The earliest known writing system, called cuneiform, was invented around 3100 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia. Before cuneiform, however, humans used a simpler writing system called proto-cuneiform that ...

For the first time, too, the museum-going and reading public could examine large samples of the vanished civilization’s writing system, a script that predated Egyptian hieroglyphs by centuries.

The results show that early humans used writing to convey information far ... a calendar that "helped to explain why the system that [Bacon] had uncovered was so universal across wide geography ...