Who First Invented Writing? As far as we know, Sumerians are believed to be the first to have invented the art of writing. The Sumerians were a civilization of people who lived in Mesopotamia(an area now known as Kuwait and Northern Saudi Arabia). Mesopotamia means "Between the Rivers", referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. These people began building large cities, rules by a monarch, and started to develop writing around 3000 BC. Their form of writing was a pictographic system. Eventually they would advance their writing system from scratching out picture-words on wet clay, into a shorthand system of lines. The newly developed system was called Cuneiform ("Wedge Shaped" in Latin) writing. As the Sumerians grew larger, they began fighting amongst eachother for scarce resources such as water, which created larger city-states, as smaller city-states were engulfed. Finally, the Sumerians came against the Akkadians, a Semetic group of people from the Arabian Peninsula. The Akkadians took over, but as they did, they took much of the Sumerian culture with them.