The History of Writing
Language exist long before writing. As far back as 25,000 years people began to paint pictures on cave walls to express their desires or tell a story. Around 4100-3800 BCE the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture. Eventually, the pictographs were stylized, rotated and in impressed in clay with a wedge shaped stylus to become the script known as Cuneiform.
The Egyptians invented a syllabic system had no definitive vowels. Some hieroglyphs were biliteral, some triliteral. Others were determinatives that at the end of the word gave a sense of the word and others were idiographs. Eventually, however, certain Egyptian hieroglyphs such as which was pronounced r’i meaning “mouth” became the pictograph for the sound of R with any vowel. The pictograph for “water” pronounced nu became the symbol for the consonantal sound of N. This practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an ALPHABET or the “One Sign-One sound” system of writing.(www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm).
The alphabet helped to democratize civilization by helping the people to become responsible for themselves and their property. The people were able to figure out what they were worth and what others expected of them.

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