--- title: How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and many peoples to grow. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / How writing began: from tally marks an… # How writing began: from tally marks and pictures to the alphabet Lesson 82 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/1/) — It is a lovely story, but real writing took thousands of years and many peoples to grow. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/2/) — People painted animals in caves tens of thousands of years ago, but a picture is not yet writing: it does not tell you the exact words, so two people can read it two different ways, just as Taffy's mother did. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/3/) — True writing began about 5,200 years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt, when temple workers and traders needed to remember how much grain, beer and how many sheep they had. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/5/) — The biggest trick came next: using a picture for its SOUND, not its meaning. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/6/) — From that idea came the alphabet, a small set of letters that can write any word at all, and the letters you are reading now are its great-grandchildren. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/7/) — People painted animals on cave walls more than 40,000 years ago, but pictures alone are not writing, because they do not show the exact words. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/9/) — In Mesopotamia (now mostly Iraq) the Sumerians began writing about 5,200 years ago, pressing a reed into wet clay; Egypt had hieroglyphs at about the same time. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/11/) — The rebus trick uses a picture for its sound: a bee and a leaf can spell «belief». - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/12/) — The first writers in Egypt and Mesopotamia used it to write names and words that cannot be drawn. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/13/) — About 3,800 years ago, workers in Egypt and Sinai who spoke a language related to Hebrew and Arabic took Egyptian picture-signs and used each one only for the first sound of its name: this was the first alphabet. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/14/) — That is why our A began as an ox's head («alp» meant ox), B as a house («bet»), M as wavy water («mem») and O as an eye. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/15/) — The Phoenicians were sea-traders from cities such as Tyre, Sidon and Byblos in today's Lebanon, famous for a costly purple dye made from sea snails; about 3,000 years ago they spread a 22-letter alphabet around the Mediterranean. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/16/) — The Phoenician alphabet had letters only for consonants, not for vowels; the Hebrew and Arabic scripts grew from the same family and are still often written without vowels. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/17/) — The Greeks borrowed the alphabet about 2,800 years ago and added vowels; the word «alphabet» comes from their first two letters, alpha and beta. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/18/) — The Romans took the alphabet from the Greeks and the Etruscans; English uses their Latin alphabet, and the Cyrillic alphabet of Ukrainian grew from the Greek one about 1,100 years ago. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/20/) — Chinese writing never became an alphabet: it uses thousands of characters, and a reader needs about three thousand of them for a newspaper, while English needs 26 letters. - [21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/82-how-writing-began-from-tally-marks-and-pictures-to-the-alphabet/21/) — Stone Age people in Britain did not write; writing came to Britain with the Romans about 2,000 years ago, so Taffy and Tegumai in Surrey could not really have done it. - ← previous: [Alice's Victorian world: tea, croquet, pocket watches, shillings and chimney sweeps](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/81-alice-s-victorian-world-tea-croquet-pocket-watches-shillings-and-chimney-sweeps/) - next →: [Toad's Edwardian England: early motor cars, caravans, steam trains, wash day and gold sovereigns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/83-toad-s-edwardian-england-early-motor-cars-caravans-steam-trains-wash-day-and-gold-sovereigns/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)