Most of us don’t give a second thought to the greatest human achievement in history. But now the British Museum’s new interactive exhibition Writing: Marking Your Mark is celebrating more than 5,000 years of our most amazing legacy. The exhibit, which runs through August 27, 2019, offers an introduction to five millennia of technological innovations in writing. Visitors can discover the extraordinary evolution of writing from Mesopotamian tablets to the early printed text, and onto the age of emojis. From my observations of the children in my family and community, the act of writing with a nondigital instrument should be disappearing by the mid-21st century.

Sandstone figure of a sphinx