![]() Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BCE, and soon after in various parts of the Near East. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them. The origins of writing are more generally attributed to the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. Some notational signs, used next to images of animals, may have appeared as early as the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe circa 35,000 BCE, and may be the earliest proto-writing: several symbols were used in combination as a way to convey seasonal behavioural information about hunted animals. These uses were accompanied by the proliferation of genres, which typically initially contained markers or reminders of the social situations and uses, but the social meaning and implications of genres often became more implicit as the social functions of these genres became more recognizable in themselves, as in the examples of money, currency, financial instruments, and now digital currency.Īrt of Lascaux, with painted animal, and four dots, a possible notation for Lunar months. ![]() Writing then became the basis of knowledge institutions such as libraries, schools, universities and scientific and disciplinary research. These uses supported the spread of these social activities, their associated knowledge, and the extension of centralized power. The earliest uses of writing in ancient Sumeria were to document agricultural produce and create contracts, but soon writing became used for purposes of finances, religion, government, and law. ![]() It is distinguished from proto-writing, which typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it more difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance. True writing, in which the content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development. In the history of how writing systems have evolved in human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols (symbols or letters that make remembering them easier). Writing systems are the foundation of literacy and literacy learning, with all the social and psychological consequences associated with literacy activities. The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by systems of markings and how these markings were used for various purposes in different societies, thereby transforming social organization.
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