Writing is invented
Accounts of grain and beer become literature
See it on the timeline →In depth
Cuneiform began as accounting marks on clay tablets in Uruk and evolved over a few centuries from pictograms into a phonetic system able to render speech. Writing arose independently at least three more times: in Egypt, in China and in Mesoamerica. The consequences are hard to overstate — laws could be fixed, contracts enforced at a distance, knowledge accumulated across generations, and power exercised through archives. History in the scholarly sense begins here; everything before is called prehistory precisely because it lacks written sources.
For children
The first texts were not about heroes or gods — they were receipts. Someone had to keep track of how many sacks of grain the temple had received. They pressed marks into wet clay, and suddenly information could outlive the person who remembered it.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org