I wish I could give this article more than one heart. The development of the first scripts and alphabets is one of my favorite topics in the whole world. These symbols really do connect us to the very ancient past — not just because of the stories and ideas they encode, but because the symbols themselves are, as you say, based on words that date all the way back to the old Akkadian language in the 4th millennium BCE. And some of those words — beyt, for example — are still in active use in modern Semitic languages, like Hebrew!

I’d love to see you do an article on the differences between ancient logographic and phonemic writing systems— the pros and cons of each, and how they each evolved over the centuries.