Cuneiform was adapted by the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Sumerians to write their own language. All that Sumerians needed to make cuneiform work was a reed and  a clay tablet. They made the clay tablets by baking them hard into kiln. Cuneiform was a kind of writing that Sumerians used. 5,000 years ago the people of Sumer began to write in cuneiform.