‘Five thousand years ago, give or take, the inhabitants of the fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers were already one of the oldest settled civilizations in the world when they began to write — to convert spoken language into signs scratched on stone and impressed in clay. The wedge-shaped, or “cuneiform,” script of the Sumerian people of ancient Mesopotamia was thought given form — concepts and memories abstracted from fallible human brains and recorded for posterity’ (p. 79).