---
title: So the Sumerians invented writing, first as little pictures of grain… — Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing · tree and pragmatics
description: So the Sumerians invented writing, first as little pictures of grain and sheep. Who acts: Sumerians. A sentence of the lesson «Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing» of the history course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clause.
---

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# Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing, sentence 5

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So the Sumerians invented writing, first as little pictures of grain and sheep.

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**Who acts:** Sumerians · **What happens:** invent · **To what, where:** writing

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Mesopotamia: the first cities and writing» of the history course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Sumerians), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:5
# text = So the Sumerians invented writing, first as little pictures of grain and sheep.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = history
# lesson = 003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change
1	So	so	ADV	RB	_	4	advmod	_	_
2	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	3	det	_	_
3	Sumerians	sumerian	PROPN	NNPS	Number=Plur	4	nsubj	_	_
4	invented	invent	VERB	VBD	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin	0	root	_	_
5	writing	writing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	4	obj	_	_
6	,	,	PUNCT	,	_	10	punct	_	_
7	first	first	ADV	RB	NumForm=Word|NumType=Ord	10	advmod	_	_
8	as	as	ADP	IN	_	10	case	_	_
9	little	little	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	10	amod	_	_
10	pictures	picture	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	4	conj	_	_
11	of	of	ADP	IN	_	12	case	_	_
12	grain	grain	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	10	nmod	_	_
13	and	and	CCONJ	CC	_	14	cc	_	_
14	sheep	sheep	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	12	conj	_	_
15	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	4	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: narrate
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: kept the draft

<!-- .fr -->
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **invent** | past | the Sumerians | writing |  |  |  |  | vn create-26.4-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent writing=Result |

<!-- .note -->
One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:history:003-mesopotamia-first-cities-and-writing.lesson:5`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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