The Sumerian language (the oldest written language of Mesopotamia, with no known relatives) enters a pictographic stage about 3100.

Sumerians develop, or perhaps borrow, a system for representing speech—not ideas, as in earlier systems—by means of a set of standardized visual symbols.

The Sumerians cuneiform writing system consists of characters made with wedge-shaped strokes impressed into clay, brick, or stone.

Among extensive Late Uruk materials found at Brak/Nagar is a standard text for educated scribes (the "Standard Professions" text, known from Uruk IV), part of the standardized education taught in the third millennium BCE over a wide area of Syria and Mesopotamia.

The site of Lagash (modern al-Hiba), located about one hundred and twenty miles (two hundred kilometers) northwest of Basra, Iraq, may have been first occupied about 3000.

The dynasty of Lagash, though omitted from the king list, is well attested through several important monuments and many archaeological finds.

Sumerian pictographs are evolving into phonograms during the period of about 2900 BCE to 2400 BCE.

Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform, the use of writing expands beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory lists to be applied for the first time, about 2600 BCE, to messages and mail delivery, history, legend, mathematics, astronomical records, and other pursuits.

Forms of the Genesis story and the tale of the Flood (the earliest parts of the Bible) are written in Mesopotamia around this time.

Conjointly with the spread of writing, the first formal schools are established, usually under the auspices of a city-state's primary temple.

Scribal schools flourish throughout Sumer.

Dominance in Mesopotamia begins to pass around 2400 BCE from the Sumerians in the lower valley to the more northerly Akkadians, a Semitic people who have begun to dominate central Mesopotamia and possibly the northern region.

Akkadian influence soon extends west into Syria and east as far as Susa in present Iran.

Other Semitic-speaking population centers grow in Syria-Palestine, southern Arabia, and various smaller centers along the Arabian littoral.

Sumerian references to the Mar.tu ("tent dwellers"—considered to be Amorite) country west of the Euphrates date from even earlier than Sargon, at least to the reign of Enshakushanna of Uruk in the twenty-sixth century.

Caucasian-speaking groups dominate Asia Minor and most of the Iranian plateau.

The Ebla tablets are a collection of as many as eighteen hundred complete clay tablets, forty-seven hundred fragments and many thousand minor chips found in the palace archives of the ancient city of Ebla, Syria.

The tablets, which were found in situ on collapsed shelves, retained many of their contemporary clay tags to help reference them.

They all date to the period between about 2500 BCE and the destruction of the city in around 2250 BCE.

They are the oldest and the largest collection of tablets yet found from the ancient Middle East.

Two languages appeared in the writing on the tablets: Sumerian, and a previously unknown language that used the Sumerian cuneiform script (Sumerian logograms or "Sumerograms") as a phonetic representation of the locally spoken Ebla language.

The latter script was initially identified as proto-Canaanite by professor Giovanni Pettinato, who first deciphered the tablets, because it predated the Semitic languages of Canaan, like Ugaritic and Hebrew.

Pettinato later retracted the designation and decided to call it simply "Eblaite,” the name by which it is known today.

The only tablets at Ebla that were written exclusively in Sumerian are lexical lists, probably for use in training scribes.

The archives contain thousands of copybooks, lists for learning relevant jargon, and scratch pads for students, demonstrating that Ebla was a major educational center specializing in the training of scribes.

The purely phonetic use of Sumerian logograms marks a momentous advance in the history of writing.

Sumerian scribes developed a clumsy system that employed a mixed use of logograms and phonetic signs.

Drawing from the existing systems, the scribes at Ebla employed a reduced number of signs entirely phonetically, both the earliest example of transcription (rendering sounds in a system invented for another language) and a major simplifying step towards "reader friendliness" that would enable a wider spread of literacy in palace, temple and merchant contexts.

The tablets provide a wealth of information on Syria and Canaan in the Early Bronze Age, and include the first known references to the "Canaanites,” "Ugarit,” and "Lebanon.” The contents of the tablets reveal that Ebla was a major trade center.

One focus was economic records, inventories recording Ebla's commercial and political relations with other Levantine cities and logs of the city's import and export activities.

For example, they reveal that Ebla produced a range of beers, including one that appears to be named "Ebla,” for the city.

Ebla was also responsible for the development of a sophisticated trade network system between city-states in northern Syria.

This system grouped the region into a commercial community, which is clearly evidenced in the texts.

There are king lists for the city of Ebla, royal ordinances, edicts, treaties.

There are gazetteers listing place names, including a version of a standardized place-name list that has also been found at Abu Salabikh (possibly ancient Eresh) where it was datable to around 2600 BCE.

The literary texts include hymns and rituals, epics, and proverbs.

The Eblaite tablets from the Igrish-Khalam dynasty administration, written in Sumerian cuneiform script, record commercial treaties; bilingual vocabularies; lists of birds, fish, and stones; ritual and mythological texts; diplomatic letters; military dispatches; and lists of personal and place names.

The Eblaite texts name Ebla as the center of a commercial empire that radiates north to Anatolia, west to Cyprus, south to Canaan and Egypt, east to Persia, and southeast to Mesopotamia.

