Writing was invented independently in several parts of the world, but the earliest known system appeared in Mesopotamia a little over five thousand years ago. It began as a practical tool for accounting, with temple officials pressing simple marks into wet clay to record quantities of grain, sheep, and beer. Over time these marks grew more abstract and came to represent sounds as well as objects, producing the wedge-shaped script now called cuneiform. Egypt developed hieroglyphs around the same period, China devised its own characters more than a thousand years later, and the Maya created a script in the Americas.
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