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When did the earliest cuneiform writing appear in Mesopotamia?
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cuneiform
An account of barley distribution, probably from Uruk, Mesopotamia, c. 3100–2900 bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
The origins of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia can be traced back to approximately the end of the 4th millennium BCE.1
The earliest attested traces of this writing system are attributed to the Sumerians, who inhabited southern Mesopotamia at that time. These initial records consisted of pictographic tablets found in Uruk (Erech), which functioned primarily as ledgers or lists of commodities. Over time, these pictographs evolved into a more conventionalized, wedge-shaped script as they were pressed into clay using a stylus.1