Traditions, cultural heritage, stories were oral passed from generation to generation by telling, teaching, showing and everything relied on remembering things. We can guess that the elderly with good memory has and had much respect in the society before the invention of writing and archived data banks. They were the walking and talking libraries!
With the traditional knowledge came probably also other aspects of respect to those who were in the know and remembered and had been given the important things to keep and remember and teach. Wise men and women, those who know the laws of old and those who were able to tell about the past wars and victories and birth of gods and things.
Neolithic Tokens
Apparently the need to keep count of things was crucial in the earliest stage of humanity learning to write. This process is best known from the Near East Neolithic were the people began to use tokens to make it easier to remember the number of sheep that belongs to this family or that tribe or this shepherd.
Invention of writing
The honour for being the first people to write things up on this earth currently goes to the Sumerians.
Second price goes to pre-dynastic Egyptians.
Whether early cuneiform and early hieroglyphs are related is a matter for discussion. Some claim that they came from Persian Gulf in those boats around the Arabian Peninsula and reached Nile at Qoptos walking along that long wadi in Upper Egypt.(qupt, Copt, Pharaonic Egyptian).
Both the cuneiform system of Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian and the Egyptian hieroglyphs, earliest known writing systems, are based on a combination of symbol types - there are symbols for sounds, syllables and things, numbers and concepts.
Cuneiform symbols were pressed by sharp stylus on clay and once the clay tablet was burned in the oven it became eternal document, literally written in stone. The symbols are highly abstract but may have originally depicted things. The symbolism is not easy to understand, however, and the distance from realistic pictures somewhat resembles oriental systems of writing such as, for example, Chinese.
Hieroglyphs were so called by the Greeks who saw them as sacred (hieros) images (glyphs). And images they are, lovely, highly detailed miniature art of life in the Nile Valley during the Pharaonic period. Since such art is slow it was simplified to more symbolic hieratic that only hinted at those images and finally degenerated to demotic in the late period.
The other writing systems, for example Chinese or Indian, are independent invention not related to the ancient Near Eastern systems.
Wikipedia
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols.
The best known examples are:
- Near Eastern Neolithic tokens, ca. 7000 BC
- Jiahu symbols, carved on tortoise shells in Jiahu, ca. 6600 BC
- Vinča signs (Tărtăria tablets), ca. 5300 BC
- Early Indus script, ca. 3500 BC
The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC.
It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.
A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC.
The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.
wikipedia (quote edited by me)
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