Small clay tokens have been found at a number of sites in Mesopotamia dating from 7000 B.C. and may have been used for basic accounting. However, around 3500 B.C. cities were growing across Mesopotamia and more sophisticated methods of organization and control were needed. In southern Mesopotamia tokens were enclosed in hollow clay balls which were covered with cylinder seal impressions as a mark of authority. These clay balls may have accompanied deliveries represented by the tokens. A check could be made on the number of objects delivered by breaking open the ball and checking against the number of tokens. The use of tokens seems to have been replaced by marking clay tablets with signs which represented the objects counted. From these various methods of recording proper writing (the representation of a spoken language) emerged. The first script was pictographic, each sign representing a word, and so could be read in any language. Soon scribes started applying the ‘rebus' principle to these signs. A sign could be read for its sound value rather than its meaning.

For example the sign X could mean ‘eye' or the sound ‘i'. It could thus have the following possible meanings:

eye,
I = first person,
aye = yes, ‘i'.

A picture of a thin man could mean ‘thin', i.e. not fat, or the sound ‘thin'. Combine that with the sign for ‘king' which could mean ‘the king is thin' or ‘thinking'.

From 3000 B.C. this writing system is found across Babylonia where it is used to write the local language Sumerian.

As signs drawn on clay were increasingly used to represent sounds rather than actual objects it was less important to draw them as pictures. Instead of dragging a piece of sharpened reed across the damp clay, scribes started to impress the end of the reed into the clay at an angle. This created little lines which look like wedges. Signs began to be made up of little wedge strokes and, since the Latin word for wedge is ‘cuneus', this form of writing is known today as cuneiform - ‘wedge-like'.

From around 2350 B.C. cuneiform was adapted to write languages other than Sumerian. Increasingly Akkadian became the main written language of Mesopotamia while cuneiform was adopted in surrounding regions to write languages such as Hittite and Elamite.