[ants_everywhere]

One of the theories of how writing was invented was via transactions and accounting.

You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.

[jeanlucas]

Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive.

What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional.

Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.

[ants_everywhere]

That's true we don't know anything about markings that were made on organic materials.

We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect.

But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.

[jeanlucas]

Exactly, it's not a good theory, but it's the best one we have.

We just need to keep in mind that and not word it as if it is a fact that writing stated with accounting

[tycho-newman]

Writing probably arose from reading animal tracks in soft mud.