History of Writing
Ever wonder how writing came to be? Well…
There’s actually some debate to which civilization can properly claim writing developed there first. Each of the world’s four major civilizations have a claim; that is, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Mesopotamians, and the Indus River Valley.
Traditionally, history is taught that it is the Mesopotamians who first developed writing. The rudiments of their writing system came to be in the fourth millennium B.C. as solely a method for keeping track of accounts and transactions. This proto-writing system developed during the Uruk period (roughly lasting from 4,000 BC to 3,100 BC and named after the city of Uruk in present day southern Iraq). However, we don’t recognize the full development of a writing system until the Sumerians, around the middle of the third millennium B.C. While writing continued to predominate as a method for tracking business transactions, some stories were recorded using the system.
However, other civilizations may have been first. We can’t really be sure, though, as the other three systems are based on completely unknown languages. First, you have the Jaihu script from China. In 1999, a group of researchers uncovered tortoise shells (carbon-dated to between 6,600 to 6,200 years ago) in a grave in Henan, China. On these shells were 16 different markings, some bearing a striking resemblance to Chinese characters used thousands of years later. If true, then the Jaihu script is the earliest writing system; predating the Mesopotamians by some 2,000 years. But many dismiss the characters as a fluke; after all, we have no evidence of their usage between the seventh millennium B.C. and the second millennium B.C., which is when historians commonly recognize the initial development of the Chinese writing system. See an excellent BBC article here.
Second, you have the Vinca script, named after the Vinca culture that existed in south-eastern Europe between the sixth and third millennium B.C. Numerous markings have been found on the ceramics of the Vinca culture, but whether or not it constitutes writing is open to question. One of the problems is that the markings appear to be random; that is, the symbols are rarely repeated. Even if you have one marking for each word, you would still expect to see many symbols repeated over and over. Yet, a few symbols are repeated, even on ceramics discovered hundreds of miles apart. But if it was a writing system, then it has no descendant in the modern world (unlike the Mesopotamian and Jiahu scripts).
Then there is the Indus script, which has its origins in the fourth millenium B.C. While the script did develop into a mature writing system, like the Mesopotamian script, it has no descendant in the modern world. That coupled with the problem that the underlying language is unknown creates the problem that we have no means of deciphering it, despite attempts. Thus, it’s unknown whether the early Indus scripts were truly a writing system.
So there you have it!
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