From ox heads to eternity

The first writing systems blurred the line between art, language, and thought, leaving a mark on civilization itself.

Writing began as an act of picturing the world, but it soon became an act of abstracting from it, of thinking not just about what was seen but about what could be meant.

The earliest known scripts, cuneiform and hieroglyphs, both arose in societies where administration, ritual, and memory demanded a technology more enduring than speech and more precise …