Writing is invented in Sumer (Iraq)

Writing began in southern Iraq in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE, in the city of Uruk. Uruk had become the largest settlement in the world: about 250 hectares, with perhaps 20,000 to 50,000 people, its life run from the great temple estates of its sacred precinct, the Eanna of the goddess Inanna. Those estates handed out grain, beer, animals and cloth to thousands of workers and needed to know who had received what. Some time between about 3350 and 3200 BCE (3200 is the conventional date) their officials began to draw small pictures of goods, people and offices on pads of wet clay, next to numbers pressed in with a round stylus. These tablets, called proto-cuneiform, are the oldest writing known. German archaeologists dug about five thousand of them out of the rubbish fills of the Eanna between 1928 and 1976; about six thousand are known today, and nine in ten of them are accounts.

Writing did not come from nowhere. For thousands of years people in the Middle East had kept count with small clay tokens. By about 3500 BCE accountants at Uruk and at Susa in western Iran sealed tokens inside hollow clay balls and rolled their seals over the outside, sometimes pressing the tokens into the surface first; soon they flattened the clay into tablets that carried only numbers and seal impressions. The archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat argued that the signs of writing grew straight out of the shapes of the tokens. Other specialists accept that tokens, seals and number tablets came first, but doubt that individual signs can be traced to individual tokens. What Uruk added was a whole system: about nine hundred signs, at least five ways of counting (one of them in sixties, the root of our sixty minutes and 360 degrees), and lists of words for training scribes. The oldest, the Standard Professions List of about 140 officials and trades, was copied with little change for nearly a thousand years.

In the earliest phase, which scholars call Uruk IV, the signs were drawn as curved pictures. In the next, Uruk III, about 3100 BCE, they became simpler and were pressed in with a reed cut to a triangular point, the first step towards the wedges that later gave the script its name, cuneiform, from the Latin for 'wedge'. Tablets of this kind soon appear at Jemdet Nasr and other towns of central Iraq, and at Susa scribes made a script of their own, proto-Elamite. These early texts hold no stories, laws or letters, and a sign was only rarely used for its sound alone, as in a rebus; writing that follows the spoken language closely came only after about 2600 BCE. Egypt began to write at almost the same moment: bone and ivory tags with signs from a royal tomb at Abydos are dated between about 3320 and 3200 BCE. Whether Sumer was really first is therefore open, and many scholars now count Egypt's writing as a separate invention, while others still see the idea travelling from Mesopotamia.

Writing is the line between prehistory and history: from now on people could leave records in their own words. Cuneiform was used for more than three thousand years, until the first century CE, and was adapted to languages that have nothing to do with Sumerian, among them Akkadian, Elamite and Hittite. Because clay survives where papyrus and wood rot, Mesopotamia is one of the best-recorded civilizations of the ancient world. The Sumerians later told their own story of how it began: in a poem, Enmerkar, a legendary king of Uruk, presses his words into clay because his messenger cannot remember a long message. In fact writing began as bookkeeping, and the much simpler alphabet came almost two thousand years later.