Egyptian hieroglyphics originate from about this date. These elaborate symbols are excellent for engraving on temples or monuments, but too elaborate for everyday writing, so that the hieratic and demotic scripts evolve in Egypt in parallel.

It is possible that hieroglyphics evolved earlier than was traditionally accepted: ". . .in 1998 a German archeological team excavating at Abdos (modern Umm el-Qa'ab) uncovered a tomb which belonged to a Predynastic ruler, and recovered three hundred clay labels inscribed with proto-hieroglyphics, dating to circa 33rd century BC."

"The Egyptian mace head (~3100 BC) contains a record of the winnings of war of the Pharoah Narmer - 120,000 prisioners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. It uses a number system allowing counting to continue indefinitely by introducing, if necessary, a new symbol." This may be the earliest Egyptian mathematical object that has survived. This method of allowing "indefinite counting by way of introducting new symbols" has been characterized as the earliest known decimal system.

The Sumerian King Gilgamesh reigns in the city-state of Uruk near the Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq. "The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest and most moving stories rooted in the ancient wisdom-tradition of mankind. Recited for nearly three millennia, it was virtually lost for another two with the advent of Christianity. Modern generations came to know about Gilgamesh only after the first cuneiform fragments of his story were excavated in 1853 at Nineveh from the library of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned in the 7th century BC. Almost twenty years elapsed, however, before the clay tablets were deciphered by George Smith at the British Museum. On December 3, 1872, he announced to the newly-formed Society of Biblical Archaeology that he had "discovered among the Assyrian tablets . . . an account of the Flood" in one of the story's later episodes. This stirred up considerable interest and, before long, more fragments of Gilgamesh were unearthed, both at Nineveh and in the ruins of other ancient cities. According to the Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh himself inscribed his story on a stone tablet. It had widespread and long-lasting appeal, for versions have been found all over the Mesopotamian region, and as far north in Asia Minor as the Hittite capital of Hattusha (Bogazkoy). This is fortunate because modern translations of Gilgamesh have literally been pieced together from widely-scattered fragments. There is no single complete rendition of the Standard Version extant, and what we do have comprises variant Sumerian, Hittite, and Akkadian streams."