How writing began

Ages 6 to 8 Read together, then try alone · about 25 minutes

Read together

Long ago, people had no writing. They told stories aloud and remembered them.

About five thousand years ago, people in Sumer, in what is now Iraq, pressed signs into wet clay. This is called cuneiform. At first they used it to keep records of goods.

Egyptians wrote with picture signs called hieroglyphs. Later, alphabets used signs for sounds, and our letters come from that idea.

Do it

1. Make a clay tablet from a flat piece of salt dough or play dough.
2. Press the end of a pencil or a wedge-shaped stick into it to make marks like cuneiform. Try to write your name in marks.
3. Write a short message in pictures, like hieroglyphs: sun, water, house, bird.
4. Ask a grown-up to show you another kind of writing, such as Chinese characters, Arabic script or the old Filipino script called baybayin.

Talk about it

• Why did people need writing?
• What would you write first?

For the grown-up

The earliest writing we know came from Sumer around 3400 to 3100 BC, first as accounts. Egyptian hieroglyphs appear around the same time. The Phoenician alphabet, from about 1050 BC, led to Greek and then Latin letters. The Philippines had its own script, baybayin, in use when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s.

Mark as done

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Where this comes from

• Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms (Thames & Hudson, 1995)
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996)
• National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines), materials on baybayin, the pre-colonial Philippine script

Written with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed. Please read it before sharing it with a child.