Persia, an ancient Greek philosopher, looked at the letter. It always took him a while to figure out which words were which. He assumed the letter he was holding was a report on the colonnades being made in a temple.  I have a feeling this would have happened all the time in ancient times when there wasn't punctuation or periods or even spaces in between lines.  Imagine you could be reading a story back then and getting everything completely wrong. Think of a baker that had gotten an order for three loaves of bread. The baker could have gotten everything wrong or made something completely different. Imagine if someone wrote a check (or bill of sale) to someone else. The person receiving the check (or bill of sale) could get the amounts wrong. Punctuation is so important in terms of listing things off or pausing for effect. Think about how strange it would be to convey emotions through a string of words all in a line without break. We have periods and other punctuation to add pauses to the flow of words and information.  You could say punctuation is vital for humanity.  Without punctuation, it would be hard to communicate with the written word.