It is prudent to avoid attributing to any one civilization the merit of having invented writing – even though some historians, basing themselves on archaeological excavations, allow themselves to argue this question, depending on their areas of expertise. “I do not think that this question is really important,” says Winand. There are things, and the adoption of writing may be one of them, that are simply in the air at a certain moment in time. There may not be a single cradle for the birth of writing, although there may be a single cradle of human civilization. One can very well imagine that at a certain level of civilization, all peoples independently run into the need for developing writing. This is the case with the Chinese, the Mayans, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians”. In the two latter cases, their geographical proximity could lead us to ask if one people might not have influenced the other, and if so, in which direction. Although there may have been influence between two peoples, each of them rapidly became autonomous, because the techniques of their systems seem to have been different from the beginning. Hieroglyphic and cuneiform writing also have different functions. In Mesopotamia, the invention of writing was connected to an increasing need to facilitate the processes of administration. Similar needs made themselves felt in Egypt, and the answer was the development of the hieratic script; otherwise, researchers tend to see the primary motive for the use of hieroglyphs by Egyptians as related to an increasing desire to individualize generic scenes. Writing, for the Egyptians, was a way of framing the manifestation of power.

Archaeologists have found evidence of figurative art, generally in stone, from the 16^th to the fourth millennium BCE. Figures that appear related to what would later become hieroglyphs have been observed painted on ceramic containers, dating from 3700 BCE. These figures are represented in scenes that are already complex, and are organized through multiple interactions that generate meanings. In this very early evidence, figurative scenes can only represent action in a generic way; for example, they can represent a king destroying his enemies. But a precise arrangement of signs allows the action to be individualized, and the actors to be identified so that they can have the praise that they deserve bestowed upon them. Although this may be rudimentary, it is a form of writing, even if it remains highly figurative.

A recent discovery (involving a dig that was conducted during the 1980s) has actually turned the world of Egyptology upside down. This was the discovery of a tomb located at Abydos, which may date back to 3320 BCE; in this tomb, 200 “etiquettes” made of bone or ivory were recovered. Upon many of these little placards, there are drawings that seem to belong to a single pattern of design, more organized and at some distance from their original figurative function. These items are incredibly ancient, and the development of these signs is what distinguishes them from previous discoveries.

These signs are the most ancient things to have been discovered in Egypt that have been used to form words. The majority of them are figurative, and so they are subjected to certain constraints; they do not match the proportions of the real world. They are oriented in such a way as to generate a meaning in reading. Some of them have a phonetic value, and can be read according to the known rules for hieroglyphs; normally their phonetic value is arrived at using a rebus principle. That which distinguishes the rebus, which plays with the distribution of a string of syllables in accordance with a succession of the iconic representations, is just this, that it is dependent on the language. These little placards, which are formed in accordance with the code of hieroglyphs, can only be read in Egyptian. Thus the discovery of the tomb has allowed scholars to conclude that more than 5000 years ago, a hieroglyphic system had begun to develop, and had already linked together ideography and phonetics.