The origins of writing

The earliest evidence for the existence of Homo sapiens derives from the interpretation of archaeological and palaeontological evidence rather than from records consciously made by people themselves. Our species was already in an advanced stage of physiological and intellectual development before we began to leave a deliberate mark on the world around us. The first such marks, perhaps the first consciously created records, are the graphic representations of daily life which have been found in caves in France and elsewhere. Scholars debate the significance of these, whether they are religious, social, or merely artistic; for our purposes, their importance is that we have here the first evidence of a species which sought some means to represent the world in which it lived. It found a material on which the representation could be recorded – the rock walls of a cave – and a medium – natural dyes – in which it could be made.

Between palaeolithic cave paintings and the first real records of human activities there are millennia. The earliest cave paintings are generally considered to date from 40,000 years ago; even so, they embody the basic principle of meeting a perceived need by developing, or making use of, a combination of medium and material. All subsequent systems have developed from that same perception of need.

When complex societies began to evolve in various parts of Asia, their very complexity forced them to consider, possibly even consciously, how complexity could be managed. Pictorial representation, forceful as it is and important as it continues to be, is limited. While pictures can convey shapes and colours far more effectively than words, and can often give greater clarity than a verbal description of an action or a scene, they are less effective in embodying abstractions or ideas. A picture can show the shape and colour of a house but cannot state its financial value. A picture can represent the appearance of a person, but cannot show what that person is thinking. A picture can reproduce, with great accuracy, the appearance of a car, but it can neither explain how it works nor show it in motion. To preserve an image of anything other than a purely visual and static world, we first need a system which allows us to express language in some representational form.