The Invention of Writing — How Humanity Carved Memory in Stone

• Opening — What Was the Oldest Writing About
• What Is Writing — The Art of Catching Speech
• Speech Vanishes, Writing Remains — Externalizing Memory
• Cuneiform — Humanity's First Writing, Born on Clay
  • Writing That Began with Accounting
  • The Reed Pen and the Clay Tablet
  • From Picture to Sign
  • A Library of Clay Tablets — Knowledge Piled on Mud
  • Gilgamesh and Hammurabi
• Egyptian Hieroglyphs — Sacred Picture Script
  • The World of the Hieroglyph
  • Sacred Writing and Everyday Writing
  • A Picture That Is Not Quite a Picture
  • The Rosetta Stone — Reviving a Forgotten Script
• The Birth of the Alphabet — Writing Every Word with Few Signs
  • The Phoenician Invention
  • Why Consonants Alone Sufficed
  • The Alphabet Crosses to Greece
  • The Stream That Flowed to Rome
• The Path Away from Pictures — Steps of Abstraction
• The Scribes — The People Who Handled Writing
• Vessels for the Word — From Clay Tablet to Paper
• Writing Sound or Writing Meaning — Phonographic and Logographic Scripts
  • Hangul as a Fascinating Case
• The Direction of Writing — Left or Right
• The East Asian Path — Chinese Characters, Another Great Stream
• The Printing Press — Until Writing Became Everyone's
• Writing and Power — In Whose Hands Did Script Lie
• Reading, Another Miracle
• How Writing Changed Human Thought
• Numbers and Writing — Two Signs That Grew Together
• Was the Alphabet Really an Equalizer
• Diverse Perspectives — Was Writing Invented Only Once
• Forgotten Scripts — Riddles Not Yet Solved
• A Few Fascinating Facts
• Had There Been No Writing — A Thought Experiment
• Modern Implications — We Still Live in the Age of Writing
• The Beginning of Literature — Writing Catches the Story
• Record and Truth — What Does Writing Leave Behind
• Closing — From a Small Mark on the Mud
• The Place of Handwriting — What Remains Though Technology Changes
• Food for Thought
• In One Line
• A Short Quiz
• 참고 자료 / References

Opening — What Was the Oldest Writing About

How romantic it would be if the first words humanity ever wrote had been a poem, a prayer, or the tale of a great hero. The reality is a little more humble. Many of the oldest known written records are account books: who received how much barley, how many sheep there were, who was issued how much beer.

There is no romance in that, yet this is precisely what reveals the true nature of writing most honestly. Human beings did not invent writing to sing of beauty. They invented it so as not to forget. They needed to fix outside the mind those things that were too numerous, too complex, and too important to hold in the head alone.

Today we follow this ordinary yet astonishing event: the invention of writing. We will trace how small marks pressed into the mud of Mesopotamia came to transform human thought, power, and even the very sense of time.

What Is Writing — The Art of Catching Speech

Before the story proper, let us pause to consider what writing is. Writing is a system for transferring speech into visible signs. It may be called the art of catching the sounds that flow away and leaving them in form.

Here a distinction is needed. People have left things in pictures since very ancient times. The paintings on cave walls and simple marks could convey meaning. But that alone is hard to call writing. To be called writing, signs must be systematically connected to particular speech. That is, through those signs one must be able to set down the content of speech fairly fully and read it back again.

By this standard, the history in which humanity drew pictures is very long, but the history in which it possessed writing in the true sense is far shorter. Crossing that threshold from pictures and marks into writing is the very great event we are about to follow. The moment humanity discovered how to catch speech systematically, the world began to change quietly, but fundamentally.

Speech Vanishes, Writing Remains — Externalizing Memory

Before writing appeared, humanity lived by speech alone for tens of thousands of years. Our species has used language for hundreds of thousands of years, but capturing that language in visible form is a relatively recent achievement. At its longest reckoning, the history of writing spans only about five thousand years.

For all those ages, humanity transmitted every kind of knowledge through memory. People memorized through song, through rhythm, through repetition. In an oral culture, a person who remembered well and told stories well was at once a library, a book of laws, and a history book.

But memory has limits. People die, stories get distorted, and numbers get confused. As trade grew complex and society grew large, more and more matters became too much for speech alone to handle. This is exactly where writing was born: a technology for moving memory out of the head and onto clay, stone, and papyrus. We often call this the externalization of memory.

