From the first writing system used by the ancient Sumerians
Even the text in the digital technology era
The history of mankind has developed along with writing!

Tracing the origins and development of writing, from ancient marks on stones and bones to modern computer and internet language.
Beginning with the first steps in storing information (knots, tick marks, pictographs), we will explore how a full-fledged writing system emerged in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC, how the Phoenician alphabet arose and its influence on the Greek alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Arabic script of the Middle East, the scripts of East Asia such as Hanja (Chinese), Hangul (Korean), and Kana (Japanese), and how the scripts used in pre-Columbian America were formed.
He also meticulously analyzed everything related to writing, from manuscripts in the Western European Middle Ages, the process by which printing led to technological innovation, to spelling conventions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

'Writing', a symbol that visually expresses human language, is the ultimate tool for conveying human knowledge, a cultural medium of society, a democratic means of expression for informing the public, and a part of art called calligraphy.
In this way, we can confirm the development of human civilization through the history of writing, which cannot be considered separately from the lives of civilized people (humans).

Even before the development of fully formed writing systems, we humans stored information using colorful visual symbols and mnemonics to aid memory.
Rock art is a repository of universal symbols, such as human-like figures, flora and fauna, the sun, stars and comets, and indescribable geometric patterns.
Most of these visual symbols are visual representations of common phenomena in the physical world.
At the same time, mnemonics that aid memory were also used in linguistic contexts.
For example, various objects were used as tools for remembering words, including knot records, pictographs, bones and sticks with notches engraved on them, sticks with pictures of messages, devices for manipulating strings to produce sounds, and colored pebbles.
Over the millennia, visual symbols and these associations have become increasingly intimately connected in specific social settings.
Finally, the two were combined to form one 'graphic mnemonics'.
---From "Chapter 1 - From Engraving to Tablet"

Another fascinating feature of Egyptian hieroglyphs is the use of quantifiers, or symbolic identifiers.
(It was only later that the symbolic identifier called determiner appeared in other writing systems.) Determiners differed markedly from phonetic complements in that they identified sounds, not meanings.
A determiner was a word symbol, a logogram that was attached to the end of a phonetic symbol, that is, a sound symbol.
In English, determiners are added to help us determine the exact meaning of a word, especially when the sound of the word is ambiguous, such as in the homonyms Bill and bill.
Because determiners should be as clear as possible, most determiners were pictographs rather than logograms.
---From "Chapter 2 - Talking Pictures"

The Canaanite proto-alphabet, which emerged later in the mid-Bronze Age, was also pictographic, linear, and consonantal, with each symbol representing a single consonant.
The newly invented writing systems in the trading centers of Egypt, Babylon, Anatolia, and the Aegean were simple and flexible to write, and thus spread and developed rapidly.
If the Egyptian scribes were the main characters who distilled the alphabet, the Canaanite scribes were the main characters who spread the alphabet widely.
The oldest alphabetic characters in Canaan are found on the Gezer Jar, excavated in Israel, and are thought to date back to the 16th century BC.

---From "Chapter 3 - Speaking Writing System"

The list of letters of the Greek alphabet was fairly complete from the beginning.
However, the task of writing in the early Greek alphabet was quite 'primitive'.
Because there was no standardized spelling for a very long time.
There was no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, and no punctuation or spaces.
Each region also followed its own unique customs, and some even used their own invented characters.
Inscriptions written in early Greek were written from right to left, like Semitic languages, and the direction of writing changed with each line, 'like an ox plowing a field' (boustrophedon).
However, around the 6th century BC, most scribes preferred to always write from left to right, regardless of line breaks.
Eventually, this method replaced all others.

---From "Chapter 4 - From Alpha to Omega"

In his proclamation of 1446, Sejong wrote:
“[Hangul] clearly distinguishes between voiceless and voiced sounds, and can record music and songs.
[Hangul] is good for practical use.
“The sound of the wind, the chirping of birds, the crowing of a rooster, and the barking of a dog can all be accurately described [in Korean].” This is almost certainly true.
Korean consonants were created based on five points of articulation: bilabial (lips), dental (teeth), alveolar (gums), velar (soft palate), and glottal (throat).
However, the shape of the three vowels is 'metaphysically' composed of the sky (round dot), the earth (horizontal line), and man (vertical line).
By rationalizing this new writing system philosophically, it superficially satisfied Korean scholars who were demanding a Chinese conceptualization to give authority to the Hangul system.
Therefore, in Hangul, consonants and vowels are distinguished not only visually but also conceptually.

---From "Chapter 5 - The Rebirth of East Asian Characters"

The first evidence of a complete writing system in Mesoamerica comes from the Zapotec people.
They are a people who occupied a vast area in southern Mexico, from the Valley of Oaxaca to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Around 600 BCE, local leaders at the Monte Alban fort and nearby centers in the Oaxaca Valley erected stone monuments to publicize their victories and to boast of the captives they captured, tortured, and sacrificed.
It is particularly noteworthy that the monument records the names of the defeated rivals and their tribes, as well as the dates on which they were defeated in battle or sacrificed.
Zapoteca scribes wrote on paper made from native plants, adding color to it, and during the colonial period, they also used paper imported from Spain.
Among the documents they left behind are account books (which likely recorded tribute), genealogies, and maps showing the Zapotec territory.
Most of the inscriptions seem to record 'the number of prisoners taken by a particular warrior on a particular day in a particular city.'

---From "Chapter 6 - Mesoamerica and the Andes"

Papyrus, the preferred writing medium in ancient times, was too expensive.
Therefore, since only a very small number of people could afford to buy written books, relatively few people bought and read long works.
However, in the 2nd century AD, parchment was circulated in large quantities.
Moreover, because parchment was cheap, book production increased significantly.
However, parchment had been around for centuries.
For example, in 190 BC, Eumenes II (reigned 197–158 BC), ruler of the Kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor (present-day western Turkey), encouraged his engineers to perfect the technique of drying thin sheep and goat skins in hopes of building a library to rival the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.
The name of the final product created through this process, 'parchment', is derived from 'Pergamum', the place where it was invented.

---From "Chapter 7 - Parchment Keyboard"

As recent studies have shown, the very act of expressing personal feelings in writing can help combat depression, strengthen the immune system, and lower blood pressure.
Didn't Aristotle also argue that 'sickness of the soul' can be expressed in writing?
Pioneer 10, a spacecraft that has crossed the solar system, responds to text commands received from a computer on Earth.
As we venture beyond our traditional limitations, writing, however imperfect, becomes an essential means of expressing the human species.
But the impulse to leave traces of a certain type of thought in artifacts is a characteristic not only of us today, but also of our ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago.
If writing continues to provide wonderful assistance to humanity in various forms, it will define and create a 'new human race'.
Whatever form letters take in the future, they will remain central to human life, empowering and enabling us to remember.
As an Egyptian scribe said about 4,000 years ago, “When a person dies, his body becomes dust, and everything connected with him crumbles to dust.
“What makes him memorable are the letters.”

---From "Chapter 8 - The Future of Letters"