Writing

Clay tablets will be found at Uruk with Sumerian and pictorial inscriptions that are thought to be some of the earliest recorded writing, dating to approximately 3300 BCE.

These tablets include the famous Sumerian King List, a record of kings of the Sumerian civilization.

Uruk, in addition to being one of the first cities, has been the main force of urbanization during the Uruk Period (4000–3200 BCE).

This period of eight hundred years has seen a shift from small, agricultural villages to a larger urban center with a full-time bureaucracy, military, and stratified society.

Although other settlements coexist with Uruk, they are generally about ten hectares while Uruk is significantly larger and more complex.

Geographic factors underpin Uruk's unprecedented growth.

The city is located in the alluvial plain area of southern Mesopotamia, on the Euphrates rivers.

Through the gradual and eventual domestication of native grains from the Zagros foothills and extensive irrigation techniques, the area supports a vast variety of edible vegetation.

This domestication of grain and its proximity to rivers has enabled Uruk's growth into the largest Sumerian settlement, in both population and area, with relative ease.

Egyptians begin using clay, bone, and ivory tags to label boxes, possibly an example of proto-writing.

The Sumerian language (the oldest written language of Mesopotamia, with no known relatives) enters a pictographic stage about 3100.

Sumerians develop, or perhaps borrow, a system for representing speech—not ideas, as in earlier systems—by means of a set of standardized visual symbols.

The Sumerians cuneiform writing system consists of characters made with wedge-shaped strokes impressed into clay, brick, or stone.

Among extensive Late Uruk materials found at Brak/Nagar is a standard text for educated scribes (the "Standard Professions" text, known from Uruk IV), part of the standardized education taught in the third millennium BCE over a wide area of Syria and Mesopotamia.

The country known as Sumer is, by the third millennium the site of at least twelve separate city-states, each comprising a walled city and its surrounding villages and land, and each worshipping its own deity, whose temple is the central structure of the city.

Sippar (present Abu Habba), located twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) southwest of present Baghdad, Iraq, is probably occupied before 3000.

Given that thousands of cuneiform tablets have been recovered at the site, relatively little is known about the history of Sippar.

As was often the case in Mesopotamia, it was part of a pair of cities, separated by a river.

Sippar was on the east side of the Euphrates, while its sister city, Sippar-Amnanum, was on the west.

While pottery finds indicate that the site of Sippar was in use as early as the Uruk period, substantial occupation occurred only in the Early Dynastic period of the third millennium BCE.

The five "first" cities said to have exercised pre-dynastic kingship are Sippar (Tell Abu Habbah), …

…Shuruppak (Tell Fara), …

…Larsa (Tell as-Senkereh), …

…Eridu (Tell Abu Shahrain), and …

…Bad-tibira (probably Tell al-Madain). 

According to the Sumerian King List, Bad-tibira was the second city to "exercise kingship" in Sumer before the flood, following Eridu.

These kings were said to be En-men-lu-ana, En-men-gal-ana and Dumuzid the Shepherd.

The early Sumerian text known as Inanna's descent to the netherworld mentions the city's temple, E-mush-kalamma.

In this tale, Inanna dissuades demons from the netherworld from taking Lulal, patron of Bad-tibira, who was living in squalor.

They eventually take Dumuzid king of Uruk instead, who lived in palatial opulence.

This Dumuzid is called "the Shepherd,” but on the King List, Dumuzid the Fisherman reigns in Uruk some time after the flood, between Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh.

The hierarchy of the gods grows more stratified, paralleling Mesopotamian society.

Recognizable class divisions and royal dynasties appear in Sumer consolidating women's exclusion from politics, although women, according to class position, continue to exercise varied roles and to enjoy some legal protection for property.

Egyptians soon borrow the notion of writing from the Sumerians, but invent a system for expressing the Egyptian language in pictures instead of words.

The Egyptian language (called Old Egyptian, the oldest attested language of the Afroasiatic family) makes the transition from picture writing to word writing by 3000 BCE.

Egyptian scribes have developed hieratic script, a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian, and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the thirty-third century BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid 1st millennium BCE.

It is primarily written in ink with a reed pen on papyrus.