Programming languages began as a veneer over assembly language. They were close to the machine and tedious to program - the state of compiler technology was not advanced enough to support the many features that programmers would find useful, even if they could envision them.
To plug this gap, the idea of an interpreted language was born. This provided a way to write small programs - scripts - in an easier style. Performance was not critical, as the scripts were generally for simple tasks, and may only needed to have run once or occasionally. An entire folklore of interpreter writing techniques developed - it was much easier to implement useful, time-saving features in an interpreter than in a compiler.
At this point, the types of language supported by interpreters and compilers were very different. Interpreted programs were not considered mature enough for production use, hence they were known as 'scripting' languages, as opposed to compiled languages used fo