You probably know that the concept of “writing” was invented by some Mesopotamian people called Sumerian (Some Mesoamerican folks also independently discovered it, though much later than Sumerians did). Have you ever thought, though, how they invented it? Because when you think about it, it’s actually quite a hard task. They had to learn how to decompose a continuous sound into a speech unit, or how to even recognize that sound in all the places it’s used in the language, find symbols to represent those and whatnot. Somehow, they managed to do it. Let’s dive into the details.

The oldest writing system introduced is the Sumerian cuneiform. To trace the number of livestock and grain, people started to use clay tokens before the writing jelled. The rapid development of the already sedentary society, the increase in the distinct elements counted introduced more symbols and led to the first writing system around 3000 B.C.. People started with using clay tablets and scratching it with pointed tools and then to reed pens.

We take it for granted, but an obvious question for the first person wanting to write down some things would be how to structure the writing format. The Sumerian decided writing should be organized by rows and columns, and s/he started writing from top left of the clay, wrote to the straight right until there’s no more space, and then went down(next line). So first writings were supposed to be read from left to right, from top to bottom, as many societies do right now.

The first writings that were excavated from the Sumerian city of Uruk were just pictures of the objects referred to. Doesn’t it just make sense? Pretty easy to read for anyone. Naturally though, the resulting text were telegraphic sentences free of grammar. Then, they started to create new signs. For example, the sign of “eat” was a “head” plus a “bread”.

Okay, this all is great, but our system so far is not very usable and there is not much of a standard. It’s more like a riddle than a system to communicate. Well, then comes the most important step: the introduction of phonetic representation. Both the word “arrow” and “life” in Sumerian language are pronounced as “ti”. They could draw the “arrow” more or less, but how do you draw the “life”(not a philosophical question)? They just drew an arrow anyway, since the reader would just say “ti” anyway. Message delivered! Then though, to resolve the ambiguity(life or arrow), they added a silent sign to indicate the category of the noun(link to Rebus principle here).

Once this was discovered, Sumerians took one more step to it, and they started to use the same strategy for syllables. For example, the word friendship would be written by two guys and a drawing of a “ship”.

The resulting product is far short of a solid writing system, the things you can represent are pretty limited, but it still is a massive step for humanity and it took hundreds of years and generations after generations for Sumerians to get there.

The next step was discarding all the logograms, determinatives, and various signs, and just using an alphabet. The first alphabet was introduced by the speakers of Semitic languages in the area of Modern Syria to the Sinai, and all other people in the world derived from that Ancestral alphabet, modifying it to fit the sounds of their languages(Like the Turkish way of extending the Roman alphabet in 1928 to add the wonderful sounds of Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü).

The last innovation leading to modern alphabets was the introduction of the vowels. The experiments with Semitic alphabet to provide the vowels were done, but the Greek became the first people to write down all vowels systematically into their alphabet, by the same type used for consonants(Inspired from the alphabet of Phoenicians, yes, the word “phonetics” are named after them!).

All in all, from the early Semitic alphabet, modifications and improvements led into the modern Ethiopian alphabet, then from Aramaic to modern Arabic, Hebrew, Indian and Southeast Asian alphabets, and then, via Phoenicians to Greeks, and to Etruscans, then to the Romans, hence the alphabet you are reading right now.

When the writing system was complicated, clumsy and ambiguous, apparently literacy was only for the elite people of those times. For example, the number of scribes of distinct Linear B documents found in the Palace of Pylos was only 40.

Only when writing systems grew simpler and expressive, did the nonprofessionals start to use writing personally. Changing the mainstream into something simpler and more expressive led humanity’s development to rise exponentially. Only then the wonderful proses were written and read, with the involvement of everyone.

Now, I’ll stop here for a second and put the word “programmatic” right before literacy. Right now, what percentage of people in the world are “literate in programs”?

If we changed the mainstream into a simple and expressive programming language, or maybe to something which is supposed to be just a mathematical notation which can run computer programs too, would the number of “programming literates” in the world rise exponentially? Could we then, maybe jump to the even next level in this wonderful journey we had so far here in the world? Or even more, what would happen if the language we use to communicate was machine parsable?

I don’t know the answers, but it feels interesting to think about them.

PS: The story of the writing’s invention up was highly inspired from the chapter “Blueprints and Borrowed Letters” of the book Guns, Germs and Steel of Jared M. Diamond.