Remember the Phoenicians and the Egyptians we talked about in the Story of Writing? The great merchants traded many wonderful things with the Egyptians and other civilizations and come up with symbols to represent numbers so that they could count money and the quantity of items that they would buy or sell. That was about 5,000 years ago. At the same time, there was another civilization known as Sumerians who lived between two rivers in a country called Mesopotamia. We have records from around 3,000 BCE showing that the Sumerians could read and write and had devised a way of writing numbers. The Sumerians writing was called cuneiform (wedge-shaped) because they used a stick which, when pressed into clay tablets, made wedge-shaped marks.