Early Writing (Cultural Knowledge)

EARLY WRITING (Sumer and Egypt, 3400-3100 BCE)

For millennia the only way to pass information from one person to another--or from one generation to the next--was through the spoken word. Then came proto-writing, the use of symbols to indicate things, useful as reminders but not representing language per se--perhaps a little like a shopping list. At last, sometime between 3400-3100 BCE, and probably in the "Fertile Crescent" (which runs from Mesopotamia though Assyria and Phoenicia to Egypt) came true writing, the earliest known forms of which include the cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") script from Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most of our modern alphabets derive from hieroglyphics through a long and complicated history.

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(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons; CTTO)