How writing began and spread

1. Stop 1 · 3400 BC to 200 BC

   Writing, invented four times

   Start with the big picture: writing was not invented once, but separately in at least four places.

2. about 400 years later

3. Stop 2 · About 3100 to 2900 BC

   A clay tablet recording barley

   Then look closely at one of the oldest kinds of writing. It is not a poem or a law, but an account of grain.

   
4. about 1,800 years later

5. Stop 3 · About 1254 to 1041 BC

   Asking the ancestors

   In China, the oldest writing we have is questions to the dead, carved beside cracks in bone.

   
6. about 1,100 years later

7. Stop 4 · 196 BC, and 1799 to 1822

   Reading the Rosetta Stone

   Writing can be forgotten. This is how one stone with three scripts let people read hieroglyphs again.

   
8. about 300 years later

9. Stop 5 · About AD 85 to 400

   Life on the frontier

   In Roman Britain, ordinary soldiers and their families wrote letters in ink on thin slips of wood.

   
10. about 600 years later

11. Stop 6 · AD 635 to 875

    Saints and raiders

    And on an island off Northumberland, monks made one of the most beautiful books in Europe.

    
12. End of the line

Pictures are credited on each stop’s own page.

Another line: Living by water.