The world’s first cities emerged in southern Mesopotamia during the Late Uruk period (about 3400-3000 BC). Officials in these cities developed a new way of recording administrative and economic information. Pictographs (representations of objects) of goods issued as rations or put into store were drawn on pieces of clay using a sharp stick or reed. Circular or crescent-shaped impressions represented numerical symbols. At the same time other forms of recording were used including small tokens of clay in geometric shapes that represented numbers or quantities, some of which were enclosed within balls of clay.

Over time the pictographs drawn on clay tablets became more abstract and the end of the reed was simply pressed at an angle a number of times into the clay to form the design. The signs were made up of these wedge-like lines, or cuneiform (the Latin for wedge is cuneus). Writing, the recording of elements of a spoken language, emerged from these earlier recording systems around 3000 BC. The first written language in Mesopotamia is called Sumerian. Most of the early cuneiform tablets come from the site of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, and it may have been here that this form of writing was invented. Cuneiform writing spread east to Iran and north into Syria during the Early Bronze Age.