The earliest writing from 3300 BCE involved pictographic script. The Sumerians were the first to develop a written language. By 2800 BCE, the script had evolved into signs, which represented syllables; his newly-evolved written language had signs for roughly 600 syllables. Scribes wrote by pressing a writing stick called a stylus into a soft clay tablet. Since the symbols appeared like wedge shapes, their writing is called cuneiform, which means, quite literally, “wedge shaped.” The earliest known dictionaries in the world developed when literacy began to spread to the neighboring kingdom of
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