History of Writing and How It Changed the World

by Marco Flores, age 10

Writing and printing have been around for thousands of years, but where did it all begin?

For much of history, the alphabet as we know it today didn’t exist. Ancient Egyptians used pictures and symbols, like animals and body parts, to write words. These symbols are called hieroglyphics. For example, to spell a word like “mental,” Egyptians might use a game board, a loaf of bread, a vulture, and a lion. These stand for the sounds “men,” “t,” “a,” and “l.”

Books, as we know them today, didn’t appear until the invention of printing. Before the printing press, books were handmade by people known as scribes, who carefully copied documents by hand. The earliest known printed book is titled The Diamond Sutra, made in China in the year 868 CE using a woodblock printing method. Scribes sometimes added images to these books by carving blocks, inking them, and pressing them onto pages.

Pens were also not always common writing tools. Ancient Egyptians used reed pens, carved from thin pieces of wood with sharpened tips. They used soot-based ink to write on papyrus. Later, the Greeks and Romans used a metal stylus to scratch letters into wax tablets. Over time, people began using quill pens, which were made from bird feathers, often from geese. To use a quill pen, you had to dip it in ink repeatedly while writing.

In 1938, a man named László Bíró invented the ballpoint pen, which changed writing forever. Today, people write using all sorts of tools, like whiteboards, blackboards, typewriters, sticky notes, pencils, markers, and chalk, to record ideas and express themselves.

[Source: The Children's Fact Finder]