Interesting question, Wordnerd. I don't know much about this, and it is hard to evaluate Web sites when you don't know the subject. However, I did find this
article about its history, and I thought these paragraphs were interesting:
"In 3300 BC, the Sumerian people of these city -states invented the first recognizable writing called by them, cuneiform. It was a bit process poor since they didn’t have paper; so they wrote on wet clay tablets with a metal stylus. These clay tablets still survive in Iraq in the thousands including tax records, letters, screenplays, wills and a wide variety of creation stories, for all their customers: Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. It wasn’t exactly a neatly stackable product and after a few years of this Flintstone-type invention, people started to literally stumble over new literature.
One would perhaps like to think that the Sumerians invented writing for grand purposes: for literature, poetry, religious histories, or even to write letters to friends.
Instead the first readable texts are mundane treatments for situation comedies and lots of record keeping. These records include lists of grain, animals, slaves received by the temples and the actual written symbols were pictographs, simple pictures that represented objects. Of course, the problem with this is that you would have thousands of pictures as the plan was for these objects to represent nouns. But the real fun came when the Sumerians used signs to represent sounds. An example is the ideogram for Water," which in Sumerian was pronounced "a". "A" also meant "in," the preposition). Scribes began to use the ideogram for water to mean both "water" and preposition "in". Writing started to represent phonetic sounds, instead of objects or ideas. They needed much fewer of them to write their language than pictograms but it took them awhile to do the math since every conceivable object had to have its own symbol. This got ridiculous and eventually the Sumerian cuneiform slowly turned into an alphabet in which syllables were represented, not individual sounds. They were finally on their way and we were far closer to the limerick than ever before.
As with any good thing, it eventually ends. Between 2800 BC and 2300 BC, Sumerian war leaders began to take over and impose a military vibe on the whole area. The cities built walls, slavery increased due to war victories resulting in a LOT more slaves, metal weapons were forged and the attitudes of these folks were bordering on the troublesome. I think the man in charge at the time, Phil or Doug Gilgamesh (not totally sure on the first name), ruled a large Sumerian city of Uruk around 2700 BC, as war leader. Uruk was fortified at that time and rulers of cities like Uruk began to rule other cities, forming states of hundreds of thousands of people. The parties were a bit less festive for awhile and forget trying to get some house remodeling done. War does horrible things to people and it has a terrible effect on comedy, just look at Bob Hope."
