Episode 1

We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word. But how and where did writing begin, and who began it? In From Pictures to Words, the first of three films about the history of writing, we uncover the hidden links between all the diverse writing systems in use today and trace the origin of our own alphabet to a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert and a man riding a donkey whose name was Khebded... ..Writing is a recent innovation. Our species has existed for about 300,000 years, and for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing. At the Moon Dreaming site in the Northern Territory of Australia, Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Aboriginal Wardaman people, explains how Aboriginal culture has been transmitted down the generations orally, without the need to write anything down. So, why did people eventually feel the need to make permanent records in visual form?.. ..According to Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist from the British Museum, it was in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, where the need for record-keeping was first felt. Here, about 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians developed the first city states. The city dwellers depended for their sustenance on taxing the surrounding countryside, and Irving produces a clay tablet from this period that is the distant ancestor of today's spreadsheet: a grid of boxes ruled into the clay, with symbols that represent numbers, and small stylised pictures that represent commodities, such as an ear of barley. These so-called pictograms would be the basis for the first writing systems, and so we owe writing to the first accountants and tax inspectors... ..But the language of accountancy is limited. To represent the full vocabulary of the Sumerian people would require a key conceptual leap, a way to use pictures to represent not things but sounds. This is what Irving dubs the giant leap for mankind, something called the Rebus Principle: the idea is that a picture of an ear of barley can represent barley, but it can also be used to represent the sound of the word barley in Sumerian, which is pronounced 'sheh'. Thus, the word 'sheh-ga', which means 'beautiful', can be represented by the pictogram of an ear of barley, followed by the stylised picture of a cow's udder, which stands for milk, pronounced 'ga' in Sumerian... ..The Rebus Principle is the key that unlocked writing for all the peoples of the ancient near east. Egyptian hieroglyphs, which developed in the same period, are also based on the same principle. The earliest known complete Egyptian text is found beneath a pyramid near Cairo, inscribed on the walls of the tomb of Pharaoh Teti. The Pyramid Texts are a series of elaborate magic spells, designed to raise Teti to eternal life.