[RoosterRedux]

Interpersonal transactions—exchanges of goods, services, or favors between individuals—almost certainly preceded the invention of warehouses. Early human societies relied on direct exchanges, bartering, and communal sharing long before the development of storage facilities. And interpersonal transactions were most certainly recorded in some manner (to reflect who owes whom).

That said, the cuneiform tablets so far discovered might be the recording of warehouse inventories.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I wasn’t gainsaying that. Cuneiform arose to meet a need and almost certainly was derived from an earlier form of notation. By the time civilization started storing information on clay tablets, some form of writing had to be available.

There was a very provocative piece on PBS, Nova, perhaps, recently that claims that the alphabet was only ever invented once, in the Levant, about 3000 years ago, and was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Tracing the Roman alphabet through Greek to Phoenician is relatively straight forward, and the Phoenician alphabet is very close to the earliest alphabetic symbols, which began by using hieroglyphs phonetically in rebuses-like form. All alphabets ever used in the world were derived from it. The assertion is that the alphabet was only invented once, one time, in one place.