Writing

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c. 3,000 BC

How do you capture the stream of sounds we call speech, and render it into a record? It is thought that the first people to write words down were the Sumerians – living in what is now Iraq – inventing a writing system comprised of syllables sometime around 3,000 BC. Much like modern Chinese writing, each symbol in Sumerian represented a syllable or idea, which was then combined with other symbols to form whole words and sentences.