Mesopotamia

Trade and Economic achievement: 

We believe Sumerian civilization first took form in southern Mesopotamia around 4000 BCE—or 6000 years ago—which would make it the first urban civilization in the region. Mesopotamians are noted for developing one of the first written scripts around 3000 BCE: wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets. This cuneiform—another way to say wedge-shaped—script was also adapted by surrounding peoples to write their own languages for roughly 2000 years, until Phoenician, which the letters you are reading now are based on, began to become the dominant script in the first millennium BCE. Cuneiform is also the script that one of the world’s first great works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in. Mesopotamians used writing to record sales and purchases, to write letters to one another, and to tell stories. The incredibly important invention of the wheel is also credited to the Sumerians; the earliest discovered wheel dates to 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia.