Episode 1:
We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word. But how and where did writing begin, and who began it? In From Pictures to Words, the first of three films about the history of writing, we uncover the hidden links between all the diverse writing systems in use today and trace the origin of our own alphabet to a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert and a man riding a donkey whose name was Khebded.
Writing is a recent innovation. Our species has existed for about 300,000 years, and for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing. At the Moon Dreaming site in the Northern Territory of Australia, Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Aboriginal Wardaman people, explains how Aboriginal culture has been transmitted down the generations orally, without the need to write anything down. So, why did people eventually feel the need to make permanent records in visual form?
According to Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist from the British Museum, it was in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, where the need for record-keeping was first felt. Here, about 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians developed the first city states. The city dwellers depended for their sustenance on taxing the surrounding countryside, and Irving produces a clay tablet from this period that is the distant ancestor of today’s spreadsheet: a grid of boxes ruled into the clay, with symbols that represent numbers, and small stylised pictures that represent commodities, such as an ear of barley. These so-called pictograms would be the basis for the first writing systems, and so we owe writing to the first accountants and tax inspectors.

Episode 2:
In 1448, in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould. His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper. But what he did was speed up history. Gutenberg’s printing press spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry. Every innovation since has been built on this foundation.
Yet behind Gutenberg’s invention lay centuries of development and change in the way words were written, without which he could never have succeeded. In this film, presenter Lydia Wilson and calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander set out to explore history’s most important technology – the technology of putting words on a page.

Episode 3:
The written word is so important in everyday life that there can be few more radical acts than forcing an entire nation to learn a new script. Yet that is what happened in Turkey in 1928 when the founder of the modern Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed that the Arabic script, which had been used to write the Turkish language for more than six centuries, would be replaced by the letters of the Latin alphabet.
His motivation lay in events that happened in Europe in the 15th century, at the beginning of the modern age, when society was transformed by the invention of the printing press. Because the shape of the letters of the Latin alphabet made them easier to print than other scripts, printing took off in Europe in a way it did not elsewhere. The resulting explosion in information led to scientific and industrial revolutions that, by the early 20th century, had taken Europe to unprecedented levels of wealth and power, giving European nations the means to dominate the globe.

source