ANCIENT

The oldest known writing was pressed into clay with a reed over 5,000 years ago.

People in ancient Mesopotamia invented cuneiform mostly to keep track of grain, sheep and beer rations.

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The oldest known writing was pressed into clay with a reed over 5,000 years ago.

THE FULL STORY

The world’s first writing system, called cuneiform, was invented in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) more than 5,000 years ago. The name means “wedge-shaped” because scribes pressed a reed stylus into wet clay tablets, leaving little triangular marks. Once the clay dried, the message was permanent.

Cuneiform wasn’t invented to write stories or poetry. It was invented to keep track of stuff. The earliest tablets are mostly inventory lists: 30 sheep, 5 baskets of grain, 12 jars of beer. Beer was actually a major payment for workers, and many of the oldest tablets are basically pay stubs from over 4,000 years ago.

Eventually people started writing letters, laws, recipes, jokes and even the world’s oldest novel - the Epic of Gilgamesh. Cuneiform was used by many cultures for around 3,000 years before slowly being replaced by alphabets. We can read it today thanks to careful detective work in the 1800s.

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The oldest known writing was pressed into clay with a reed over 5,000 years ago.

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