No other invention –except perhaps the wheel-has had a longer and greater impact on human culture than writing. In face,the history and culture of many civilizations is onlymeasured from the point that they developed writing.
The Sumerians first started to record the numbers of objects they counted by pressing reeds into wet clay. Since then, humans have been looking for the prefect tool to record their ideas.
The earliest forms of writing were pictographic-in other words, pictures were used to represent objects. Chinese writing is an example of this. Originally, the characters looked like pictures. 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. For example, in one character, a monkey holds a head over a skull. The monkey represents a day, and the head stands for 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 today.
As writing developed, the relationship between characters and the objects they represented became less strong. Writing became phonetic-letters represented sounds, like in the modern English alphabet.Phonetic alphabet developed by the Phoenicians about 3,000 years ago influenced the writing of modern Hebrew,Arabic,Greek, and English