The chicken-egg paradox in writing is that at some point someone came up with a symbol that meant something more than “drawing of profile of buffalo means buffalo.” So when that one person said “OK, I’m drawing a buffalo with an arrow above it, that means ‘go hunting’” there was an hour or two between writing and reading being invented.
Pictographs is the term.
The chicken-egg paradox in writing is that at some point someone came up with a symbol that meant something more than “drawing of profile of buffalo means buffalo.” So when that one person said “OK, I’m drawing a buffalo with an arrow above it, that means ‘go hunting’” there was an hour or two between writing and reading being invented.