The Oldest Writing Systems on Earth

Cuneiform leads, pressed into wet clay in Sumer around 3200 BCE, followed closely by Egyptian hieroglyphs. Chinese writing emerges by 1200 BCE on oracle bones, and Mesoamerican scripts by 300 BCE.

Each was invented independently, likely from counting tokens and pictographs. Everything else, including our alphabet, descends from a Canaanite adaptation of Egyptian signs around 1800 BCE.

Clay, papyrus, bone, and stone preserve these first texts against four or five millennia..