Writing Systems Compared
Compare the world's earliest writing systems — cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the Phoenician alphabet — and how they shaped civilizations.
Writing was invented independently at least four times in human history, and each system took a radically different approach to the same fundamental problem: how to represent spoken language in visible marks. Comparing these systems reveals as much about the societies that created them as about the technology of writing itself.
Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics both began as pictographic systems and evolved toward more abstract phonetic representation, but they followed different trajectories. Cuneiform became increasingly abstract (wedge-shaped marks that bore no visual resemblance to their meaning), while hieroglyphs retained their pictorial character for over three millennia. Chinese writing, emerging from oracle bone inscriptions around 1200 BCE, developed a logographic system where each character represents a word or morpheme — a tradition that persists today. The Phoenician alphabet, appearing around 1050 BCE, took the radical step of reducing writing to a small set of consonant signs, creating the ancestor of virtually every alphabet in use today.
The type of writing system a civilization adopts has profound consequences. Logographic systems require learning thousands of symbols, concentrating literacy among specialists. Alphabetic systems are simpler to learn, potentially democratizing access to written communication. The Phoenician alphabet's simplicity was one reason it spread so rapidly — a technology whose ease of use ensured its dominance.