From Sumerian pictograms to cuneiform
In Mesopotamia, between the rivers Tigris and Eu-phrates, even before 4000 B.C., there lived a people of unknown race, the Sumerians, whose fascinating culture is still largely hidden in the mists of history. They probably immigrated from the northeast as nomadic tribes, to settle in the land between the two rivers, a fertile plain where they developed their culture under hard climatic conditions. Such difficulties had no small influence on their intellectual, economic, and social character. Like their Semitic successors, the Sumerians had a logical and scientific turn of mind, a fact that is clearly visible from the background of their writings.
The earliest examples of Sumerian script come from the fourth millennium b.c. and are generally regarded as the oldest examples of records that can truly be described as "writing." They are pictograms scratched in clay, in which the straight line is already strongly predominant, indicating a very early use of the technique of impressing a spatula into clay. For the Neolithic period, the simplification of forms is quite astonishing, and the question naturally arises as to whether there are earlier, still undiscovered versions of these picto- grams.
The strongly stylized drawings are either represen - tations of complete objects or parts of these shown in more detail.