Information Theory: Birth of Writing

Cave handprints represent humanity’s earliest preserved symbolic markings, conveying minimal information—simply that someone was present at that location and might return.

Around 50,000 years ago, humans underwent a sudden cognitive transformation, developing the ability to externalize inner thoughts through language and creative expression after millennia of unchanged stone tool technology.

The Narmer Palette from Egypt’s Nile River region (circa 3100 BC) contains some of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions demonstrating the rebus principle for writing the pharaoh’s name.

Pictograms represent concrete physical objects through drawings resembling their natural forms, creating the first systematic visual representation of specific things rather than mere presence markers.

The rebus principle revolutionized writing by disassociating sounds from pictures, combining symbols based on pronunciation rather than meaning to represent names and abstract concepts.

Ancient communicators combined individual pictograms and ideograms based on their meanings to create composite messages, enabling complex communication through symbol sequences.

Ancient Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) created clay accounting tablets before 3000 BC, representing some of humanity’s oldest written documents and the birthplace of systematic writing.