How did writing begin?

Have you ever wondered how people remembered things before they could write them down? Join your hosts Mira and Finn on a time-traveling adventure to the year 3200 BC! We are heading to ancient Sumer, to a bustling mega-city called Uruk, where the greatest invention in human history is about to happen!

Imagine using a wet lump of squishy clay and a pointy reed to do your homework! That is exactly how the ancient Sumerians invented the very first writing system, called cuneiform. At first, they just used wedge shapes to count sheep and grain. But soon, they were recording rules, epic stories, and stacking knowledge so it would last for thousands of years!

But wait, the story doesn't stop there! We will also travel to ancient Egypt to decode beautiful picture writing called hieroglyphs, and then meet the clever Phoenicians who created the very first alphabet with just 22 letters! Without these amazing inventions, humans could never remember anything past one lifetime. Get ready to discover how the written word changed the world forever! Tune in and see why history is never boring!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to History's Not Boring by Kidopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. Hey Finn, I was just reading an awesome email from a listener named Ashling. Oh, where is Ashling from? She is seven years old and lives in Wicklow, Ireland. Hi Ashling. Hi, Ashling in Ireland. Thanks for saying hello. You know, Ashling's email got me thinking. How did she send that to us? By typing words. But imagine a world where absolutely no one knew how to read or write.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

No books? No text messages? No comic books?

SPEAKER_00 0:37

None. Before 3200 BC, people successfully used oral tradition, like storytelling and songs, to pass down stories or laws for generations. But without those traditions, a person's everyday memories, skills, and knowledge vanished forever, like smoke in the wind.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

That sounds completely exhausting. I can't even remember where I put my shoes this morning, let alone remember an entire library of information.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Exactly! Today we are travelling back 5,200 years to find out how humanity invented the ultimate cheat code, writing. Let's set the scene. The year is 3200 BC. We are in ancient Sumer in a megacity called Uruk.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Where exactly is Uruk? And how big is a megacity back then?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

It was located in modern-day Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. At 3200 BC, it had 40,000 people, and a few centuries later, it grew to cover over two square miles with giant baked mudbrick walls.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Whoa, 40,000 people! That is enough to fill a giant baseball stadium.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Exactly! It was the largest city in the entire world at the time. There were probably another 80,000 people farming in the fields outside. It was a bustling, noisy metropolis, filled with markets, temples, and canals.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

But having that many people must have caused a massive problem, right? Did they run out of food?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

No, they had tons of food. The problem was keeping track of it. The temple officials had thousands of sheep, huge herds of cattle, and endless mountains of grain to manage. They had to pay workers, feed the priests, and store emergency supplies.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Oh, I get it. If you have 10,000 sheep, you cannot just count them on your fingers.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Right! At first, they used little clay tokens to count things. One round token meant one sheep. But if you were trading 500 sheep for 1,000 bushels of grain, managing all those loose tokens was a total nightmare.

unknown 2:55

Haha!

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Imagine having a giant pile of 1,500 little clay balls just rolling all over the floor. You would trip on them.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

It was a mess! So, some absolute genius in Uruk came up with a better idea. They took a lump of slippery wet river clay and flattened it into a shape like a large lentil.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Okay, they have a piece of wet clay. What happened next?

SPEAKER_00 3:21

They took a reed plant growing by the river and cut the end to make a pointy stick called a stylus. Then they pressed it right into the damp clay.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Wait, so they did not write with ink, they just poked holes in mud?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yes, because the stylus was triangular, it made little wedge shapes in the clay. We call this writing cuneiform, which is a word derived from Latin roots meaning wedge-shaped. They would bake the clay in the sun to make it rock hard.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

What were the very first words they wrote down? Was it a cool action story about dragons?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Nope. The oldest writing we have, from 3200 BC, is basically grocery receipts. They drew pictures for things. For example, an upright jar with a pointed base meant beer. They drew a head with a bowl next to it to mean eating.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

So the greatest invention in human history started because they needed to track their drinks and sheep.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yes, they had to make sure the workers got their daily rations. But it got complicated fast. Instead of just drawing a sheep, they started using different combinations of wedges to represent syllables and whole words.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

That sounds like it would take a lot of different shapes.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Oh, it did. Early writing started with around 1,500 picture signs, but using syllables actually reduced it to about 600 signs by 2,500 BC. Still, imagine a keyboard with 600 different keys on it. It would be 10 feet long.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

600 signs? I only had to learn 26 letters in the alphabet. How did anyone learn that many?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

It was so incredibly hard that they had to invent something else entirely new. The world's first formal school.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Oh no. Did they have homework in 2500 BC? They sure did.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

The Sumerian word for school was Eduba, which translates to tablet house. And we actually have their 4,000-year-old homework tablets.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Wait, really? What did a Sumerian kid's homework actually look like?

