Imagine the World with No Written Communication
No street signs, no texting, no symbols for gaming controllers, no books. Thousands of years ago, there was no writing. People had to talk to each other to transfer information. As societies moved from hunting and gathering to farming, people stopped moving around as much. They needed a way to keep track of their crops. Rulers wanted a way to keep track of things like taxes.
It was the Mesopotamians who are credited with the first form of writing in 3100 B.C.E. They used it to keep records. These first writings were nothing like the complex alphabet system we use today. They are called pictographs. They were more like pictures, sort of like emojis, but for business.
Scribes used pointed tools to draw on soft clay. Many of the tablets discovered by archaeologists have information about barley crops on them. Barley was a major crop in Mesopotamia.
By 3500-3000 B.C.E., the pictograph system had evolved into cuneiform writing. The city of Uruk is credited with advancing this type of writing.
To write in cuneiform, scribes used a stylus with a wedge on the end to make impressions that
represented words and images into soft clay. This form of writing spread to all of Mesopotamia where people used this type of writing until about 100 B.C.E., which is when alphabet-like script came into existence.
For more information, visit the following sites:
http://www.ancient.eu/cuneiform/
http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/writing/story/sto_set.html