Once memory was externalized, something remarkable happened. Knowledge was no longer confined to a single lifespan. Even after the one who carved the words had died, the words remained. People hundreds, even thousands of years later could read those records. For the first time, it became possible to speak across time.

Cuneiform — Humanity's First Writing, Born on Clay

Writing That Began with Accounting

Humanity's first full-fledged writing system appeared around the third millennium BCE in the Sumerian region of Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq. This was cuneiform.

What is fascinating is that cuneiform was not, from the start, created to record language. Its roots lie in accounting. Before writing appeared, the Sumerians used small clay tokens to count goods. One shape of token stood for a sheep, another for a unit of grain. They placed these tokens inside clay envelopes to record transactions.

As time passed, people began pressing the shapes of the enclosed tokens onto the outer surface of the envelope. Then they realized something: if the marks were there, the tokens themselves were no longer needed. In this way, the marks on the clay tablet came to stand in for the tokens, and from here writing sprouted. This is the widely accepted account of how it began.

The Reed Pen and the Clay Tablet

The name cuneiform comes from the shape of the characters. The Sumerians cut reeds at an angle to make a pen with a pointed tip, and pressed it into soft clay tablets to leave marks. These marks resembled wedges or nails, and so the script is named after the Latin word for wedge.

Clay tablets were cheap and plentiful, and when dried in the sun or baked in fire they lasted a long time. As a result, hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have survived to this day, preserved in museums and research institutions. A humble material, mud, turned out to be the most stubborn guardian of human memory.

From Picture to Sign

Early cuneiform was close to pictures that imitated the shapes of things. To draw an ox, one drew an ox's head; to write water, one drew a wavy line. But over time the characters grew steadily more abstract. Because drawing curves with a reed pen was cumbersome, the signs simplified into combinations of straight lines and wedge shapes.

A more important change was that the characters came to represent not only meaning but sound as well. Pictures alone made it hard to record abstract concepts or personal names. So people began borrowing characters of similar pronunciation to express sounds. Through this, cuneiform developed into a complex system holding both meaning and sound, and could record not only administrative documents but also law codes, letters, myths, and literature.

A Library of Clay Tablets — Knowledge Piled on Mud

Another astonishing legacy that cuneiform left behind is a vast collection of clay tablets. A certain king of ancient Mesopotamia is said to have gathered a great body of clay tablets in his palace, and this is counted among the very old large-scale archives humanity has left.

Within it were not only administrative documents but a wide range of writings, from myth and literature to astronomy and medicine, divination and dictionaries. It was an attempt to gather in one place the knowledge a society possessed. Interestingly, when the palace later burned, these tablets were baked all the harder by the heat and so were preserved all the better. Much of the Epic of Gilgamesh, too, has come down to us from within such a collection.

What such a collection tells us is that people sought, from early on, to gather and organize knowledge and pass it to the next generation. Gathering scattered records in one place and classifying them is itself the governing of knowledge, and this is essentially no different from what we do today in libraries and archives. That heap of knowledge piled on mud is one scene in humanity's long effort to store memory, neatly, outside itself.

Gilgamesh and Hammurabi

One of the most famous legacies cuneiform left behind is the Epic of Gilgamesh. This story of the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and his anguish over death, was carved into clay tablets and endured for thousands of years, coming down to humanity as one of the oldest works of literature. It contains a great flood narrative as well, often compared with the flood tales of many later cultures.

Another monument is the Code of Hammurabi. This law code, which Hammurabi, king of Babylon, had carved into a stone pillar, contains the principle of punishment well known through the phrase an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The very fact that the law was carved in stone for all to see shows that writing had taken its place as a tool of power and governance.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs — Sacred Picture Script

The World of the Hieroglyph

In Egypt, not far from Mesopotamia, a script of its own developed around the same period. These were hieroglyphs. Made of intricate pictures of birds and serpents, people and tools, plants and stars, this script was beautiful to behold, and was itself an art that adorned the walls of temples and tombs.

The Greek origin of the word hieroglyph carries the sense of sacred carving. True to the name, this script was deeply bound up with religion, and was used mainly in sacred spaces such as temples, monuments, and royal tombs.

Sacred Writing and Everyday Writing

Another fascinating point about Egyptian writing is that within a single culture, the writing of formality and the writing of practice existed side by side. If the intricate hieroglyphs that adorned the walls of temples and tombs were writing for formality and the sacred, a separate, swifter and more abbreviated script was used for everyday administration and record-keeping.

