Traditionally, from Aristotle to Hegel, has been considered as valuable the following sequence: Thought  Word  Writing. In this essay I claim that the right order of the sequence is utterly the opposite: (i) oral language does not come first, gesture does; (ii) writing is independent from language both because gesture comes first and because writing, differently from language, can record; finally (iii) the capacity of recording and of communicating is typical of the soul seen as a tabula.