Writing
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.
Aegean art
In the Bronze Age, about 2800–1100 BC, despite cultural interchange by way of trade with the contemporaneous civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Aegean cultures developed their own highly distinctive styles. After the Greek Bronze Age civilizations collapsed, the early part of the Greek Dark Ages saw minimal artistic production until the Protogeometric style in pottery emerged about 1050 BC, which is taken as the first phase of "Ancient Greek art". This traditional disjunction was to some extent a result of the uncertainty as to whether the Mycenaean Linear B script recorded a form of Greek or not. This was settled when the script was decoded in the 1950s, confirming it was Greek. The same uncertainty remains as to the Minoan Linear A.