A contract for the sale of a field and a house, written in a cuneiform script, c. 2600 BCE. Cuneiform scripts were used to write several languages, over a wide area of land and time. They began as mostly recognisable images of things like ploughs, trees, grain, human body parts, etc., and morphed into distinctive wedge shapes that were easy to press into clay. These clay tablets were often inadvertently fired when archives and library buildings burned down, leaving the information baked solid. (Image credit
here.)
