Irving Finkel

But the first evidence we have presents a sort of clear-ish sort of picture.

It was simple, then it got more complicated, and then it became magnificent.

so that with all the signs, a fluent and well-trained scribe could not only write down the Sumerian language, which was one of the native tongues of Iraq, or the Babylonian language, which was the other main language of Iraq, but also any other language he heard.

So

if somebody came speaking French ahead of their time and spoke out loud, he could record with these signs the sound of French.

And we have examples of funny languages in the world around in the Bronze Age, which were written in cuneiform purely by ear.

And often, sometimes the scribes who recorded by dictation or by something wrote stuff they couldn't understand, but somebody else could read and understand it.

So,

What you have is, long before the alphabet, when the alphabet was not even a dream, a complex, bewildering-looking, off-putting writing system, which was actually very beautiful, very flexible, and lasted for well over three millennia, probably closer to four millennia.

And it took a long time for the alphabet, which anybody would say was much, much more useful and much more sensible, to displace it.

So it's one of the major stages of man's intellect, because quite soon after the writing first took off,

signs began to proliferate.

And someone said, hey, we haven't got a sign for this sound, or we haven't got a sign for this idea.

And so it began to swell out.

And at some extremely remarkable stage, one, probably only one person, suddenly realized that if there was no control, they would grow exponentially and exponentially until it was all nonsense and everybody had their own writing.

And the second thing is that no one could remember them

unless they were written down in a retrievable way.

So they invented not only writing, they invented lexicography, which means that early in the third millennium, they put down all the things that were made of wood and all the things that were made of reeds and all the names of colors and of countries and all the gods and everything.

They made a systematic attempt

to make these signs, to standardize them and to make them retrievable, and of course to teach them.