Where do writing systems come from?
Where do the world's writing systems come from?
Sometimes you’ll see it said that all the world’s writing systems descend from three original scripts—Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese logograms, or Mayan hieroglyphs:
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It’s true that most of the world’s writing systems derive from one of these three scripts. For example, the Latin alphabet, the Arabic abjad, the Hebrew alphabet, the Devanagari abugida (used for most languages in India), the other Brahmic scripts (including those in the Pacific), and the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets did all derive from the Phoenician alphabet, which itself derives from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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Writing is a technology
But what about Sumerian cuneiform? It predates the use of Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 3400 BCE vs. 3250 BCE), with a continuous archaeological record showing the evolution from pictographic proto-writing to abstract signs.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, on the other hand, appear fairly suddenly in the archaeological record. There were also robust trade routes between Egypt and Mesopotamia which could have brought the tradition of writing to Egypt. Did Egyptian hieroglyphs derive from Sumerian cuneiform then? Scholars don’t actually know, because the situation is complex:
For starters, Egyptian hieroglyphs feature flora and fauna that are local to Egypt, so those signs could not have been borrowed from the Sumerians:
| Hieroglyph | Name |
|---|---|
| 𓄿 | Egyptian vulture |
| 𓇅 | papyrus stem |
| 𓅞 | sacred ibis |
| 𓅟 | flamingo |
| 𓆊 | crocodile |
