About 5,200 years ago, in the city of Uruk in what is now southern Iraq, people invented writing. They pressed wedge-shaped marks into damp clay tablets with a sharpened reed. The marks could stand for objects, sounds and ideas. We call this writing cuneiform, and it is the oldest known writing in the world.
What did the very first writers write about? Mostly accounting. Sacks of grain. Counts of sheep. Lists of workers and how much beer they got paid. It wasn’t poetry or stories. People needed a reliable way to track who owed what to whom, and squiggly marks on clay turned out to work much better than memory.
The amazing part is that those clay tablets last almost forever. Once they bake in the sun or in a fire, they basically turn into stone. Today, museums hold tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, and scholars can still read them. We know more about ancient grocery lists than about most modern phone calls.
