>>81268452You're not quite right. Pictograms emerged before the development of complex societies as a way for migrating nomads to leave behind messages to help, guide or warn others. While there were presumably vocalizations that also represented concepts, the pictogram was not intended to represent the spoken word, but to simply represent the idea. This allowed groups whose spoken languages were not mutually intelligible to still generally understand messages and signposts left behind.
But the lack of direct contact between these tribes outside of the messages they left through these pictograms meant that as their languages grew in complexity, they had to represent that complexity with the same, mutually recognizable symbols. You have the symbol for 'human,' but when one tribe encounters a man-eating animal, they need to convey it in a way that tribes who haven't encountered it yet will understand. Thus man + beast. What if you need to warn that this maneater hunts in packs? Man + beast + group. But this maneater avoids open ground and stalks in forests, so man + beast + group + tree. Before you know it, we develop a spoken word to name this animal, and the pictograms come to be read as 'wolf'. You couldn't just invent a new pictogram for wolf, or else nobody that hadn't seen a wolf would understand you, but by combining pictograms everyone understands, you can describe a new creature such that anybody coming after would understand. The oldest pictograms in human culture, and the ones most common across languages spanning from asia to europe, are the ones for "human" and for directions.
This sort of system of communication is how we arrived at an alphabet of letters that we combine to form words. It's directly a product of the fact that migrating tribes coming westward out of india were encountering inhospitable conditions they weren't adapted for and were driven to continue migrating in search of food, hospitable climates and arable land. And it's why civilizations that settled earlier in history developed their written language differently.
