Writing and Reading
1. The History of Writing
The dating of the beginning of human language is not easy, but we have a clear picture of the relevant interval for the upper and lower boundaries. There were hominids with a human-like vocal tract as early as 200,000 B.C., but they probably did not have a sufficiently developed nervous system to control it until about 100,000 B.C. Evidence regarding Neanderthals (70,000-35,000 B.C.) is not clear as to human language capacities; most experts believe that the essential features of human language were in place at least by the time of Cro-Magnon (35,000 B.C.) Crystal (p.293) gives the "window of likelihood" for the evolution of spoken human language as being between 50,000 - 30,000 B.C.

Nothing that we can call writing, however, evolved before about 3000 B.C. In other words, spoken human language seems to have been around from at least 30,000 - 50,000 years before writing was invented. The domestication of plants and animals, the invention of pottery making, the development of new technologies of grinding and polishing in the manufacture of stone tools c. 8000-9000 B.C. -- all of these occurred some five or six thousand years before writing was invented. In this historical and evolutionary sense, then, spoken language has been prior to written language. It is true, too, that writing systems were based on spoken languages -- initially, in an attempt to capture meaning via graphic representation. Spoken language is prior to written language as well in the life of every human being who becomes literate: ability to produce and comprehend written language comes later than these abilities in the spoken language. Further, whereas all human beings of even quite low I.Q. become competent native speakers, not everyone is able to acquire similar competence in the derivative, written, medium. Spoken language does not have to be taught; written language, by and large, does.

Pictographic Writing
The major division among types of writing systems is the division between phonologically-based systems (where the written symbols represent sounds of the languages) and non phonologically-based systems (where the written symbols represent meaning). The earliest writing systems developed out of pictorial representations of objects, and "reading" initially represented simply recognizing the symbols. Egyptian and Mesopotamian pictograms date from about 3000 B.C.; pictograms in China (an independent development) have been dated at about 1500 B.C. Pictograms slowly became conventionalized, and developed into ideographic writing systems.
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Ideographic Writing
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/Writingl...

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Early written symbols were based on pictographs (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (symbols which represent ideas). Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese civilizations began to adapt such symbols to represent concepts, developing them into logographic writing systems. Pictographs are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Pictographs are often used as simple, pictorial, representational symbols by most contemporary cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram