<P> In the Minoan / Mycenaean civilizations, writing has not been observed for any use other than accounting . Tablets serving as labels, with the impression of the side of a wicker basket on the back, and tablets showing yearly summaries, suggest a sophisticated accounting system . In this cultural region the tablets were never fired deliberately, as the clay was recycled on an annual basis . However, some of the tablets were "fired" as a result of uncontrolled fires in the buildings where they were stored . The rest are still tablets of unfired clay, and extremely fragile; some modern scholars are investigating the possibility of firing them now, as an aid to preservation . </P> <P> Writing was not as we see it today . In Mesopotamia, it started out as simple counting marks, alongside which sometimes a non-arbitrary well understood the sign, in the form of a simple picture image, that was cut into wood, stone, pots but more often pressed onto clay tokens . In that way, recorded accounts of amounts of goods involved in a transaction could be made . This convention began when people developed agriculture and settled into permanent communities that were centered on increasingly large and organized trading marketplaces These marketplaces traded sheep, grain, and bread loaves, recording the transactions with clay tokens . These initially very small clay tokens were continually used all the way from the pre-historic Mesopotamia period, 9000 BC, to the start of the historic period around 3000 BC, when the use of writing for recording was widely adopted . </P> <P> The clay tablet was thus being used by scribes to take down the events of what was happening during his time . Tools that these scribes used were styluses with sharp triangular tips, making it easy to leave markings on the clay, the clay tablets themselves came in a variety of colors such as bone white, chocolate, and charcoal . Pictographs then began to appear on clay tablets around 4000 BC, and after the later development of Sumerian cuneiform writing, a more sophisticated partial syllabic script evolved that by around 2500 BC was capable of recording the vernacular, the everyday speech of the common people . </P> <P> Sumerians used what is known as pictograms . Pictograms are symbols that express a pictorial concept, a logogram, as the meaning of the word . Early writing also began in Ancient Egypt using hieroglyphs . Early hieroglyphs and some of the modern Chinese characters are other examples of pictographs . The Sumerians later shifted their writing to Cuneiform, defined as "Wedge writing" in Latin, which added phonetic symbols, syllabograms . </P>

What tools did the sumerians use for writing