Cuneiform
Accountants in Uruk press signs into clay, and writing begins.
- When
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The earliest tablets from Uruk around 3200 BCE are administrative: quantities of grain, beer, livestock and labour, recorded with number signs and pictographs impressed by a reed stylus. Writing is invented to keep track of things, not to tell stories. Over centuries the pictographs abstract into wedge-shaped signs and acquire phonetic values, which lets the script record language rather than just amounts — and once it can do that it can record law, poetry, prayer and mathematics.