Irving Finkel

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.

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.