An important language development

have been employed – for example, parchment, papyrus and paper – are not long-lasting and are easily destroyed by fire and water. But clay has proved to be resistant to those particular kinds of damage. The word 'cuneiform' actually refers to the marks or signs inscribed in the clay. The original cuneiform signs consisted of a series of lines – triangular, vertical, diagonal and horizontal. Sumerian writers would impress these lines into the wet clay with a stylus – a long, thin, pointed instrument which looked somewhat like a pen. Oddly, the signs were often almost too small to see with the naked eye. Cuneiform signs were used for the writing of at least a dozen languages. This is similar to how the Latin alphabet is used today for writing English, French, Spanish and German for example. Before the development of cuneiform, tokens were used by the Sumerians to record certain information. For example, they might take small stones and use them as tokens or representations of something else, like a goat. A number of tokens, then, might mean a herd of goat. These tokens might then be placed in a cloth container and provided to a buyer as a receipt for a transaction, perhaps five tokens for five animals. It was not that…