Writing throve east and south of Hellas and Italia long before reaching the Mediterranean peninsulas. It emerged in southern Mesopotamia (
see
Cuneiform
) when it was realized that a (usually pictographic) symbol for a thing also represented the name of that thing, and such a symbol could be used for the sound of the name of that thing in notating words or affixes unamenable to (pictographic) representation. In agglutinative Sumerian, morphemes do not change their sound for grammatical expression, so the syllable represented by a cuneiform sign remained constant. But the constant sounds in Egyptian morphemes are the consonants only (vowels change with inflection); so when the idea of representingmorphemes came to Egypt, the signs (adapted from existing pictographs) came to represent only consonants–one, two, or three.