Cuneiform was the earliest fully developed system of writing from 4th millennium B.C. It was used in ancient scripts in which each character was formed by a stroke in the shape of a wedge, cone or nail.
Cuneiform writing was probably invented by the Sumerians, a Mesopotamian people.
Cuneiform was a syllabic writing system. Symbols for this script were derived from pictographs and ultimately came to represent sounds.