My first full lecture was on “The birth of symbolic language” which coverd a fair amount of content based on natural languages (languages that are developed through human interaction) and after starting on some very early cave paintings, for example those which can be found upon the walls of the Chauvet cave which were discovered in 1994.
Image from the Bradshaw foundations France rock art archive, of some of the cave paintings in the Chauvet cave.
soon after the lecture lead on to cuneiform, the subject that I found most interest in, merely for the fact that it is to be the origin of written communication as we know it today. Cuneiform was created as the first “writing” form when the need arose for people and community to keep track of information that may have been to vast to just memorise, for things such as keeping track of stock, like cattle, sheep or grain as they came in and out of stores or farms, of course at this stage the tools for such writing were fairly basic, using the materials at hand like clay from river banks and etched into using pointed sticks or reeds. On the earlier texts rather than writing, it was pictures that were drawn into the clay to record stores of things like grain and animals, but it it did not take long for the scribes to realise that it was quicker to not create artistic impressions of each object the would record but instead much easier to use a few marks to create an image to represent each thing, the markings of which would of course need to be taught to others so that everyone could recognise them. And so it was from this point onwards that they no longer would need a pointed tool to draw out more complex pictures, and so they used blunt wooden or reed styluses, and due to the shape of these, when used they would leave a wedged-shaped impression in the clay, which is why the writing system came to be known as cuniform (from the Latin word cuneus meaning wedge).
References:
(J.T. Hooker & C.B.F Walker – 1990)
danyosaur 