Writing system
Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbols. The best known examples are:The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic 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.
Kernos
The form begins in the Neolithic in stone, in the earliest stages of the Minoan civilization, around 3,000 BC. They were produced in Minoan and Cycladic pottery, being the most elaborate shape in the latter, and right through ancient Greek pottery. The Duenos Inscription, one of the earliest known Old Latin texts, variously dated from the 7th to the 5th century BC, is inscribed round a "kernos" of three linked pots, of an Etruscan type.