Ancient Writing Systems: How the World’s First Scripts Worked

Writing was invented independently at least three and probably four times: in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Every alphabet in use today, from Latin to Arabic to Hebrew, descends from a single invention made by Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt around 1800 BC. This guide walks through the major ancient writing systems, how each one worked and where you can still see its influence.

Three ways to write a language

Before looking at individual scripts, it helps to know the three basic designs:

• Logographic: signs stand for words or meanings (Chinese characters, many Egyptian and cuneiform signs).
• Syllabic: signs stand for syllables such as ka or mi (Linear B, Japanese kana, many cuneiform signs).
• Alphabetic: signs stand for single sounds. Some alphabets write only consonants (Phoenician, early Hebrew and Arabic); others write vowels too (Greek, Latin).

Most ancient scripts mixed these methods. Egyptian, cuneiform and Chinese all combine word signs with sound signs.

Cuneiform (Mesopotamia, c. 3300 BC – AD 75)

The oldest known writing grew out of accounting in the Sumerian city of Uruk, in today’s southern Iraq. Scribes pressed a reed into wet clay, leaving wedge-shaped marks. Cuneiform was used for more than 3,000 years and for over a dozen languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and Old Persian. Its signs could be words, syllables or silent “determinatives” that marked the kind of word. Read more in How Cuneiform Works: Word Signs, Syllables and Determinatives, try the Cuneiform Translator, or translate into Sumerian with the Sumerian Translator.

Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 3200 BC – AD 394)

Hieroglyphs appear in Egypt only slightly later than cuneiform. About 750 signs were in common use. Some represented words, some one, two or three consonants, and some were determinatives. Egyptian writing did not record vowels. Everyday documents used faster scripts, hieratic and later demotic. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription, at Philae, is from AD 394; the Rosetta Stone, which carries the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, let Jean-François Champollion decipher them in 1822. See How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Beginner's Guide and the Hieroglyphics Translator.

Chinese characters (c. 1250 BC – today)

The oldest Chinese writing is found on the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty: turtle shells and ox bones inscribed with questions to ancestors. The system is still in use after more than 3,000 years, the longest continuous history of any script. Most characters combine a meaning element with a sound element. The literary language of the classics is covered by our Classical Chinese Translator.

Mesoamerican scripts (c. 900 BC – AD 1500s)

In what is now Mexico and Central America, the Maya developed a full writing system mixing logograms and syllable signs, in use from about 300 BC. Only four Maya books survived the Spanish conquest, but thousands of inscriptions on stone and pottery have been deciphered since the 1950s, largely thanks to Yuri Knorozov’s work on the syllabic signs.

The first alphabet (c. 1800 BC)

Around 1800 BC, Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt and Sinai borrowed a few hieroglyphs and used each one for the first sound of its name: the ox head (ʾalp) for the glottal stop ʾ, the house (bayt) for b. This “Proto-Sinaitic” script was the first alphabet. The Phoenicians, traders from today’s Lebanon, standardised it into 22 consonant letters by about 1050 BC and carried it around the Mediterranean.

Alphabets that grew from it

• Greek (c. 800 BC) borrowed the Phoenician letters and used some for vowels, creating the first full alphabet. Try the Greek Alphabet Converter.
• Latin came from Greek through the Etruscans and became the alphabet of most of the world.
• Aramaic spread across the Persian Empire and gave rise to the Hebrew square script and, eventually, Arabic. See the Aramaic Translator.
• Runes (c. AD 150) were probably adapted from an Italic alphabet by Germanic peoples. Try the Runic Translator.
• Brahmi in India (3rd century BC), probably inspired by Aramaic, is the ancestor of Devanagari, used for Sanskrit Translator, and most scripts of South and Southeast Asia.

The full family tree is traced letter by letter in From Phoenician to Latin: How the Alphabet Spread, and you can write in the original letters with the Phoenician Alphabet Translator.

Scripts still not deciphered

Some ancient writing has never been read: the Indus script of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (c. 2600–1900 BC), Linear A of Minoan Crete, and the rongorongo tablets of Easter Island. In each case the texts are too short or the language too unknown for a confident decipherment.

Sources

• Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
• Smithsonian Magazine, “How the Rosetta Stone unlocked hieroglyphs“.
• The Unicode Consortium, Phoenician code chart
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Sumerian language“.
• Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (1996).
• Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing (2nd ed., 2007).