Origins of Writing: From Pictographs to
Alphabets
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Writing is the graphic representation of spoken language
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Pre-Writing: The oldest graphic representations made by humans are cave
paintings, petroglyphs and counting marks. Technically these are not writing since
they do not directly represent language but they are evidence of the capacity for
symbolic thought and, indirectly, of language use)
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Chauvet Pont-d'Arc cave paintings (32,000 years ago)
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Lascaux cave paintings (17,000-15,000 years ago)
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Altamira cave paintings (17,000-14,000 years ago)
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Native American petroglyphs (13,000 years ago)
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Counting marks on clay tokens (6,000-5,500 years ago)
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3,300 BC, Invention of writing by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Wedgeshaped (cuneiform) markings incised on clay with a sharpened reed
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3,200 BC, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing
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The earliest writing took the form of pictograms or pictographs where the
graphic symbol visually resembles the represented object:

Early writing often was intended to keep track of items of property, acting as a
sort of business/accounting record-keeping

Gradually pictograms became more abstract and lost their picture-like quality.
Examples:
Chinese
to
to
from Egyptian
to Phoenician "aleph"
from Egyptian "nu" = "water"
to Roman
to Phoenician "mem"
to Roman

Originally a graphic symbol represented a whole word, concept or idea (logogram,
ideogram)

Eventually, a few symbols began to do double duty, standing both for a
word/concept/idea and for a similar sounding word (a homonym), a syllable, or a
single sound. This process is known as the "phonetization" of writing or
"phonographic" writing and is what led eventually to writing systems relying on
syllabaries and alphabets.

A syllabary is a writing system where a symbol stands for a specific syllable.
Modern Japanese is written using two different syllabaries called Katakana and
Hiragana, each containing 46 symbols. Japanese is also written using ideograms
borrowed from Chinese writing (this is called Kanji). Japanese is also written
sometimes using Latin alphabetic symbols (this is called Romaji). The NativeAmerican Cherokee language is written with a syllabary of about 85 signs
invented by Sequoyah (d. 1843)

An alphabet is a writing system where a symbol stands for a single sound

An example of a word sign doing double duty by homonymy, i.e. standing for two
different but similarly sounding words, is Sumerian "ti" ("arrow") represented by
the pictogram —>, this symbol then began to be used to stand also for the word
"til" ("life")

Sumerian "ti" ("arrow") —>, standing for the word "til" ("life") is also an example
of the way in which a pictogram for a concrete object comes to help in the
representation of an abstract concept. Other examples involving early Chinese
characters:
+
sun + moon = "brightness"
+
mouth + bird = "singing"

Syllabaries and alphabets are much more efficient than logographic/ideographic
writing because they can represent any word in a language with a limited number
of signs, as opposed to the need for a symbol for each word/concept/idea in
logographic/ideographic systems

The so-called rebus principle illustrates the way in which logograms/ideograms
became syllabic or alphabetic signs:

Another example of the rebus principle involving Egyptian hieroglyphics:
stands for the word "R _ " meaning "mouth"
stands for "K _" meaning "basket"
then
stands for "R_K" meaning "time"

The acrophonic principle is also one of the processes by which writing became
phonographic. In ancient Egyptian, symbols that once stood for whole words
came to stand only for the sound of the first consonant in that word. For example,
the hieroglyphic sign standing for the word "f-t" (which meant "horned-viper" and
also looked like one) eventually came to stand for just the sound "f" (a move
toward alphabetic writing)
=f

1,500 BC, earliest alphabetic writing, Proto-Sinaitic, emerges in the Middle East,
followed by Proto-Canaanite (c. 1,400 BC), Phoenician (c. 1050 BC), and then
the Greek (1000-800 BC) and Roman alphabets (c. 650 BC)
Links & References:
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William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller,
Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction, 5th edition (Bedford St. Martin's,
2005).
Akira Nakanishi, Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries,
Pictograms (1990)
James Norman, Ancestral Voices: Decoding Ancient Languages (1975)
Ancient Scripts