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Unlike us, the Sumerians counted in 60s. We call this the sexagesimal system. Ours is in 10s, i.e. decimal.

1 𒁹

2 𒈫

3 𒐈

4 𒐉

5 𒐊

6 𒐋

7 𒐌

8 𒐍

9 𒑆

10 𒌋

60 𒁹

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Writing was a real chore back then. The Sumerians would make tablets out of wet clay and use a hollow reed to etch circles and semi-circles into it while still wet and soft.

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Once upon a time in the land of Mesopotamia, there lived a people who engaged in commerce, had a system of weights and measures, paid in currency, and most importantly, kept written records of all of this in clay tablets. These were the Sumerians.

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The ancient Egyptians invented one of the earliest known writing systems. The symbols they used were called hieroglyphs, which comes from a Greek word meaning ‘sacred carving’.

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Hieroglyphs included around 700 different signs of objects and animals. Some signs were pictorial or symbolic and stood for whole words. Some signs were phonetic, which means they stood for sounds.

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According to Egyptian tradition, the god Thoth created writing to make the Egyptians wiser and to strengthen their memory. The god Re, however, disagreed: he said that delivering the hieroglyphs to humanity would cause them to contemplate their memory and history through written documents rather than relying on their actual memories passed down through generations.

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Hieroglyphs could be written vertically, horizontally, left to right, or right to left! The phonetic hieroglyph alphabet is the closest version to our modern English alphabet. It is not exactly the same because the ancient Egyptians did not have symbols for vowels (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ or ‘u’), but the alphabet below includes the closest sounds.

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For many years hieroglyphs were not understood at all. In 1798 CE Napoleon Bonaparte went to Egypt with many researchers and they copied several Egyptian texts and images. One year later, the Rosetta Stone was found, a decree of Ptolemy V, with the same text written in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic writing. Finally, Jean-François Champollion unravelled the mystery. He identified the name of Ptolemy V written on the Rosetta Stone, by comparing the hieroglyphs with the Greek translation.

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Then, he continued to study the names, using an obelisk from Philae (now in Dorset, England). The obelisk had the name of Ptolemy and Cleopatra written on it. This made it possible to conclude that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was a mixture of signals representing sounds, ideas and words, not a common alphabet. Champollion's achievement in deciphering the Rosetta Stone unlocked the secret of the ancient Egyptian writing system and allowed the world to finally read into Egyptian history.

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How The Rosetta Stone Unlocked Hieroglyphics

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Deciphering Ancient Writing through technology

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Deciphering Ancient Writing through technology

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Ancient Writing | Priceless artifacts | Modern technology

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Chinese civilization has long held a deep obsession with the written word, influencing its culture in forms ranging from poetry to imperial recordkeeping. There are some people who think that Chinese writing may have truly ancient roots, dating as far back as the Ban Po settlement, inhabited between 4,500 and 3,750 BCE.

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Chinese independently invented writing something that's only been done around five times in human history!!

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Chinese independently invented writing something that's only been done around five times in human history!!

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At Ban Po, archeologists have discovered a number of pottery shards, which is pretty normal for a village of this time. What's interesting, however, is the frequent repetition of images and symbols inscribed onto these shards. While no one's been able to interpret them, some people think that these images are used consistently enough to represent a very early form of written language.

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The earliest known inscriptions, each of which contains between 10 and 60 characters incised on pieces of bone and tortoiseshell that were used for oracular divination, date from the Shang (or Yin) dynasty (18th–12th century BC), but, by then it was already a highly developed system, essentially similar to its present form.

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Shang priests practiced an unusual form of divination that involved placing heated rods in grooves carved into specially-prepared ox scapulae (shoulder bones) and turtle plastrons (the undersides of turtle shells).

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The oracle bones unearthed in Xiaotun also provided some of the earliest evidence of Chinese writing and the first examples of writing in East Asia. They recorded harvests, childbirths and wars, detailed accomplishments of kings, described human sacrifices, plagues, natural disasters, enemy tribes and the ailments of kings. Some 3000 different Chinese characters---most of them pictograms---were used during the Shang dynasty.

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How Chinese characters evolved | The Origin of Chinese characters

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How Chinese characters evolved | The Origin of Chinese characters

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How Chinese characters evolved | The Origin of Chinese characters | EXPLORE MODE

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The Indus script is a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilization. Most inscriptions containing these symbols are extremely short, making it difficult to judge whether or not these symbols constituted a script used to record a language, or even symbolize a writing system

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Generally recognized as the world's expert on the Indus script, Asko Parpola has been studying this undeciphered writing for over 40 years at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He is co-editor of collections of all seals and inscriptions in India and Pakistan. As Professor of Indology he has led a Finnish team of experts through numerous approaches to the puzzle of one of the world's very earliest writing systems.

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The Indus Script begins with the Harappa Phase (2600-1900 BC). There are three phases of Indus script and seal use based on excavations at Harappa and other sites. The Indus writing in its fully developed form can be dated to about 2600-1900 BC.

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Why is Indus Valley script still difficult to understand?

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Why is Indus Valley script still difficult to understand?

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Fewer inscriptions are found on clay tablets, pottery and metal objects. With an average of just 4 or 5 signs, the brevity of most inscriptions poses a challenge for decipherment efforts. It's also among the reasons that some scholars argue these characters are not true writing.

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The Sumerians invented the system of units that we use today to tell time:

60 seconds = 1 minute

60 minutes = 1 hour

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Babylonians were the first to identify five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They learned about the planets and stars actually assigning workers to chart them every night.

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In Egypt, artists and sculptors were expected to follow a formula, not come up with original ideas. So while art was lovely and consistent, they did not use a new style for thousands of years.

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Although they first wrote on clay tablets, the Egyptians later wrote in papyrus. The oldest papyrus scroll has been linked to the region of Pharaoh Khufu who rules between 2575 and 2465 BCE!

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Egyptians wrote hieroglyphics mostly in black or red ink, but a skilled painter would also use white, blue, green, yellow, and orange ink.

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Archaeologists say they have discovered some of the world's oldest known primitive writing, dating back 5,000 years, in eastern China, and some of the markings etched on broken axes resemble a modern Chinese character.

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The oracle bones were seen as a medium of communications between diviners and ancestors! Users of oracle bone divinations sought advice and predictions on matters such as raising of crops, the outcome of battles, illness, and childbirth.

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The Han produced the first Chinese dictionary and the first official history. They gave names to the dynasties that preceded them and unified China's diverse ethnic groups, using their writing system, into the Chinese.

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There are no signs of changes to the Harappan script over the course of 2000 years, across all levels (time periods) of excavation!

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Harappan was all short and had an average length of about 5 signs. The longest one had 26 signs and others were shorter than 26.

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The letters in Harappan Script were mostly from right to left, some exceptional cases had the letters written in bidirectional format.

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A board with stone symbols/letters over 30 cm in height in a wooden frame was discovered at Dholavira in 1999, which archaeologists believe to be the world’s first signboard!

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Writing wasn't just used for record keeping. The Sumerians created some of the earliest surviving works of literature