Proto-writing traces back over 20,000 years. Logographic writing is at least 5,000 years old, but alphabetic writing took another 2,000 years to become widespread. Even then, many forms of punctuation and even things as basic as placing spaces between words are far more recent innovations. If reading text without spacing between words sounds difficult – the advice historically given was that reading the text aloud made this process easier, and up until only a few centuries ago