SPEAKER_00 5:38

The teacher would write perfectly neat cuneiform on one side of a clay tablet, and the student had to copy it on the back. You can still see all their messy mistakes thousands of years later.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

That makes me feel way better about my handwriting. Did the kids like the tablet house?

SPEAKER_00 5:56

In one famous 4,000-year-old poem called School Days, a student writes about his mother packing him a lunch of two breads before he runs to school. But school was tough. How tough are we talking? Archaeologists found a real tablet written by a student complaining. He wrote that he was beaten at school because he could not do his homework properly.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

They got in trouble just for bad homework.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yes, the teachers were very strict, but it wasn't just Sumerians' writing. Around the same time, in 3100 BC, the ancient Egyptians invented hieroglyphs. They carved thousands of tiny, beautiful pictures of owls, snakes, human eyes, and boats into massive stone temples along the Nile River.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Those look amazing. But both cuneiform and hieroglyphs took years to master. Writing was only for a tiny group of experts called scribes.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Exactly. But around the year 1050 BC, a group of sea traders called the Phoenicians changed everything. They lived in modern-day Lebanon and Syria, and they realized 600 signs were still way too many.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

I completely agree with the Phoenicians.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

What did they do? They popularized the first widely used phonetic alphabet. Based on an older alphabet, they stripped writing down to just 22 simple signs.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Just 22 letters? That is even smaller than our alphabet today.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Yes, and they were all consonants. There were absolutely no vowels. The letter Aleph was a glottal stop consonant and didn't make an A sound until the Greeks later borrowed it. It was drawn to look like an ox's head with horns.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Wait, if you turn a capital A upside down, the two legs look exactly like animal horns. That is an ox.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

You got it! And the letter for B was called Beth, which was shaped like a little house. This 22-letter alphabet was so incredibly easy to learn, Phoenician merchants sailed their cedar wood ships and spread it all over the Mediterranean Sea.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

So writing went from poking wet clay for sheep receipts to 22 letters that anyone could learn. That is incredible!

SPEAKER_00 8:22

It completely changed humanity. Before writing, a person's knowledge died with them. Writing let humans stack knowledge on top of knowledge, generation after generation, for thousands of years.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Do we still have a lot of those old clay cuneiform tablets today?

SPEAKER_00 8:41

We have tens of thousands of them. In the 1850s, archaeologists in Iraq discovered the ruins of a library belonging to an Assyrian king named Asher Banipal. It had over 30,000 clay tablets in it. They gave us ancient laws, star maps, and mathematics.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Since they were made of rock-hard clay, moving that library must have weighed as much as a mountain.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Definitely heavier than carrying a few paperbacks. And nobody could read cuneiform for almost 2,000 years, until brilliant scholars in the 1850s finally cracked the code. Like the ultimate secret puzzle. Alright, Finn, time for the quiz! Are you ready to test your knowledge about the history of writing?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Okay, my brain is ready. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

First question. What was the name of the ancient Sumerian megacity where writing began around 3200 BC? Next one. Writing on wet clay with a reed stylus made little wedge shapes. What is the name for this wedge-shaped writing derived from Latin roots? Question three. The ancient Sumerian schools were called the Aduba. What does that translate to? Here's number four. The Phoenicians simplified everything. How many letters were in their famous alphabet? Last question. The very first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, Aleph, was drawn to look like the head of what animal? Great job! Let's see how you did with the answers. The first answer is the ancient city was Uruk. It had 40,000 people. For question 2, the wedge-shaped writing is called cuneiform. Number three, the answer is the Aduba translates to the tablet house. Question 4. There were just 22 letters in the Phoenician alphabet. And the final answer is Aleph was drawn to look like an ox.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Woohoo! I definitely stacked some knowledge in my brain today.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

You sure did, Finn. It is absolutely mind-blowing to think that every book, every text message, and every website started with someone poking mud with a stick.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

I am just so glad I do not have to carry heavy clay tablets in my backpack. My paper notebooks are way lighter.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Very true. Hey, if you listeners are glad you do not have to carry clay tablets to school, please scroll down and leave us a five-star review. Just tap those stars on your podcast app. It really helps us out.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah! And do not forget to check out our site, kidopoly.com. We have got tons of fun learning games and awesome activities waiting for you.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Head over to our site kidopoly.com to explore. Oh, and if you want a shout out on the show like Ashling, or just want to say hi, email us at hello at kidopoly.com.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

We love hearing from you. Send those emails to hello at kidopoly.com.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Thanks for time traveling with us today. See you next time on History's Not Boring. Bye, everyone.