ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to place the development of systems of writing alongside other techniques for representing thought. One powerful, indeed almost omniscient, method is the use of speech, but it is not the only one and the history of the development of writing shows a continual interplay between attempts to capture thought in the way that a painter might echo the reality of the visual world and attempts to represent speech itself. The invention of phonographic representation appears to have been made independently in at least five ancient writing systems: Sumerian, Egyptian, Cretan, Hittite and Chinese. The major drawback to pictographic systems of writing will be apparent. Such drawings do indeed represent concepts directly in the same way that speech does, but with nothing like the power and flexibility of speech, since they are constrained by attributes of the visual world not really relevant to the process of symbolic communication.
