Writing predates the pyramids of Egypt. The earliest known writing systems emerged more than five thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, making the written word one of humanity’s oldest technologies.

Its original purpose had nothing to do with literature or storytelling. Writing was developed primarily as a practical tool for tracking goods, recording trade, managing taxes, and maintaining accounts.

Before fully developed writing existed, many cultures used proto-writing systems capable of conveying ideas but unable to represent spoken language with any completeness.

The earliest widely recognized writing system was Sumerian cuneiform, which took shape in ancient Mesopotamia. The name cuneiform means “wedge-shaped,” a description of the distinctive impressions made by a stylus pressed into soft clay tablets.

Writing did not spread to the rest of the world from a single point of origin. It emerged independently in multiple places. Ancient China developed its own writing system with no borrowing from Mesopotamia or Egypt.

The civilizations of Mesoamerica independently created writing as well, placing it among the small category of fundamental technologies that human beings invented more than once, in separate places, without contact between them.

Many scholars treat the invention of writing as the boundary line separating prehistory from recorded history.

Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually grew into a system of more than five thousand distinct symbols. Reading and writing them was a skill confined to a small educated class, which gave scribes a position of considerable influence and social importance.

Most modern alphabets can be traced back, through a chain of descent, to ancient writing systems of the Near East. The Latin alphabet used for English descended from the Greek alphabet, which itself derived from still earlier scripts. The word alphabet is a compression of alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

The ancient Maya produced one of the most sophisticated writing systems ever developed in the Americas, and it holds the distinction of being the only major pre-Columbian script that has been fully deciphered. Other ancient writing systems, including the Indus script, have resisted all attempts at decipherment despite sustained scholarly attention over many decades.

One of the practical strengths of alphabetic writing is efficiency. A relatively limited set of symbols can combine and recombine to represent a vast number of words.

Not all writing systems follow the alphabetic model. Some represent whole words, others represent ideas, others represent syllables, and many combine more than one of these approaches.

The Chinese writing system is among the oldest continuously used writing traditions in the world. Japan incorporated Chinese characters, known in Japanese as kanji, and alongside them developed two original phonetic scripts of its own: hiragana and katakana.