Have you ever wondered what the oldest known written text is? Even if you did, you probably wouldn’t be surprised that it’s really old. People have been communicating about their experiences and reality for thousands of years. Early writings were not written in ways we would recognize today, and modern writing emerged as a long process.
The oldest form of visual communication can be found in ancient caves scattered around the world. Cave paintings are a form of representation that people use to record their experiences with certain events or things. However, they generally do not tend to form a specific linguistic message and are therefore more considered part of pictorial art traditions.
However, when some pictures continually begin to represent certain meanings, they begin to turn into pictograms. So, a circle with lines coming out of it could represent the sun, or a stickman with two legs, a circle for a head and two sticks for an arm, or a zigzag line could be a lightning bolt. As long as other people can recognize these drawings and copy them for similar purposes, they function as a form of communication. For example, nowadays you can use a knife and fork image to indicate a restaurant, or an airplane image can indicate an airport.
What these pictures have in common is that they are used to describe things that exist in nature or have distinctive features. But when the meaning of a sun drawing expands to include temperature, light, and daylight, it is now called an ideogram. Ideograms come to represent ideas and abstract meanings, not just things found in the real world.
Ancient languages began with pictograms and ideograms
Many ancient languages are thought to have started with simpler representations of pictograms or ideograms that have remained in use for centuries. Both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese writing contain pictograms that translate into more abstract meanings. When a symbol is sufficiently removed from something physical, it is easier to see it as a word in a language. When symbols are used to represent certain words in a language, they become logograms. Logograms form the basis of many of the earliest true writing systems, including languages in the Near East, China, and Central America.
Let’s get to the main subject… The oldest accepted writing style was recorded on a limestone tablet known as the Kish tablet, dated to 3,500 BC. The tablet was found in an ancient Sumerian city called Kish, in what is now Iraq. The writing on its surface is purely pictographic and represents a midpoint between proto-writing and the more complex syllabic spelling of cuneiform. This remarkable object probably predates Egyptian hieroglyphs by several centuries and thus appears to be the oldest known and decipherable written system used by humans.
Cuneiform was the most common and historically important writing system in the ancient Middle East, and was used by many and diverse cultures, including their spoken languages, the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. Writing was created by pushing reed styli into moist clay to create wedge-shaped indentations that, when combined in different ways, can represent different speech syllables that when put together form different words. Later, the scribes also began to carve cuneiform on all kinds of stone objects.
The writing system has been used for nearly 3,000 years and has produced hundreds of thousands of clay tablets and written objects. Archaeologists only rediscovered many of them in the early 19th century, and efforts were then directed towards deciphering and translating the meanings of these writings.
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