By the middle of the fourth millennium BC, two writing systems developed almost simultaneously in Egypt and lower Mesopotamia: Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform writing. Before the scriptures were certainly already in use the seals ("small sign" in Latin), that is, the personal imprint left on a malleable material, so as to attest the identity of the sealer, and much earlier the marks, small clay objects that represented units of calculation, and that date back to the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals, then towards the first millennium B. C. E., which were used to count quantities of cereals, animals etc.
Hieroglyph is the Italian tranliteration of the Greek adjectival word h, hieroglyphics, which means "sacred engraved", referring to the letters, that is, the signs that were engraved on the temples and statues of gods and rulers. If transcribed on papyri they constituted a simplified writing, called hieratic, used since ancient times, and an even more simplified, almost shorthand, called demotic (a term coined by Herodotus), which developed towards the end of the seventh century. a. e. v. Hieroglyphic writing simultaneously had a phonetic, ideogram and determinative value (that is, some signs wanted to specify a genus: for example, there was a specific sign indicating that a certain population was nomadic, and not sedentary).
There was also a hieroglyphic script "hittite", although it was used in the Luvian, Indo-European language of Anatolia; this script does not seem to depend on the Egyptian one.
Cuneiform writing, as the word itself says, consisted in tracing wedges with a stylus, that is, an accumulated rush, on soft clay tablets, which were then fired; or they were carved on stone, tombstones or statues.
Finally, from a diachronic point of view, we arrive at alphabetic writing, much easier to learn and write, where each sign identifies a sound. The introduction of the alphabet is conventionally traced back to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, that is, towards 1200 B. C. E., but certainly the process, in its genesis, was very long: the protocanane and the protosynaitic are earlier examples of alphabetic writings.