This was only natural. One could not draw every text carefully stroke by stroke. To record taxes, write letters, and keep ledgers, a writing that could be set down quickly was needed. So the same writing system split, according to its use, into a formal face and a flowing, cursive one.

This way in which a single script comes to have several faces according to its use was not unique to Egypt. In many cultures, writing carved on monuments and writing used in daily life, careful hands and quick hands, existed together. Writing has always changed its shape to suit human need, and between the two demands of formality and practicality, a varied array of scripts has bloomed.

A Picture That Is Not Quite a Picture

A common misunderstanding about hieroglyphs is to assume that a single character simply means whatever it pictures. In reality, hieroglyphs were far more complex. Some signs expressed the meaning of a thing, some expressed a sound, and still others served as markers indicating the category of a word. The same picture of a bird could mean bird in one context and represent a particular sound in another.

For everyday use the Egyptians employed a separate, more cursive script written in a flowing hand. If the sacred hieroglyph was the script of formality and art, the practical script was the writing of swift, useful work. Even within a single culture, the look of writing changed according to its purpose.

The Rosetta Stone — Reviving a Forgotten Script

Hieroglyphs were once a completely forgotten script. As the ancient Egyptian civilization waned and the cultures of Greece and Rome moved in, those who could read hieroglyphs gradually vanished. For more than a thousand years, the pictures on those walls remained nothing but mysterious patterns.

The key that reopened this locked door was the Rosetta Stone. Discovered during an expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, this black stone bore the same content carved in three scripts: hieroglyphs, the everyday Egyptian script, and Greek letters. Because scholars could read the Greek, a challenge began to decipher the hieroglyphs by using it as a clue.

After long effort, in the early nineteenth century, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion at last unraveled the principles of the hieroglyphic script. He showed that hieroglyphs were not mere pictures but a system holding both sound and meaning, reviving the voices of ancient Egyptians who had been silent for thousands of years. The Rosetta Stone is widely used even today as a metaphor for the key that unlocks a hidden secret.

The Birth of the Alphabet — Writing Every Word with Few Signs

The Phoenician Invention

Cuneiform and hieroglyphs were great achievements, but they had one serious drawback: they were too hard to learn. One had to memorize hundreds or thousands of signs, so the ability to read and write was a privilege granted only to a small number of professional scribes.

What threw this heavy door wide open was the alphabet. The Phoenicians, who flourished through trade along the eastern Mediterranean, refined a way of writing speech with only a small number of signs. The core idea was simple: instead of assigning a sign to a whole word or a syllable, they matched one sign to the sound of each consonant.

This way, there was no need to memorize hundreds of characters. With a little more than twenty letters, nearly every word could be written. The Phoenician script, however, recorded mainly consonants, leaving the reader to fill in the vowels from context.

Why Consonants Alone Sufficed

That the Phoenician script recorded mainly consonants and omitted vowels sounds rather strange to us today. How did people read without vowels. Yet this was a way well suited to the nature of that language.

In some languages, the skeleton of consonants alone reveals the outline of a word well enough. Because the structure of the consonants carried the core meaning of the word, while the vowels were filled in naturally from context, even consonants alone could be read without difficulty by a familiar reader. Much as we catch the sense of a sentence with abbreviations or missing letters from its context.

This shows well that writing is refined to suit the nature of its language. For some languages a consonant-centered notation is fitting; for others it is better to write the vowels clearly too. That vowel letters were added in the passage from Phoenician script to Greek script can also be seen as writing's response to the needs of a new language.

The Alphabet Crosses to Greece

As a trading people, the Phoenicians sailed across the Mediterranean, and their script spread along with them. Among those who received it, the Greeks took a decisive further step: they introduced letters for vowels.

The Phoenician script had several consonant signs that Greek did not need, and the Greeks assigned these to vowel sounds. Once both consonants and vowels were written, script became a precise instrument with which almost anyone could reconstruct the pronunciation. Many scholars regard this as the starting point of a complete phonetic alphabet. The very word alphabet comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek script.

The Stream That Flowed to Rome

The Greek alphabet was passed in turn to the Italian peninsula, and through several stages it took root as the Latin script of the Romans. As the Roman Empire extended its reach across Europe, the Latin script spread with it, and today countless Western languages, including English, use this Latin script. The a, b, c that we read now reach all the way back to the traders of distant Phoenicia.

Let us lay out this long journey in a simple timeline.

