no other invention-except perhaps the wheel-has had a longer and greater impact on human culture than writing. in fact, the history and culture of many civilizations is only measured from the point that they developed writing.
The Sumerians first started to record the number of objects they counted by pressing reeds into wet clay. Since then, humans have been looking for the perfect tool to record their ideas. The earliest form of writing were pictographic - in other words, pictures were used to represent object. Chinese writing is an example of this. Originally, the characters looked like picture However, over the centuries, they became less picture-like and faster to write. Another example of pictographic writing is ancient Mayan.
The Maya used pictures to write dates. Fore example, in one character, a monkey holds a head over a skull. The monkey represents a day, and the head stands of the number six. Since the skull stands for ten, together, the pictogram represents 16 days. Interestingly, of the various cultures that used pictographic writing, only chinese is widespread to day.
At writing developed, the relationship between characters and the objects they represented became less strong.