Sumer
Sumer () is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze ages, and one of the first civilizations in the world along with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of which enabled them to settle in one place. Prehistoric proto-writing dates back before 3000 BC. The earliest texts, from c. 3300 BC, come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr; early cuneiform script emerged around 3000 BC.
Cucuteni–Trypillia culture
The mainstream academic theory is that writing first appeared during the Sumerian civilisation in southern Mesopotamia, around 3300–3200 BC. in the form of the Cuneiform script. This first writing system did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, but gradually developed from less stylised pictographic systems that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols that contained meaning, but did not have the linguistic flexibility of the natural language writing system that the Sumerians first conceived. These earlier symbolic systems have been labelled as proto-writing, examples of which have been discovered in a variety of places around the world, some dating back to the 7th millennium BC.