The first writing
Writing has its origins in the strip of fertile land stretching from the Nile up into the area often referred to as the Fertile Crescent. This name was given, in the early 20th century, to the inverted U-shape of territory that stretches up the east Mediterranean coast and then curves east through northern Syria and down the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Persian Gulf.
The first known writing derives from the lower reaches of the two greatest rivers in this extended region, the Nile and the Tigris. So the two civilizations separately responsible for this totally transforming human development are the Egyptian and the Sumerian (in what is now Iraq). It has been conventional to give priority, by a short margin, to Sumer – dating the Sumerian script to about 3100 BC and the Egyptian version a century or so later.
However, in 1988 a German archaeologist, Günter Dreyer, unearths at Abydos, on the Nile in central Egypt, small bone and ivory tablets recording in early hieroglyphic form the items delivered to a temple – mainly linen and oil.
These fragments have been carbon-dated to between 3300 and 3200 BC. Meanwhile the dating of the earliest cuneiform tablets from Sumeria has been pushed further back, also to around 3200 BC. So any claim to priority by either side is at present too speculative to carry conviction.
Evolution of a script
Most early writing systems begin with small images used as words, literally depicting the thing in question. But pictograms of this kind are limited. Some physical objects are too difficult to depict. And many words are concepts rather than objects.
There are several ways in which early writing evolves beyond the pictorial stage. One is by combining pictures to suggest a concept. Another is by a form of pun, in which a pictorial version of one object is modified to suggest another quite different object which sounds the same when spoken.
An example of both developments could begin with a simple symbol representing a roof - a shallow inverted V. This would be a valid character to mean 'house'. If one places under this roof a similar symbol for a woman, the resulting character could well stand for some such idea as 'home' or 'family'. (In fact, in Chinese, a woman under a roof is one of the characters which can be used to mean 'peace').
This is a conceptual character. The punning kind might put under the same roof a sloping symbol representing the bank of a river. The combined character, roof and bank, would then stand for a financial institution - the type of 'house' which is a 'bank'.
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