Invention of Writing

Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The first writing system is cuneiform script, the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 . This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction.

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