Cuneiform

Cuneiform, developed by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), is the world's oldest known writing system. Pressing a reed stylus into wet clay tablets, scribes first recorded trade transactions and inventories. Over centuries, the system evolved from pictographs to abstract wedge-shaped signs capable of expressing complex language, law, literature, and astronomy — including early literature such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known literary works.

Exact date is debated; some tablets may be slightly earlier or later. Egyptian hieroglyphics emerged around the same period independently.

Context

The oldest tablets come from the Eanna temple district of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, and are usually dated to the late fourth millennium BCE. Dating relies mainly on the layers of earth in which the tablets were found and on comparison with other datable remains, so the c. 3400 BCE figure is a convenient round estimate rather than a precise year.

These earliest texts are not stories or poems. Most are administrative records: counts of grain, beer, livestock and textiles, kept by temple officials. Signs began as simple pictures, then gradually became stylised wedge shapes as scribes pressed a cut reed into soft clay, which is where the name cuneiform (from the Latin for wedge) comes from.

Over the following three thousand years, cuneiform was adapted to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and several other languages. Its users produced letters, legal codes, school exercises, medical and astronomical texts, and literary works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh in its later versions. Because baked and sun-dried clay survives well, hundreds of thousands of tablets are preserved in museum collections today.