Something written had to exist in order to be read, so writing is at least a second older than reading.
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No. You can read signs. Like foot prints, or fire scars. Or you can count actually objects before you invent tallying.
An individual person can learn to read before they learn to write, and that’s almost always the case. But the very, very first person to ever do either of those things wrote before he read.
The very first person to write was doing so with the intent of it being read. They didn’t make marks that they didn’t understand and then later discover their meaning. Writing makes no sense without reading. These two things happened in unison, one does not predate the other.
I wasn’t taking about an individual, I was talking about humans as a species and culture.
There may also have been a series of simple pictures that someone had put next to each other, then someone else figuring out “hey, if I make the symbols simple enough and draw a lot of them, I can actually record stories completely accurately!”
In that case, the reading would come first, as the reader would be the first one to interpret the simplistic images as text.
