Cuneiform — The First Writing

It began as accounting. Someone in Uruk around 3400 BCE needed to record how many jars of beer had been delivered to the temple, pressed a stylus into a wet clay tablet and made a mark. From that administrative necessity, over centuries, emerged the most revolutionary cognitive technology in human history: writing. Cuneiform — the wedge-shaped marks made by pressing a reed stylus into clay — became capable of expressing any word in the Sumerian language, then any word in Akkadian, then Elamite, Hittite, Ugaritic. For three thousand years it was the dominant writing system of the ancient Near East. The last known cuneiform text was written in 75 CE, by a Babylonian astronomer who may have been the last person on earth who could read it.

These signs carry the clay tablet, the reed stylus, the first written word, and the moment that changed what it means to be human.