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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't really answer the question - it just says it began with pictographs in clay tablets. But surely that's not the actual origin - wouldn't it be perhaps that earlier than that, there might have been things like ad-hoc markers scratched into trees or rocks (probably pictograms, indicating e.g. a good cave, or the direction to something?) that eventually became more formalised before making the jump to tablets?

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We can only really speak about the earliest writing we know of and that basically requires writing in stone.

We have to remember that we only ever have a squinting view at the past because >99% not made from stone of everything has rotted.

I have no doubt that we were writing on paper-like substances long, long before rock carving, but there's simply no remaining evidence of it the we know of.

Wild to think about the potentially countless records etched on wood that are completely lost to time.

We were painting on caves way before that. I would argue that wall paintings were the first forms of writing. The reason for this is that wall paintings always seem to convey some type of idea or in many cases they seem to represent some type of past event. Eventually that made the jump to actual writing.

Merely conveying ideas isn't enough to be writing in the archeological sense, you have to actually be conveying speech. So-called "full writing" is when the written language can convey any spoken sentence and vice versa.

Importantly, not all drawn symbols that convey meaning are writing. Musical notation is not writing for example. There's been an open debate in archaeology regarding the extent to which rock and cave art are actually conveying speech as opposed to some other form of communication and whether these practices are even directly related to early writing traditions.

a few years ago an article posted here in HN explained that writing was basically invented for accounting. So first forms were depicting symbols for items to be accounted for, then by composition they created new symbols to represent multiple symbols.

what's fascinating is words, numbers, money and computation seem to have the same origin in those proto-cuneiform boxes.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a true American genius, develops the idea of writing from accounting for objects of common value like olive oil, wine, flour etc. She traces the development of literacy to an earlier phenomenon called numeracy - skill in counting and calls both literacy and numeracy as sources of power for the person who possessed those skills.

The following reference may be of help:

How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95.

This book is a summary of her earlier two volume study called 'Before Writing'.

Hope this helps.

I haven't read this book, but the earliest written signs we have are pictographic, and don't seem to have a relation to numbers per se, but are much closer in character to ancient cave drawings. The argument is interesting from the perspective of numeracy as ancient Egyptian magical stories often involved numerical quantities, the Tao Te Ching is another example of magic involved with numbers, but I think that would come from a later period of development of civilization, whereas the origins of writing itself probably predate something like an advanced agrarian economy such as Egypt, China, the Indus River Valley civilization and the Mayan civilization.

Here in Peru the quipu system, a form of proto-writing, was invented for accounting. It is said that it was used for balancing agricultural production across different regions.

Freud argues in Totem and Taboo that the first written sign was actually the totemic figure(s) which tribes use in their various rituals. We can surmise that from these signs evolved pictographs, which then became systematic pictographic writing, which then led to our modern writing systems.

i have not read the article but no, it came from cuneiform from sumer 6k years ago.

the article says cuneiform came from these pictograms (proto cuneiform)

cuneiform is just the method, like pen and paper. i am sure there existed characters before but we cannot know that, nor how they wrote before that, because the clay tablets are the oldest written records humanity has available that survived all this time.

AFAIK writing is thought to have been invented from nothing in at least three places: the Americas, the Middle East, and China.

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