Punctuation

Writing has been around in some form for at least 5200 years. These earliest systems were pictographic, with little symbolic drawings coming to represent more complex ideas, and eventually individual words.

I have a strong conviction that this leap from art to writing is a serious contender for our most important invention, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to envision how it might have happened. Meanwhile, archaeologists and historians keep unearthing new discoveries that help us paint a more complete picture of our distant past.

This leap was made independently in a few different areas of the world, including Egypt, Sumer, and China on the Eurasian land mass and the Maya in the Americas. And, as huge as this was for all of the pertaining civilizations (and for human progress as a whole), I want to focus on something that happened along the way to where we are today.

First, there was the journey into abstraction. What I mean is that these ancient scribes would draw something like a…