Sumerian Pictograms

From the very start, writing was used as a form of accounting. It was used to track agriculture, trade, and settling of towns. These records were first taken on clay tablets with markings represents a variety of things. These tablets date back as 9000 BCE to pre-historic Mesopotamia. Nearly 6000 years later, around 3000 BCE Sumerians began using a more advanced type of writing in the form of pictograms, prompting the beginning of recorded of history. These pictograms were basically pictures of the words or their sounds. Pictograms were used commonly by different societies including the Egyptians with their hieroglyphs. The Sumerians pictograms writing eventually evolved in cuneiform, which translate to “wedge writing” in Latin. Cuneiform was written with wedge shaped stylus that is very comparable to our modern tablets or computers today. The Sumerians had huge libraries of clay tablets that

The form has multiple advantages over the scroll, it is easier to handle, flip through sections, and store. Although papyrus was the most widely used writing surface, it came with several disadvantages. Papyrus became brittle with age, deteriorated under humidity, and the papyrus plant only grew in the Nile region of Egypt, which gave Egyptians a monopoly of the resource. Many people without papyrus had to resort to the use of fine animal skins called parchment to write. Despite the availability of parchment, papyrus scrolls were still preferred and were considered more refined. Eventually, however, parchment preplaced papyrus as the primary writing surface in the Western word by 4th century CE due its more durable qualities and the ability to write on both sides of it. Parchment became well suited for use in a codex and remained as a primary writing surface well after paper was introduced from