[The Broad Course of Writing — Approximate Chronological Order]

3rd millennium BCE   Cuneiform appears in Sumer, Mesopotamia (from accounting)
3rd millennium BCE   Hieroglyphs develop in Egypt
2nd millennium BCE   Early alphabetic scripts form in the Levant
late 2nd millennium  Phoenician consonant alphabet takes shape
early 1st millennium The Greeks adopt Phoenician script and add vowels
1st millennium BCE   Latin script forms, spreads with Roman expansion
mid-15th century CE  European printing spreads, accelerating literacy
mid-15th century CE  Korea creates Hunminjeongeum (Hangul)
early 19th century   Hieroglyphs deciphered with the Rosetta Stone as a clue

The dates in this timeline vary somewhat among scholars, and they are written here approximately, to help grasp the broad course of events.

The Path Away from Pictures — Steps of Abstraction

If we were to compress the development of writing into a single scene, it would be the long walk away from pictures. Characters that were at first pictures resembling things turned, over time, into ever simpler and more abstract signs.

There was a practical reason for this. To write quickly, one had no leisure to draw a complex picture in full each time. In the process of pressing a reed pen into clay or writing swiftly with a brush, characters grew naturally abbreviated. The picture once drawn carefully stroke by stroke turned into a sign finished in a few movements of the hand.

This change was not merely a matter of shape. The further a character drew away from the look of a thing, the more freely it could carry sound and abstract meaning. Once a sign unlike an ox could mean ox, and a sign unrelated to waves could represent a certain sound, writing grew at last into a tool able to record everything in speech. By just the distance it moved away from pictures, the power of writing grew instead.

The Scribes — The People Who Handled Writing

The existence of writing did not mean that everyone could read and write. In ancient societies, handling script was the work of specialists who had undergone long training. These were the scribes.

To become a scribe, one had to enter school from a young age and undergo years of rigorous discipline. Students memorized hundreds of signs and drilled the same characters again and again onto clay tablets until their hands knew them. On practice tablets found in the scribal schools of Mesopotamia, the writing a student copied carefully and the corrections a teacher added survive side by side. A dictation notebook from thousands of years ago has come down to us.

Because the skill was so hard-won, scribes were held in high regard. They were needed everywhere: in palaces and temples, in markets and courts. Recording taxes, taking down letters, attesting to contracts, setting down royal decrees in documents, all of this passed through their hands. To know writing was a passage into the very heart of society.

What is fascinating is that the harder the script, the greater the scribe's authority grew. A complex writing system conferred a kind of monopoly on the few who could handle it. So some scholars regard the spread of the easily learned alphabet as not merely a matter of convenience, but an event that shook the very structure of knowledge and power.

Vessels for the Word — From Clay Tablet to Paper

The history of writing is also a history of what writing is held in. According to the material on which writing was set down, the look and use of writing changed.

In Mesopotamia, as we have seen, clay tablets were used. The common, cheap mud was good for pressing into, and once baked it lasted long. In Egypt, people favored a paper-like material made from the stalks of a plant called papyrus. Light and able to be rolled up, it suited long texts well, but being vulnerable to damp it preserved less well than clay tablets.

Later, in various cultures, finely prepared animal skin was also used for writing. It was tough and durable, but troublesome to make and costly. And at last, as paper, drawn thin and even from plant fibers, spread widely, the holding of writing became far lighter and cheaper. Paper played a great part in popularizing the written word, and later, meeting the printing press, it would unleash an explosive power.

Each time the material changed, the landscape of writing changed with it. The age of carving into heavy clay tablets and the age of plying a brush or pen over light paper differed even in the very attitude with which people approached writing. Our own tapping of words onto a screen now is the most recent scene in this long history of materials.

Writing Sound or Writing Meaning — Phonographic and Logographic Scripts

One important framework for understanding writing is to ask what a script records. Broadly, scripts divide into phonographic writing, which records sound, and logographic writing, which records meaning.

Phonographic writing renders the sounds of speech into signs. The alphabet and Hangul are leading examples. Looking at the letters, one can tell fairly clearly how they are read. Such writing has the advantage of being easy to learn because the number of signs is small.

Logographic writing records meaning rather than sound. Chinese characters are the leading example. A single character stands for a single meaning or word, and the same character can be read by speakers of different languages each in their own pronunciation. The burden, however, is that there are a great many characters to master.

Of course, real scripts do not divide so neatly into two. Many scripts carry both natures at once. Chinese characters also make use of elements that carry sound information, and there are scripts, such as the Japanese kana, that record sound in syllabic units. Classification is only a framework to aid understanding; actual writing is far more varied.

