in the spoken language. There are considered to be three writing criteria for all writing systems. Firstly, writing must be complete: it must have a purpose or some sort of meaning to it, and a point must be made or communicated in the text. Secondly, all writing systems must have some sort of symbols which can be made on some sort of surface, whether physical or digital. Lastly, the symbols used in the writing system must mimic spoken word/speech, in order for communication to be possible. The greatest benefit of writing is that it provides the tool by which society can record information consistently and in greater detail, something that could not be achieved as well previously by spoken word. Writing allows societies to transmit information and to share and preserve knowledge. Recorded history of writing Some notational signs, used next to images of animals, may have appeared as early as the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe circa 35,000 BCE, and may be the earliest proto-writing: several symbols were used in combination as a way to convey seasonal behavioural information about hunted animals. The origins of writing are more generally attributed to the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, at the end of the 4th millennium BCE, and soon after in various parts of the Near East. An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing: Scholars make a reasonable distinction between prehistory and history of early writing but have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became "true writing". The definition is largely subjective. Writing, in its most general terms, is a method of recording information and is composed of graphemes, which may, in turn, be composed of glyphs. The emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the "historicity" of a culture by the presence of coherent texts in the culture's writing system(s). Inventions of writing Writing was long thought to have been invented in a single civilization, a theory named "monogenesis". Scholars believed that all writing