At the end of the 4th millennium BC, when people living in southern Mesopotamia (today’s southern Iraq) began carving cuneiform on clay tablets to produce documents relating to trade and other matters, humanity took its first steps towards the universal act of ‘writing’.
Documents written in Sumerian are very diverse. They include inscriptions recording the achievements of kings; administrative and economic documents dealing with royal accounts; documents relating to the sale and purchase of houses, cultivated land, enslaved people, etc.; court decisions; lexicons with words grouped according to themes such as trees, animals, fish, skins, etc.; epic poems recounting the exploits of the hero Gilgamesh and others; the Sumerian pantheon’s central deity Myths about Enlil, Inanna, goddess of love and war, Enki, god of wisdom, etc.