The Kish Tablet from Sumer with pictographic writing, c. 3500 BCE.
Ashmolean Museum, Iraq (Photo: Jose-Manuel Benito viaWikimedia Commons).
Nestled in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, Sumer stands as the earliest known civilization.
The Kish Tablet from Sumer with pictographic writing, c. 3500 BCE. Ashmolean Museum, Iraq (Photo: José-Manuel Benito viaWikimedia Commons).
Proto-cuneiform emerged in Mesopotamia and was largely rooted within a pictographic system.
These elements can make it difficult to decipher proto-cuneiform artifacts, including the Kish Tablet.
Cuneiform, however, demanded a creation process similar to proto-cuneiform.
Proto-cuneiform tablet recording the allocation of beer, c. 3100-3000 BCE. Collection of theBritish Museum(Photo: Jim Kuhn, viaWikimedia Commons).
Symbols were impressed into soft clay tablets with a stylus, hardening quickly in Mesopotamias hot climate.
The Kish Tablet is the oldest written text in the world and uses proto-cuneiform pictographs.
Proto-cuneiform tablet recording the allocation of beer, c. 3100-3000 BCE.
Proto-cuneiform tablet of an administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats (Photo:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, donated toWikimedia Commons).
Collection of theBritish Museum(Photo: Jim Kuhn, viaWikimedia Commons).
Cuneiform followed proto-cuneiform by the end of the fourth millennium BCE and correlated more with spoken language.
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A large cuneiform inscription found on the south side of the Van Castle Hill in eastern Turkey (Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, viaWikimedia Commons).
