“This was the golden age of Mesopotamian civilization: at the latest at the end of the fourth millenium, in the so-called Late Uruk Period, architecture attained great heights, and the visual arts flourished, with the appearance of figurative scenes exalting the power of the king. It was also at that time that writing came to be invented: the resulting release of cultural and intellectual energy can only be imagined. Writing was then used exclusively in the economic sphere, primarily as a memory aid, but it nevertheless enables us to recognize that its inventors spoke Sumerian, an agglutinative language without any known parallel.”

—The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.