Pictures and sounds People made records with clay tokens shaped to represent different things over 10,000 years ago. But the oldest known writing is marks on clay tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from around 3500 bc. They record land sales, business deals and tax details. Today writing uses letters to show the different sounds in a word. The sea, for instance, might be shown by wavy lines and a man by a stick man.
Some Egyptian hieroglyphs are picture writing.
Later on, however, people began to use symbols to show different words. Chinese characters use one symbol for each word. There are nearly 50,000 different characters in Chinese. The Greek alphabet has 24 letters. The Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia has 33 letters.