Garner Read's Music Notation - A Manual of Modern Practice gives a short introduction to the history of (Western) music notation, which I'll try to summarise here.

He gives the earliest as about 3000 years ago - a Greek system using letters to denote pitches (using rotations and reversals to indicate alterations in the basic pitch, as we'd use sharp and flat signs). By the 4the Century AD this had 4000 signs and symbols!

Boethius in the 6th century designated the 15 notes of a 2-octave span by the 1st 15 letter of the Latin-Greek alphabet.

Many systems were tried in the 8th-14th centuries, but the most significant was neumes which essentially outlined the melodic shape of a melody and came to replace alphabet systems in Christian plainchant. They were inexact however and served more as reminder than the giving the actual melody.

This deficiency was only solved with varying degrees of immeduate success by the invention of staff lines and the codification of rhythm.

A 9th century book Musica Enchiriadis invented the use of a 6-line staff and placed the syllables of the text in the spaces, the spaces marked at the start by symbols indicating whole-tone or half-tone to the next space. (Duration was still not notated). This one staff examples was forgotten until the 10th century when a single pitch-line was hailed as a great invention! Staves of 5 and 6 lines did not appear until the 12th century. The single-line stave (marking a pitch to which neumes were related by being placed above or below it) was used in Latin plainchant and gradually more lines were added fixing more pitches. 4 lined had appeared by the 12th C and that is still used in Catholic liturgical music.

Symbols for note duration developed slowly between 13thC and 17thC and the modern 5-line stave and note symbols did not become standard until well into the 17thC. Additions (accents, slurs, dynamic and tempo markings) were still being refined during the following century.


So you could say that the history of sight reading goes back 3000 years in it's vaguest form (where you would have had to have some familiarity with the tune already) or perhaps only 300 or 400 years to a system that allowed you to play accurately something you'd never seen before. (Tablature systems used by lutes, vihuelas and other string instruments, which while not modern staff notation fulfilled the same function also come in at this last distance)

I've left out a lot of details even from the summary in the book, but it should give you an outline.

Mick