Ancient Earth

Ancient Mesopotamia

Cradle of Civilization — Birthplace of Writing

Modern Iraq is a hotbed of violence, but five thousand years ago, a small nation along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers started doing something no one else had done before. They recorded history. These were the Sumerians. The words you are reading right now are made up of symbols — letters of the alphabet — that owe their form to the primitive shapes created in Sumer at the earliest edge of history.