page_title: History of writing
section_title: Recorded history
hierarchical_section_title: History of writing / Recorded history
caption_attribution_description: English: Limestone tablet engraved with pictographic writing. It comes from the mesopotamic city of Kish (Iraq), dated from 3 500 BC. It is drawn in real size, approximately. Probably, it is the earliest known evidence of writing, and contains pictographs of heads, feet, hands, numbers and threshing-boards. Department of Antiquities, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (United Kingdom). Español: Tablilla de piedra grabada con escritura pictográfica procedente de la ciudad mesopotámica de Kish (Irak), datada en el 3 500 adC. Dibujada a tamaño natural, aproximadamente. Probablemente es el vestigio más antiguo conocido de escritura; y consta de pictogramas que representan cabezas, pies, manos, números y trillos. Se conserva en el Departamento de Antigüedades del Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Gran Bretaña).
context_page_description: The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by letters or other marks and also the studies and descriptions of these developments.
  In the history of how writing systems have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols. True writing, in which the content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development. It is distinguished from proto-writing, which typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it more difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance. One of the earliest forms of written expression is cuneiform.
context_section_description: The origins of writing appear during the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East.
  An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing:
  Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba pattes some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
  — Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Circa 1800 BC.
  Scholars make a reasonable distinction between prehistory and history of early writing but have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became "true writing." The definition is largely subjective. Writing, in its most general terms, is a method of recording information and is composed of graphemes, which may, in turn, be composed of glyphs.
  The emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the "historicity" of a culture by the presence of coherent texts in the culture's writing system(s).
  The invention of writing was not a one-time event but was a gradual process initiated by the appearance of symbols, possibly first for cultic purposes.
caption: Limestone Kish tablet from Sumer with pictographic writing; may be the earliest known writing, 3500 BC. Ashmolean Museum
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