Atlas Trail
Writing, Invented Again and Again
Most of the world's scripts trace back, sooner or later, to a small handful of shared ancestors. This trail visits the rare exceptions: the handful of writing systems invented from nothing, by people who owed no debt to any script that came before them, plus the closely related mystery of the ones nobody has managed to read yet.
Stop 1 of 7.
Scripts
Cuneiform: the oldest attested independent invention of writing, built from Sumerian accounting marks around 3500 to 3200 BCE.
Stop 2 of 7.
Scripts
Egyptian hieroglyphs: a second, roughly contemporary invention on the Nile, and a live debate over whether it owed anything to Mesopotamia at all.
Stop 3 of 7.
Scripts
Han script: Chinese characters, a third independent tradition, whose oracle bone ancestors reach back to around 1250 BCE.
Stop 4 of 7.
Scripts
Maya script: a fourth independent invention half a world away in Mesoamerica, deciphered only after decades of dispute over whether it was phonetic at all.
Stop 5 of 7.
Scripts
Cherokee syllabary: the most recent independent invention on record, completed by one man, Sequoyah, in 1821.
Stop 6 of 7.
Scripts
Linear A: the trail's open case. A real script, real signs, real tablets, and a language nobody has yet identified.
Stop 7 of 7.
Scripts
A candidate for genuinely independent invention that stayed unresolved into the modern carbon-dating era: the debate over whether Rapa Nui's rongorongo predates European contact runs from the thirteenth century to as late as the 1770s.
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