"The Origins of Writing in Southern Mesopotamia".
The first evidence of written word was discovered in the Sumerian culture and was created over 5,000 years ago. This time in history has been called the urban revolution because of the enormous changes in how people lived and interacted with one another. Through the development of language and writing, the Mesopotamian civilizations were able to create complex cities and societies, a fundamental step in the progression of mankind. The origins of writing were not in the conventional forms that we as a modern society utilize, but instead were in the form of pictographs and numerals. A pictograph is a "recognizable picture of [a] real object rather than [of] symbols" (Roaf 69). The Sumerians used pictographs to represent and convey thoughts or ideas to one another; this process is integral to the preservation of history and to the art of communication. .
The Sumerians first used writing as a practical means of keeping records. The development of writing has been categorized into three stages, with Uruk IV being the first stage. The most primitive illustrations dated from about 3100 B.C. and were small tablets that possessed markings on them. These small tablets were found in the city of Uruk and have been described as tags that were attached to sacks of grain and other agricultural products, notably created as shipping tags. Wealthy Sumerians would have bought the sacks and the tags would have noted the type of product and the amount of said product. In addition, larger tablets were found around this time with the impression of documentation of accounts thought to make record keeping more efficient. "Some six hundred tablets belonging to the [Uruk IV stage] have been found at Uruk and one other at Kish" (Roaf 69). At this time the crude symbols and pictographs were employed by the Sumerians to keep records of inventories, but eventually writing developed into complex script, which expressed thought and abstract ideas.