The table below offers a simple comparison of the features of the two approaches.

Hangul as a Fascinating Case

Even among phonographic scripts, Hangul holds a special place. Unlike most scripts, which transformed naturally over long ages, Hangul is a rare script for which we have a clear record of who made it, when, and why.

In the mid-fifteenth century, King Sejong of Joseon, troubled that the common people could not express their meaning because they did not know writing, created a new script. This was Hunminjeongeum, meaning the correct sounds for instructing the people. Hangul is delicately designed for ease of learning, forming syllables by combining a small number of basic letters. As a script whose purpose and principles are transmitted together, Hangul stands as a most fascinating case in the history of writing.

The Direction of Writing — Left or Right

When we look closely at writing, it is fascinating that even the direction in which writing proceeds differed from culture to culture. Some scripts were written from left to right, some from right to left, and there were cultures that wrote from top to bottom.

The Latin script and Hangul we use today generally proceed from left to right. But not all scripts are so. Some ancient scripts used a manner of writing one line from left to right and the next from right to left, alternately. In that writing proceeded as an ox plowing a field turns at the end of one furrow and comes back, this manner is often explained by such a comparison.

The direction of writing seems trivial, but it is bound up with the shape of the characters, the writing tool, and the nature of the material. Which hand holds which tool and writes on which material changes the comfortable direction. Even in a single thing as seemingly small as the direction of writing, a trace of the environment in which that script grew is contained.

The East Asian Path — Chinese Characters, Another Great Stream

If the story so far has taken place mainly on the stage of West Asia and the Mediterranean, in East Asia a rather different path unfolded. At its center stand the Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are a script that developed in China, and among the major scripts still in use today they rank among the very oldest. Their early forms include characters carved on turtle shells and animal bones, which are said to have been used for divination and recording its results. Like cuneiform, which began with accounting, Chinese characters too grew out of practical and ritual needs.

A major feature of Chinese characters is that one character generally carries one meaning and one syllable. There are therefore very many characters, but at the same time people from regions speaking different languages could read the same character each in their own pronunciation and share its meaning. This was a great force in binding a wide region together into a single writing culture.

Chinese characters spread to many neighboring countries and left a deep influence. In Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere, Chinese characters were used for a long time, and upon that foundation each region found its own way. Japan developed the kana, which record syllables, on the basis of Chinese characters, while Korea, as we have seen, created Hangul on an entirely new principle. It is a fascinating case of how a single script, meeting various cultures, branches out into different forms.

The Printing Press — Until Writing Became Everyone's

That writing was invented did not mean it at once became everyone's. For a long time, writing had to be copied by hand one character at a time, and books were precious and costly things. To make a single book, someone had to spend a long time carefully transcribing it.

What greatly changed this landscape was printing. Once the same characters could be struck off again and again, books were made far faster and more cheaply. In particular, as movable-type printing spread widely in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, books gradually changed from treasures of a few into things that many people could own.

The consequences were deep and wide. As more people came into contact with books, the number of those who could read increased, and knowledge and ideas spread as never before. Once people far apart could read the same book at the same time, the sharing of thought and debate grew far livelier as well. If the alphabet lowered the threshold of writing, the printing press flung the door wide open.

Viewed from afar, the history of writing is also a long process by which writing opens up to ever more people. Writing that had lingered in the hands of a few scribes, passing through the alphabet and the printing press, and meeting digital technology today, has at last come to the fingertips of nearly everyone.

Writing and Power — In Whose Hands Did Script Lie

That writing began with accounting is no accident. From the start, writing was deeply bound up with collecting taxes, distributing grain, and managing people. In other words, writing was a technology of administration and power.

To govern a large society, one must record precisely who must pay what and how much. One must set down which land belongs to whom, and which promise was made when. Writing made such things possible, and as a result vast bureaucracies and states could function. The framework of governance, taxes, law, and administration, could scarcely have held together without writing.

For this reason, the ability to read and write was itself power. Scribes who could handle the complex script occupied key positions in society, and writing remained in the hands of a few. That law was carved into stone, that the deeds of kings were left on monuments, all of this shows the authority that writing held.

A fascinating paradox is that this very tool of power gradually opened to more people with the coming of the alphabet. A script that was easy to learn lowered the threshold to writing, and when it later met the printing press, knowledge spread even more widely. The history of writing is also a story in which the concentration and the diffusion of power flow together.

