Why Was Writing Invented?

It's hard enough to find out how old representational writing really is, much less to figure out its original purpose. For some time now, the theory has been that writing was invented for accounting purposes: listing possessions of, taxes by, and tributes to authorities. These records were important because of the power that came with them. But it may be that wealthy rulers appropriated an existing system of records for their own purposes. However, the question may be better understood if we know how writing was invented. It actually developed over a long period of time in several stages.  

The evidence suggests that writing is actually more like gunpowder than like nuclear weapons. For one thing, in the four wellsprings of writing, it never (as far as we know) sprang forth as fully phonographic but evolved to become that – there’s usually some kind of proto-writing, and some kind of proto-proto-writing. I like to think of writing as a layered invention. First there’s the graphic invention: the notion of making a durable mark on a surface. Humans have been doing this for at least 100,000 years – the bureaucracy didn’t give humans that power. Then the symbolic invention: let’s make this mark different from all other marks and assign it a meaning that we can all agree on. Humans have been doing this for a long time, too. Then there’s the linguistic one: let’s realise that a sound, a syllable and a word are all things in the world that can be assigned a graphic symbol. This invention depends on the previous ones, and itself is made of innovations, realisations, solutions and hacks. Then comes the functional invention: let’s use this set of symbols to write a list of captives’ names, or a contract about feeding workers, or a letter to a distant garrison commander. All these moves belong to an alchemy of life that makes things go boom.

Read what we know so far and the various theories of why writing became was it is at Aeon. -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen)