Nova recently had a two part series on this, 'A to Z: The First Alphabet', it does a much better job of answering the question than this article... https://www

Nova recently had a two part series on this, 'A to Z: The First Alphabet', it does a much better job of answering the question than this article... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabe... My favorite part was this... "IRVING FINKEL: This [Sumerian] material goes from near the beginning of writing, so this is what we call a “pictographic” tablet from 3000 B.C. It’s very slim, and it’s ruled into columns with boxes of information that go together. These round and semi-round elements are numerals. And in each of the boxes, they have these things, which are added up at the end. NARRATOR: This clay tablet is the distant ancestor of today’s spreadsheet: a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers and pictures that represent commodities."