The first writing was invented to keep accounts

Around the end of the 4th millennium BCE (about 3200 BCE), scribes in the Sumerian city of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, pressed a reed stylus into damp clay to make the world’s earliest writing. The wedge-shaped marks give the script its name: cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, “wedge.”

The road to that moment was long. The archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat traced it to small clay tokens — cones, spheres, disks — that Mesopotamians had used for thousands of years to count goods like grain and livestock. To record a transaction, accountants sealed the relevant tokens inside a hollow clay ball, a bulla, and then pressed the tokens onto its wet outer surface so the contents could be read without breaking it. In time, people realized the impressions alone sufficed, and the tokens were abandoned. Those marks became the first written signs.

The earliest tablets are not stories or laws but ledgers — lists of commodities paired with numbers and personal names. Writing emerged as a tool for administrators, not poets.

From there the signs evolved. Crude pictographs were simplified into abstract clusters of wedges, and through the rebus principle — using a sign for its sound rather than its picture — they grew into a flexible phonetic syllabary capable of recording the Epic of Gilgamesh, legal codes, and astronomy. Lost for centuries, cuneiform was finally deciphered in the 19th century, largely thanks to the trilingual Behistun inscription decoded by Henry Rawlinson.