Sure. But before reading Homo Sapiens had to develop many other competences in the representative field. First he had to develop our articulated language starting 300,000 years ago. That enabled Homo Sapiens to develop the representational power of words as referential elements. Then he had to shift from this vocal, oral representation to a visual representation, shifting from the ear to the eye (see McLuhan on that). Then this will lead to writing and that will take a long time again. Reading is only the other side of writing and we consider today writing was “invented” around 3,500 BCE, and we estimate it must have taken at least 3,000 years to develop the material medium, the writing tool and the writing code to get to the Sumerian cuneiform writing system. The scribes (mostly Akkadians) wrote and then literate people could read (a very limited elite). Note Akkadians spoke a Semitic language and Sumerians spoke a language that can be considered as one ancestor of Indo-European languages.