Reading, Another Miracle

When we speak of writing, we usually attend to writing, but no less astonishing is reading. To look upon the marks someone carved and revive the speech and meaning held within them: that is reading.

Reading is by no means a simple act. The eyes follow small signs, and in the mind those signs unfold into sound, and again into meaning. To a skilled reader this process happens almost in an instant and so feels natural, but in fact it is an intricate ability that becomes second nature only after long learning.

With reading made possible, human beings could take in the thoughts even of people they had never met. We meet, through writing, news of a distant place, the insight of one who has already left the world, the tale of an age we have never visited. If writing is carving memory outside the self, reading is drawing that carved memory back into oneself. Only when the two meet does writing at last become a bridge across time and space.

How Writing Changed Human Thought

Writing was not merely a tool for taking down speech. The act of writing and reading changed the very way human beings think.

First, abstract thought grew. Speech flows away, but writing stays put. Writing that stays can be pondered, compared, and revised. Building up a complex argument step by step, and going back to examine what was written before, become far easier when writing exists. Thought that handles long chains of logic deepened together with writing.

Second, knowledge accumulated and connected. When one generation set down its discoveries in writing, the next could set out again from there. There was no need to start over from the beginning each time. The power of the written record had much to do with how learning and science advanced steadily over long stretches of time.

Third, a sense of history arose. In the ages before writing, the past lingered dimly in memory and legend. But writing fixed events together with their dates. Only then did people face the past distinctly as the past, and become aware of where they stood within the flow of time. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the very concept of history grew upon writing.

Of course, there are various views on the changes writing brought. Long ago a certain philosopher even worried that writing would weaken the memory instead. The concern was that people would come to rely on the outside rather than inscribing things in the mind. Interestingly, this worry, leaping across the ages, recurs in changed form whenever a new technology appears. The question of how a tool, while expanding human capacity, makes us lose something, has been a living one from the age of writing down to our own day.

Numbers and Writing — Two Signs That Grew Together

When discussing the origin of writing, there is a partner hard to leave out: numbers. Fascinatingly, the fact that many of humanity's first records dealt with quantities shows that counting and recording numbers was deeply entangled with the birth of writing.

The clay tokens we saw earlier were originally tools for counting the number of goods. Starting from marks representing so many sheep or so many units of grain, they moved gradually to a stage of writing down what it was that had been counted. In other words, at first how many came first, and writing clearly what it was followed after.

This is another clue showing that writing grew together with abstract thought. To detach the number three from three sheep or three grains and handle it simply as the concept three is by no means a given. The ability to write a number as a sign and think of it apart from things tells us that human thought had made a leap forward. Writing and numbers grew up thus side by side, helping one another.

Was the Alphabet Really an Equalizer

The tale that the easily learned alphabet lowered the threshold of writing is appealing. But there is a point here to examine with care. For the script becoming simpler did not at once mean that everyone came to read and write.

To master writing, a simple writing system alone is not enough. There must also be the time and leisure to learn, someone to teach, things to read and tools to write with. Even after the alphabet appeared, those who knew writing long remained a part of society, and the wide spread of the ability to read and write came much later. It was possible only when printing, systems of education, and the change of society came together.

So rather than declaring the alphabet an invention that made the world equal in itself, it would be more accurate to see it as an important step that greatly widened the possibility for writing to open to more people. The simplicity of writing was a necessary condition, not by itself a sufficient one. History generally flows not from a single invention but from the meshing of many conditions.

Diverse Perspectives — Was Writing Invented Only Once

A question often raised when discussing the origin of writing is this: was writing invented just once in human history and spread from there, or did it arise separately in several places.

Scholars on the whole take seriously the possibility that writing was invented independently, with no connection between them, in several regions of the world. Mesopotamian cuneiform, and the scripts of other civilizations thought to have developed apart from it, are cited as examples. It is not easy, however, to tell whether a given script arose entirely independently or was influenced by a neighboring culture. The origin of writing remains a fascinating subject of ongoing research.

What is clear is that once the idea of writing arose somewhere, its influence spread quickly. As the course of the alphabet, from Phoenicia to Greece and on to Rome, shows, writing followed people and goods, crossing borders and languages and changing its shape along the way.

Forgotten Scripts — Riddles Not Yet Solved

Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphs could be read again. But not every ancient script revived so fortunately. Several ancient scripts remain in the world that have not been fully deciphered.

