The Sumerians developed the writing system known as cuneiform.
Cuneiform emerged in southern Mesopotamia during the late fourth millennium BCE, especially for recording goods, labour and administrative transactions. The earliest signs were pictorial, but they gradually became abstract marks pressed into wet clay with a reed stylus.
The word cuneiform comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning wedge, because the stylus created wedge-shaped impressions. Sumerian scribes later used the system for royal inscriptions, religious works, legal texts and literature.
Cuneiform was not a language; it was a writing system used for several languages, including Sumerian and Akkadian. The Epic of Gilgamesh survives in cuneiform copies, and the script remained in use in parts of the ancient Near East until the first century CE.