Writing

Writing records language with visible marks that another person can read back later, far away or long after the writer has died. It arose independently several times; among the earliest examples are tablets from southern Mesopotamia of around 3300 BCE, on which temple accountants pressed and drew signs while the clay was still damp.

What it is

Each shape of token probably stood for a kind of goods. Sealed in a clay envelope, the tokens could record a debt until it was paid.

Writing is a set of visible marks, agreed within a community, that stand for the words or sounds of a language. A reader who never met the writer can recover the message, even centuries later.

People kept records long before they wrote. In the Near East, small clay tokens shaped as cones, spheres and discs appear from about 8000 BCE. The archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat reads them as counters for measures of grain, oil or livestock; others, such as Lucy Bennison-Chapman, argue that many had other uses. Around 3500 BCE, accountants sealed tokens inside hollow clay balls and pressed the same shapes on the outside. Such devices tracked quantities but could not record a name or a sentence.

A writing system can note whole words, syllables or single sounds, and many combine these principles.

How it works

Two ideas turned counting into writing. The first gave quantities and goods separate signs. On the oldest tablets from Uruk, numbers are pressed with the round end of a stylus and the goods are drawn beside them with a pointed tip: five marks and an ear of barley for five measures of barley. The value of a number sign still depended on what was counted, with different systems for grain, animals or land.

The second idea was the rebus, using a sign for its sound. In Sumerian, “arrow” and “life” sounded alike, so the arrow sign could also write “life”, a word hard to draw. Sound signs appear in Mesopotamia by about 3000 BCE.

Pressed at different angles, the corner of a cut reed leaves vertical, horizontal and oblique wedges.

Tracing curves in damp clay drags it into ridges, so scribes came to press the edge of a cut reed instead. Each touch left a wedge, and over the third millennium BCE the pictures became groups of wedges, hence the name cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus.

Egyptian scribes chewed the end of a rush stem into a brush and rubbed it on cakes of black or red ink set in a wooden palette. They wrote on papyrus, strips of the plant’s pith laid in two crossed layers, pressed and dried. Alphabets later used signs for single sounds, so a few dozen of them could write any word.

How to build

You need fine clay, water, a dry reed or garden cane as thick as a pencil, a knife and a damp cloth.

Prepare the clay. Potter’s clay works as it is. Riverbank clay must be soaked, poured through a cloth to remove grit, then left to stiffen until it takes a thumbprint without sticking. Knead out the air pockets.

Shape the tablet. Press a ball the size of a small egg into a cushion about 2 cm thick, small enough to hold in one hand.

Cut the stylus. Saw off about 15 cm of reed. Near one end, shave the sides with the knife until the tip is square in section, with flat faces meeting at sharp corners, then cut it straight across: a corner pressed into clay leaves a wedge. Cut the other end through a node, so that the solid partition closes the tube, and round it off; a round wooden stick also works. Pressed straight down it leaves a circle, and at a slant a D-shaped notch, the two shapes the first scribes used for numbers.

Write. Divide the face into boxes with the long edge of the stylus and put one entry in each box. Press the number with the round end and lift it cleanly. Then draw the sign for what was counted with a corner of the square end, as the first scribes did, or build it from pressed wedges, as later scribes did.

Dry it. Leave the tablet in the shade for several days, turning it once so it does not crack. Dried clay softens again in water; firing in a kiln, as for pottery, makes it permanent.

Try the alphabet. Say ten words aloud and list the sounds you hear, ignoring the letters you would normally spell them with. Give each sound a simple sign, using the old trick: draw something whose name begins with that sound. When no word starts with a sound, invent a sign for it. Add a sign whenever a new word brings a new sound: most alphabets end up with twenty to forty-odd letters.

Safety. Cut away from your body when trimming the reed. Do not sand or sweep dry clay: its dust contains fine silica that harms the lungs, so clean with a damp cloth. Fire tablets only in a proper kiln, and never fire a piece that is still damp, which can burst.

History and evolution

The oldest tablets come from the Uruk IV layer of the city’s temple quarter, usually dated about 3350–3200 BCE, by some authors 3200–3100 BCE. Over 6,000 proto-cuneiform tablets and fragments are known from Uruk and other sites, most of them accounts. Cuneiform lasted over three thousand years.

In China the scribe ground an ink stick on a wet stone and wrote with a pointed hair brush.

In Egypt, bone and ivory labels from tomb U-j at Abydos, dated to around 3200 BCE, already carry hieroglyphs, some used for their sound. Specialists still debate whether Egypt took the idea from Mesopotamia, as the dates are so close. Chinese writing appears on Shang oracle bones from Anyang around 1200 BCE, already mature. In Mesoamerica, writing was in use in Oaxaca by about 400 BCE, and painted Maya glyphs at San Bartolo date from 300–200 BCE. No contact links China or Mesoamerica with the Near East at those dates: these were separate inventions.

The alphabet grew out of hieroglyphs. Some forty short texts from the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadim, in Sinai, and two from Wadi el-Hol, in Egypt, use only 27 to 29 signs. Their writers, speakers of a Semitic language, gave each Egyptian picture the first sound of its name in their own tongue: a house, beth, became b; water, mem, became m. Proposed dates run from about 1850 to 1550 BCE. By 1200–1050 BCE the Phoenicians wrote 22 consonant letters from right to left. Greeks adopted them around 800 BCE and added vowels, and the Etruscans passed the alphabet to Rome in the seventh century BCE.

Paper, first made in China in the second century BCE, later became the usual surface for writing and for printed books.