History of WritingFrom Carved Symbols to Movable Type

When did writing first appear? The answer depends on how you define "writing". The tortoise-shell carvings from Jiahu in Henan are more than 8,000 years old, and whether they count as writing is still debated. Cuneiform, written on clay tablets by the Sumerians around 3200 BCE, was first used for bookkeeping. The game holds more than twenty writing systems, and this page follows four threads: the earliest writing, the evolution of Chinese characters, the family tree of alphabets, and modern inventions.

The earliest writing

The dates of these ancient scripts depend on the archaeologist's "clock". Willard Libby invented the method of dating ancient objects by carbon-14, which gave archaeology this ruler and earned him the 1960 Nobel Prize (Arnold & Libby, Science 1949).

The evolution of Chinese characters

Chinese characters went from ancient forms to modern forms in a few clear steps:

• Oracle bone script: writing carved on turtle shells and animal bones in the late Shang dynasty. About 4,500 distinct characters have been found, and about a third can be read.
• Bronze inscriptions: writing cast on bronze vessels. The Mao Gong ding of the Western Zhou has nearly 500 characters.
• Small seal script: after Qin Shi Huang unified the writing system, small seal script became the standard.
• Clerical script: strokes went from round to square, the watershed that turned ancient Chinese writing into modern writing.
• Regular script: matured in the Wei-Jin period and is still the basis of printed Chinese today.

Scripts around China were shaped by Chinese characters too. Kana (hiragana and katakana) were both simplified from Chinese characters. Hangul was created in 1443 under King Sejong the Great, and its consonant letters imitate the shape of the mouth when making each sound.

The family tree of alphabets

The story of the alphabet is a long chain of borrowing.

• Proto-Sinaitic script: Semitic workers in Egypt borrowed pictographic symbols to stand for consonants, the origin of the alphabet.
• Phoenician alphabet: 22 letters that recorded only consonants, spread around the Mediterranean on Phoenician trading ships.
• Greek alphabet: the Greeks were the first to give vowels their own letters.
• Latin alphabet: the most widely used alphabet in the world today.
• Aramaic alphabet: the administrative script of the Persian Empire, which later gave rise to Hebrew, Arabic and several Indian scripts.
• Hebrew alphabet: the square script used in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Arabic alphabet: written from right to left, with letters changing shape depending on their position in a word.
• Brahmi script: Ashoka used it to carve edicts across India, and many scripts of South and Southeast Asia descend from it.
• Devanagari: used to write Hindi and Sanskrit, with a horizontal line along the top of the letters that joins them into words.
• Tibetan script: created in the 7th century by Thonmi Sambhota, modeled on Indian scripts.
• Cyrillic alphabet: created in the late 9th century in the First Bulgarian Empire and named after the missionary Cyril.

Modern inventions

• Braille: Louis Braille went blind at age 3 and invented this system of raised dots for letters at age 15.
• Morse code: uses dots and dashes for letters, and the most common letter, E, is a single dot.
• Unicode: a character-encoding standard released in 1991. It now covers more than 150,000 characters across more than 160 scripts.
• Emoji: in 1999 Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 emoji for Japanese mobile phones.

Writing, language and people

Writing spreads because languages and peoples move. The spread of farming populations also carried their languages around the world, shaping today's language families (Diamond & Bellwood, Science 2003). Even the human capacity for language has a genetic side: the FOXP2 gene, linked to language, underwent special changes in the human lineage (Enard et al., Nature 2002). These studies help explain why writing always follows people and languages.

Papers to search for

• Arnold & Libby (1949): "Age determinations by radiocarbon content: checks with samples of known age"
• Diamond & Bellwood (2003): "Farmers and their languages: the first expansions"
• Enard et al. (2002): "Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language"