For thousands and thousands of years, people have communicated with each other by talking. We don’t really know what they said to each other long ago, but we can guess.
In the early days, there was no writing. If you wanted to tell your neighbor something, there was only one way to do it. You just walked over and told her.
At some point, all those thousands of years ago, people started using written marks, or symbols, to help them keep track of things.
Using symbols for counting was useful. But people needed a way to tell what they were counting. One idea was to use little drawings that looked like the things they stood for. These are called pictographs.
Eventually people wanted to use writing to do more than…