Some scripts are hard to solve because not enough material survives. There are cases where only short fragments come down, or where it is not even clear what language the script recorded. Decipherment usually requires either another script alongside that carries the same content, or some clue about the language; and when such a thread is absent, a script keeps its silence for a long time.

These unsolved scripts remind us that deciphering writing is by no means a given. That hieroglyphs came to speak again was the result of several coincidences and long effort layered together. Even now, in every corner of the world, scholars labor to open the doors of locked scripts, and someday yet another forgotten voice may break its silence and speak to us.

A Few Fascinating Facts

The history of writing holds many stories that grow more interesting the more one chews them over. Here are a few.

First, many of the oldest writings were accounting records. Not poems or myths, but lists of grain and livestock and rations were humanity's first sentences. Records noting rations for labor also survive, and they show honestly what people of the time held to be important.

Second, the stubborn vitality of that humble material, the clay tablet. Paper documents vanish easily in fire and damp, but a baked clay tablet only grows harder. There are paradoxical cases in which tablets, baked along with a city as it burned, were thereby preserved all the better. Disaster did not erase the record but rather set it fast.

Third, the story of the Rosetta Stone's decipherment. Three scripts carved on a single block of stone reopened the voice of a civilization that had been locked away for more than a thousand years. The not-quite-coincidence that different scripts carried the same content became the key to reviving a lost language.

Fourth, the trace left in the names of the alphabet's letters. Just as the word alphabet itself comes from the first two letters of the Greek script, the names and order of the letters bear, fossilized within them, the long journey the script has passed through.

Had There Been No Writing — A Thought Experiment

Let us imagine for a moment. What if humanity had, in the end, never invented writing.

To begin with, governing a large state would have been extremely difficult. Without records of taxes, law, and administration, systematically managing great numbers of people is no easy matter. Vast empires and complex bureaucracies became possible only upon the foundation of writing.

The accumulation of knowledge, too, would have been slower. If everything were entrusted to memory and the spoken word, much of the insight one person gathered over a lifetime would largely vanish along with them at the moment of death. The next generation might have had to set out again, each time, from nearly the same place. The steep advance of learning and science we enjoy today is the result of piling record upon record, atop the records of those who came before.

Above all, we would scarcely have heard the voices of the past. The sorrow of Gilgamesh, the law of Hammurabi, the letters and prayers of distant ancients, all would long since have faded into silence had there been no writing. Writing is the passage through which the dead speak to the living, and nearly the only path by which we converse with our ancestors across time.

Modern Implications — We Still Live in the Age of Writing

Today we read and write more than ever before. Paper books and newspapers, of course, but also messages and posts on screens, search boxes and comments: writing is with us in nearly every waking moment. If printing once greatly popularized the written word, digital technology has made writing an everyday matter for almost everyone.

Yet the essence of writing is not so different from five thousand years ago. We still write so as not to forget, to carry our words afar, to speak across time. Between the heart of the Sumerian scribe who carved the amount of barley into a clay tablet, and our own as we tap a memo onto a screen, there is something that runs together at a deep level.

At the same time, new questions arise. In an age when everything is recorded and searched with ease, what shall we remember and what shall we entrust to the outside. Now that the capacity to externalize memory has grown to an extreme, the old philosopher's worry comes to find us again with a new face. The question posed by the invention of writing is not yet finished.

The Beginning of Literature — Writing Catches the Story

Even though writing was at first used for accounting and administration, its use did not stay there. People soon began to write down stories. Tales of gods, the adventures of heroes, songs of love and death, were carved onto clay tablets and papyrus.

The Epic of Gilgamesh mentioned earlier is a leading example. This story of grieving before the death of a friend, wandering in search of eternal life, and at last accepting human mortality, reaches across thousands of years to stir us deeply even today. Had there been no writing, this record of the heart would long since have vanished.

The change that came as literature was written down was great as well. A story passed by mouth changed a little with each telling, but a story fixed in writing took on a settled form. The same story could be met in nearly the same shape by people far away and by people far in the future. A written work also became a foundation that could be read over and pondered, interpreted, and built upon with new works. The long tradition of literature we know grew up precisely upon this power of the record.

Record and Truth — What Does Writing Leave Behind

Though we have said that writing hands the past down to us, there is a careful point here. For what remains in writing is not at once the whole truth of an age.

