A major human breakthrough, besides agriculture, was the ability to represent a language graphically. In ancient societies, where most of the people were illiterate, the writing was done by scribes.
- In this video, Sara Brumfield of UCLA demonstrates how scribes wrote on clay tablets in Mesopotamia.
- This video from The Oriental Institute, Chicago, talks about these scribes and the rationale behind cuneiform.
- Egyptian scribes and their work is described in this video from The Oriental Institute, Chicago