Writing Systems Compared

For at least 200,000 years, humans communicated through speech alone. Every story, law, and scrap of knowledge existed only in living memory. When a person died, whatever they knew went with them, unless they had passed it on through conversation, song, or ritual.

Then, between roughly 3200 and 2000 BCE, at least three separate civilizations independently invented systems for making language visible. Not a single heroic breakthrough. A convergence: different peoples facing similar problems, landing on similar solutions.

Writing was, arguably, the most consequential technological innovation in human history. More than the wheel. More than agriculture. It allowed human knowledge to accumulate across generations without loss, distortion, or dependence on any one person's memory. Nothing before it could do that.