Writing

?Writing, according to the latest theories, was invented in southern Mesopotamia for the first and perhaps the only time. The oldest written texts come from Uruk toward the end of the fourth milennium B.C. They were impressed on clay tablets with a reed stylus and then baked. . . . The new invention must have quickly proved its worth, for it apparently provided the stimulus to the beginning of pictographic writing in Egypt and Persia . . . by about 3000 [B.C.].?

?William W. Hallo & William Kelly Simpson, from The Ancient Near East: A History, 1971.