Overview

The development of writing took place more than once, in different places and at different times. The earliest was about 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, the ancient Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, home of the first farmers and city builders as well as the first scribes. Writing began as idealized pictures and simple symbolic notations such as slashes and dots. Eventually, alphabets provided the flexibility to represent any sounds in the spoken language, facilitating the transmission of abstract ideas. Writing was arguably humanity's most important invention, because it provided the means to record and pass along knowledge between people separated in time and space.

Background

Before writing could be conceived, humans first needed spoken language. Anthropologists are unsure when our remote ancestors first developed the physiological capability to speak, and the abstract reasoning necessary to use verbal symbols to...