Ptahhotep, city administrator and vizier (first minister) during the reign of Djedkare Isesi in Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, is credited as the author of The Instruction of Ptahhotep, an early piece of Egyptian "wisdom literature" meant to instruct young men in appropriate behavior.

He, his son Akhethotep (who is also a vizier), and other of his descendants will be buried at Saqqara.

Their tomb is famous today for its outstanding depictions.

Ptahhotep's grandson, Ptahhotep Tshefi, is traditionally credited with being the author of the collection of conformist wise sayings known as The Maxims of Ptahhotep, which extol the virtues of truthfulness, self-control and kindness towards one's fellow beings, and indicate how to behave properly before greatness, how to choose the right master, and how to serve him.

To learn by listening to every voice.

To accept that human knowledge is imperfect.

To recognize strength in avoiding open conflict wherever possible.

To seek justice and know that divine will prevails.

To lead correctly, through openness and kindness.

To praise generosity towards family and friends and to guard against greed, the base of all evil.

To recognize social elevation as a godly gift, and to preserve it by accepting the precedence of one's superior.

Southeast Arabia (909 BCE – 819 CE) Antiquity — Incense Kingdom Seeds and Gulf/Red Sea Integration

Geographic and Environmental Context

• Eastern Yemen (Hadhramaut, eastern Aden interior, al-Mahra).

• Southern Oman (Dhofar Highlands with the khareef monsoon, al-Wusta gravel plains, Sharqiyah Desert fringes).

• The Empty Quarter (Rubʿ al-Khālī) margins in adjoining Saudi territory.

• The offshore island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea.

• Anchors: Wādī Ḥaḍramawt–Shibam–Tarim, Dhofar escarpments (Ẓafār/Al-Balīd, Mirbat), al-Mahra dunes, al-Wusta plains, Sharqiyah sands, Socotra’s Hagghier Mountains and dragon’s-blood groves.

• Dhofar incense terraces, Hadhramaut wadis, Socotra resin groves.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

• Aridity deepened inland; coastal fog-belt sustained agriculture.

Societies & Political Developments

• Proto-polities in Dhofar incense uplands; Hadhramaut valley towns; Socotra as resin outlier.

• Linked to Sabaean–Qataban–Himyarite systems in Yemen.

Economy & Trade

• Frankincense, myrrh, dragon’s-blood resin; goats, camels, dried fish.

• Coastal entrepôts tied to Gulf and Red Sea; incense moved to Mediterranean and India.

Technology & Material Culture

• Iron tools; terrace walls; cisterns; dhows with lateen precursors.

Belief & Symbolism

• Incense integral to ritual; ancestral veneration persisted; cross-links with Sabaean deities.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

• Terrace irrigation + incense trade ensured survival; coastal fisheries buffered shortfalls.

Transition

By 819 CE, Southeast Arabia was a specialized incense frontier, integrated into global Red Sea–Indian Ocean circuits — ready for its role in the Islamic and medieval ages to come.

The Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, though marked by disunity and civil strife, witnesses an unprecedented era of cultural prosperity—the "golden age" of China.

The atmosphere of reform and new ideas is attributed to the struggle for survival among warring regional lords who compete in building strong and loyal armies and in increasing economic production to ensure a broader base for tax collection.

To effect these economic, military, and cultural developments, the regional lords need ever-increasing numbers of skilled, literate officials and teachers, the recruitment of whom is based on merit.

Also during this time, commerce is stimulated through the introduction of coinage and technological improvements.

Iron comes into general use, making possible not only the forging of weapons of war but also the manufacture of farm implements.

Public works on a grand scale—such as flood control, irrigation projects, and canal digging—are executed.

Enormous walls are built around cities and along the broad stretches of the northern frontier.

The so-called Hundred Schools of Thought reportedly emerge after 770 BCE from the courts of the various Chinese kingdoms, which form the centers of cultural leadership.

Formal education is available only to rulers and nobles.

Assyrian king Ashurbanipal asserts his pride in his scribal education his in the statement: “I Ashurbanipal within [the palace], took care of the wisdom of Nebo, the whole of the inscribed tablets, of all the clay tablets, the whole of their mysteries and difficulties, I solved.”

He is one of the few kings who can read the cuneiform script in Akkadian and Sumerian, and claims that he even wrote texts from before the great flood.

He is also able to solve mathematical problems.

He collects cuneiform texts from all over Mesopotamia, and especially Babylonia, in the library in Nineveh.

Despite being a popular king among his subjects, Ashurbanipal is also known by for his exceedingly cruel actions towards his enemies.

Some pictures depict him putting a dog chain through the jaw of a defeated king and then making him live in a dog kennel.

Many paintings of the period seem to exhibit pride in his malice and brutality.

During the final decade of his rule, Assyria is quite peaceful, but the country apparently faces a serious decline.

Documentation from the last years of Ashurbanipal's reign is very scarce but the latest attestations of Ashurbanipal's reign are of his year 38 (631 BCE), but according to later sources he reigned for 42 years (627 BCE).

While he still lives, Ashurbanipal’s sons apparently contest the succession.

Kung-Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who teaches social ethics in China in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, founds the ethical system that bears his name, basing his doctrine on the recognition of individual fate.

He incorporates elements of traditional Chinese folk religions and emphasizes aristocratic social virtues and behavior in accord with divine principles.