Irving Finkel

The first attempts at writing that we could call writing go back to the middle of the fourth millennium, say around 3500 BC, something like that.

There were people in the Middle East, individuals who lived between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, who had clay as their operating material for building and all sorts of other purposes.

And eventually,

as a writing support, they somehow develop the idea of the basis of writing, which means that you can make a sign, which people agree on, on a surface, that another person, when they see it, they know what sound it engenders.

That is the essence of writing, that there's an agreed system of symbols that A can use and B can then play back, either in their heads or literally with their voices, a bit like a gramophone record.

So when it really began is a terribly, terribly awkward question for us, because the truth of the matter is we have no idea when anything began.

And all we can say is that the oldest evidence we have is around 3500 BC.

But whether that was anywhere near the time or the stage when this started off for the first time seems to me very, very unlikely.

So, among these Mesopotamians, around 3500, they started to do this.

They made up signs which everybody understood, and they could write simple pictographic messages.

Foot is a foot, leg is a leg, and barley is barley.

And then, very, very gradually…

They had the idea of how you could represent numerals, and then they had the idea that the pictures could also represent signs.

And once they had the idea that you could write sounds with pictures, that's the crucial thing, that a picture of a foot not only meant foot, but it meant the sound of the word for foot.

Once this happened...

Some probably very, very imaginative and clever persons had a kind of light bulb moment when they realized that they could develop a whole panoply of signs which could convey sound.

And once you had that,

you're liberated from pictographic writing into a position where you can record language.

So language, grammar, and all the rest of it, and before long, proverbs and literature and all the other things that got written down.

So it was a pretty gigantic step whenever it was taken, but we really have no idea when it was first taken.