What were the first writing tablets used for?
First developed around 3200 B.C. by Sumerian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of recording transactions, cuneiform writing was created by using a reed stylus to make wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets.
What is the oldest cuneiform tablet?
The Kish tablet
The Kish tablet, a limestone tablet from Kish with pictographic, early cuneiform, writing, 3500 BC. Possibly the earliest known example of writing.
When was the writing tablet invented?
On this clay tablet is some of the earliest writing from anywhere in the world. It was made around 3100–3000 BC in southern Iraq, known as Mesopotamia.
What did Mesopotamians use to write?
Most writing from ancient Mesopotamia is on clay tablets. Damp clay was formed into a flat tablet. The writer used a stylus made from a stick or reed to impress the symbols in the clay, then left the tablet in the air to harden.
What does the oldest writing say?
Cuneiform
Cuneiform is an ancient writing system that was first used in around 3400 BC. Distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, cuneiform script is the oldest form of writing in the world, first appearing even earlier than Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Where did writing begin?
Mesopotamia
Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.
How many Sumerian tablets are there?
Since then, archaeologists have recovered numerous pieces of Sumerian art, pottery and sculpture as well as some 500,000 clay tablets, the vast majority of which have still yet to be translated.
What is the oldest written word?
What is the oldest written text?
The Epic of Gilgamesh started out as a series of Sumerian poems and tales dating back to 2100 B.C., but the most complete version was written around the 12th century B.C. by the Babylonians.
What is the oldest known writing?
How did Mesopotamian write on clay tablets?
The tablets are written in two ancient languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, using a script called cuneiform. Cuneiform is the earliest writing system in the world and was made by impressing triangular-shaped wedges into wet clay tablets.