If you are visiting to do research for a school project, this section is the place to start. Here, you will find the standard explanation of how writing began. That narrative is not wrong. It is, however, not the whole story; and my primary interest is with large parts of that story which have been left out.
The usual story of how writing began locates this origin in the Nesr East, and places this beginning with the agricultural surpluses that occurred as agrarian societies developed. The people who were producing food generally stayed in one place, while the goods they supplied were being moved around. Phonetic writing arises out of that movement of goods — and was shaped at its inception by methods for recording quantities of different things.
Elsewhere, it was people who moved around — in a semi-nomadic lifestyle, between seasonally accessible food sources. The form of writing which arose from this origin was very different than those that evolved in the Middle East; and one dominant characteristic which came into place here can best be described as “positional localization”.
Thus, while the form(s) of writing which arose in the Middle East were heavily weighted toward a very basic form of signification (attaching one sign to another thing: connecting a sign with an object; attaching a number to that sign; substituting a sound, instead of a number, as what is connected to a sign) — the form(s) of writing I have been documenting are more heavily weighted toward grammar: that is, the functional connectivities holding between linguistic elements as co-definitional, determined through various aspects of positional localization.