Describe how Sumerian city-states developed cuneiform writing from record-keeping, and identify its uses and lasting importance.
By about 3500 BCE, southern Mesopotamia was home to Sumer, a region of independent city-states -- Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, and others -- each with its own king, its own patron god, and its own walls. Sumerians were remarkable inventors: they get credit for the wheel, the plow, the sailboat, and a number system based on 60 (which is why a clock still has 60 minutes and 60 seconds today). Their biggest invention, though, was writing itself.
Writing did not start as poetry or storytelling -- it started as bookkeeping. Temples and palaces needed to track how much grain, livestock, and cloth came in and went out, and memory alone could not keep up. Around 3200 BCE, Sumerian scribes began pressing a reed stylus into wet clay tablets, at first drawing simple pictures (pictographs) and gradually shifting to wedge-shaped marks, which historians call cuneiform (from Latin words meaning "wedge-shaped"). Once writing existed, people used it for far more than counting grain: law, letters, astronomy, and eventually literature, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving epic poem in the world, about a real king of Uruk remembered in legend.
Mastery looks like: They can explain that cuneiform began as record-keeping, describe how it worked, and name at least one lasting Sumerian invention.
Common stumbles: Assuming writing was invented for stories first; confusing Sumer (the region/culture) with any one of its individual city-states.