Writing may have been invented independently three times in different parts of the world: in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. Writing is humankind’s principal technology for collecting, manipulating, storing, retrieving, communicating and disseminating information. The evolution from tokens to script also documents a steady progression in abstracting data, from one-to-one correspondence with three-dimensional tangible tokens, to two-dimensional pictures, the invention of abstract numbers and phonetic syllabic signs and finally, in the second millennium BC, the ultimate abstraction of sound and meaning with the representation of phonemes by the letters of the alphabet. Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. The development from tokens to script reveals that writing emerged from counting and accounting. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script can be traced furthest back into prehistory to an eighth millennium BC counting system using clay tokens of multiple shapes. Each preserved over millennia features characteristic of their original prototypes. The three writing systems that developed independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica, shared a remarkable stability. The evolution of writing from tokens to pictography, syllabary and alphabet illustrates the development of information processing to deal with larger amounts of data in ever greater abstraction. This antecedent of the cuneiform script was a system of counting and recording goods with clay tokens. It is also the only writing system which can be traced to its earliest prehistoric origin. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. Published in James Wright, ed., INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Elsevier, 2014 Abstract Murals and Floor Paintings at ‘Ain Ghazal.‘Ain Ghazal “Monumental” Figures: A Stylistic Analysis.The Human Clay Figurines And Ancient Near Eastern Magic.‘Ain Ghazal Token Catalogue, by Type and Subtype.Token Finds At Pre-Pottery Neolighic ‘Ain Ghazal, Jordan A Formal And Technological Analysis.Description of When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story.Tokens in China, Europe and Africa – The Significance.Prehistoric Administrative Technologies and the Ancient Near Eastern Redistribution Economy – The case of greater Susiana.Tokens and Writing: The Cognitive Development.“Signs of Life,” in Archaeology Odyssey.Tokens: their Significance for the Origin of Counting and Writing.
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