Necessity is the mother of invention. As settlements grew larger and more complex, so did the need of inventories, records, marks of ownership, census records, etc. Memory alone was not sufficient so there was a need to develop a way to record transactions, keep an inventory of property, and laws and agreements that had been decided upon. When life was simple, records could be simple. drawings of thing being traded or transferred with a simple numeric indicator so they know how many. As life got more complicated, more complex systems were developed to meet the needs of the task at hand.
Two examples of proto-cuneiform tablets.
The top image is from the Kish tablet estimated at 3500 BCE
An example of early cuneiform.
An example of fully developed cuneiform
This chart is an example of how cuneiform evolved from pictographs.
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