Those who left records were generally the few who could handle writing, and they chose and set down what was important from their own viewpoint. The deeds of kings were proudly carved, but the daily lives of the nameless were not well preserved. The story of the victorious side comes down in detail, while the voice of the defeated sometimes faded dimly away. So when reading old records, we need to weigh together from whose gaze, and with what intent, they were written.

Even so, the value of what writing left behind is by no means small. Incomplete and slanted to one side though it may be, without records we would know almost nothing of the past. What matters is neither to believe records blindly nor to ignore them, but to read together what they contain and what they lack. One of the greatest gifts writing gave us may be, perhaps, this very material with which we can face the past critically.

Closing — From a Small Mark on the Mud

Let us return to the beginning. Many of the first words humanity wrote were account books reckoning barley and sheep and beer. They were utterly practical records, neither splendid nor sacred.

Yet from that very humble mark, everything began. A small sign on the mud drew human memory out of the head, carried knowledge across generations, changed the shape of power, and cultivated abstraction, logic, and a sense of history. The sorrow of Gilgamesh, the law of Hammurabi, and even this very piece you are reading now, are all distant descendants of that small beginning.

Writing is among the greatest inventions humanity has made. It was a way to carve memory against time, and a technology to carry our words beyond death. In even a single line written carelessly today, this astonishing history spanning five thousand years is fully contained.

The Place of Handwriting — What Remains Though Technology Changes

The tools for writing have kept changing. From reed pen and brush to quill and fountain pen, then to typewriter and keyboard, and now to the fingers that tap a screen. Yet even as technology changed, one thing, the act of a person drawing characters by their own hand, has not easily vanished.

There is something in handwriting that printed letters do not have. Even writing the same content, the shape of the writing differs from person to person, and according to the mood of the day. So a hand-written letter or memo bears the trace of its writer. Into each single character are put the touch and the time of a person.

Of course, in the digital age the place of handwriting is not what it was. Much writing is entered by keyboard and read on screen. Yet many people still feel that there is a special value in setting something down carefully by hand. However far the tools advance, the most ancient gesture of carving memory by hand seems to remain stubbornly within us.

Food for Thought

• The fact that humanity's first writing was not poetry or prayer but accounting records: what does it tell us about the true nature of writing.
• Did entrusting memory to the outside make human beings freer, or did it make us lose something.
• Can we say that the coming of the easily learned alphabet made society more equal.
• How might phonographic and logographic scripts each shape the thought of their users.
• Is the writing of the digital age yet another great turning point in the long history of script.

In One Line

Writing began so as not to forget, and by drawing memory out of the head it fundamentally changed human thought, power, and the sense of time.

The small mark that began in the mud of Mesopotamia was refined through cuneiform and hieroglyphs into the alphabet, spread widely on meeting the printing press, and continues unbroken even onto our screens today.

Within this long story, in which scripts that record sound and scripts that record meaning each walked their own path, the one thing unchanged was humanity's age-old wish to carry words across time.

A Short Quiz

Below is a short quiz to look back over the content of this piece. Read each question first, try to answer it yourself, and then check the answer.

• Question 1. What is the script counted as humanity's first full-fledged writing system, carved on clay tablets in Sumer of Mesopotamia.

• Answer 1. It is cuneiform. Its name comes from the wedge-shaped marks pressed into soft clay tablets with a reed pen.

• Question 2. From what use is cuneiform widely explained to have begun.

• Answer 2. It is explained to have begun in accounting, counting the quantities of goods and recording transactions.

• Question 3. What artifact, bearing three scripts together, became the decisive clue for deciphering the forgotten Egyptian hieroglyphs.

• Answer 3. It is the Rosetta Stone. Using the Greek script as a clue, the principles of the hieroglyphs could be unraveled.

• Question 4. After receiving the Phoenician alphabet, which people introduced letters for vowels and further advanced the phonetic alphabet.

• Answer 4. The Greeks. Thanks to the vowel letters they introduced, the alphabet became a more precise phonetic instrument.

• Question 5. Unlike phonographic writing which records sound, what is the leading example of logographic writing that records meaning.

• Answer 5. Chinese characters. A single character stands for a single meaning or word.

참고 자료 / References

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Writing (writing system) — https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Cuneiform — https://www.britannica.com/topic/cuneiform
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hieroglyphic writing — https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyphic-writing
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Alphabet — https://www.britannica.com/topic/alphabet-writing
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rosetta Stone — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rosetta-Stone
• The British Museum, Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone — https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone
• HISTORY, Who Created the First Alphabet — https://www.history.com/news/who-created-the-first-alphabet