The first cities and writing
Sumer records the first words
Quick facts
- First writing
- Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, around 3600 to 3500 BCE
- City
- Uruk
- Earliest form
- Pictographs pressed into wet clay
- Script
- Cuneiform, later using sound-symbols (phonograms)
What happened
In the cities of Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, writing was invented around 3600 to 3500 BCE, and World History Encyclopedia locates the earliest true writing in the Sumerian city of Uruk. It began as pictographs, simple symbols standing for objects, pressed into wet clay with a reed to keep track of goods and accounts. Over time those pictures gave way to phonograms, marks that stood for sounds, in the script we call cuneiform, and writing grew from a bookkeeping tool into a way to record law, story, and history.
Why it matters
Writing is the line where recorded history begins. Everything before it is prehistory, reconstructed from bones, stone, and inference, while everything after it, people could set down in their own words and pass on directly. This is the point on the timeline where the human record starts to fill with actual names, dates, and voices.
How we know
World History Encyclopedia dates the invention of writing to Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, around 3600 to 3500 BCE, locates it in the city of Uruk, and describes the shift from pictographs to the phonetic cuneiform script pressed into clay with a reed.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Writing (World History Encyclopedia) (2023) · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Early urban development in the Near East (Science, via PubMed) (2007) · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Neolithic Revolution → · Zoom in: Uruk, the first city, and the invention of writing