When was writing invented?
Writing was invented around 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia (cuneiform) and independently around 3200 BCE in Egypt (hieroglyphics), 1200 BCE in China (oracle bone inscriptions), and 600 BCE in Mesoamerica. The Mesopotamian invention — driven by accounting needs — is the earliest known.
Writing emerged independently at least four times in human history, each invention driven by local needs and taking a unique form.
The earliest known writing appeared in the Sumerian city of Uruk around 3400 BCE. It began as pictographic symbols on clay tablets — simple pictures representing goods and quantities — used to manage the complex temple economies that had outgrown human memory. Over centuries, these pictures evolved into the abstract, wedge-shaped cuneiform script.
Egyptian hieroglyphics appeared roughly 3200 BCE, possibly inspired by the concept of writing from Mesopotamia but developing independently in form and function. The earliest Egyptian writing appears on ceremonial objects and royal monuments rather than accounting records.
Chinese writing emerged around 1200 BCE in the form of oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty. Characters were carved into turtle shells and ox bones for divination purposes. The Shang script is a direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters.
Mesoamerican writing — including Zapotec, Maya, and other scripts — developed by around 600 BCE, entirely independently of Old World traditions. The Maya script, the most fully developed, could express the full range of spoken language.
The Phoenician alphabet, developed around 1050 BCE, deserves special mention. Though not an independent invention of writing, it was a revolutionary simplification — reducing hundreds of cuneiform signs or hieroglyphs to just 22 consonant letters, making literacy far more accessible and becoming the ancestor of almost every alphabet used today.