"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days.... The end of the world is evidently approaching?
Inscription on an Assyrian tablet
About 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia invented humankind's first writing system. Having already established the world's first true civilization by introducing agriculture and domesticating cattle, they decided that it was more efficient to record their economic transactions in writing rather than use tokens to represent the number of beasts and the amount of harvest they traded. Their initial use of simple pictograms (drawings representing actual things) quickly developed into a complex system of symbols where items were illustrated by one sign and their volume by another.
The Sumerians' innovation was not only used for commercial purposes, but also extended to phonetic—rather than wholly pictographic—ideograms that expressed concepts such as deity and royalty as well as thoughts.
As the symbols evolved, the notes that were recorded on clay tablets became more cuneiform (wedge-shaped), owing to the wedge-tipped reed the Sumerians used as a writing utensil. They were initially drawn in vertical columns, but the writing direction soon changed to left to right in horizontal rows. Rediscovered in the nineteenth century, the cuneiform script (whose last known inscription is an astronomical text from 75 C.E.) carries major significance as the first means of chronicling events in writing.
