were already familiar. How cuneiform characters became less iconic and more stylized over time. (Credit: Lawrence Lo) How cuneiform characters became less iconic and more stylized over time. (Credit: Lawrence Lo) Over time the iconic characters became more stylized, so they were easier to write but resembled their referent object or action less. That “fish” sign got gradually less fishy, ultimately assuming its present-day form: 魚, a crossed box with a hook on top and four dashes radiating below. How various Chinese characters developed over time to their present-day forms. How various Chinese characters developed over time to their present-day forms. In another pivotal step, some characters came to signify sounds, rather than distinct, complete words (though the degree and pace by which phonetic symbols replaced whole-word signs differs between the scripts). This transition was aided by the rebus principle: swapping a word that’s difficult to depict graphically for its homonym, such as using the picture of an “eye” to represent “I”. To help differentiate characters with multiple meanings, the systems also added semantic markers that denoted parts of speech and context clues. Through centuries of innovation, the scripts eventually advanced to the point of transcribing speech. This propelled writing infinitely beyond its original functions, into a tool capable of recording history, literature and messages — all the content filling our libraries, notes and text files today. Adopted and modified by neighboring cultures, these scripts persisted for over a millennium. While the systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mesoamerica eventually died out, the Chinese system has remained in continuous use for more than 3,000 years. That’s the general story of writing, as told by the pristine scripts. Next, we’ll review how their origins differ and what archaeologists have gleaned from the earliest texts. |
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