In the beginning there was the word – but there was nothing to write it on, and anyway writing had not been invented yet. Symbols were scratched on rocks and in caves but our first records of any form of writing comes from the ancient Sumerians who lived in an area known as Mesopotamia which stretched North from the Persian Gulf between the Tigris and the Euphrates, taking in Babylon and Baghdad. Today this is Southern Iraq. The Sumerians were the first to live in cities 3500BCE (before Common Era replacing BC before Christ), . The only other civilizations were the Olmec civilization on South America and that of Ancient Egypt, which was just beginning to emerge. Their hieroglyph language first appear 300 years later.