From the simple and mundane necessity of keeping records in a ledger, writing was born. The earliest written symbols were agricultural accounts. It all began in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This region of the Middle East was divided between two peoples with entirely different languages, the Sumerians in the south and the Akkadians in the north, between the 6th and 1st millennium BC. The first tablets with some form of writing were discovered in Sumer, in the city of Uruk. This writing was called "cuneiform." As cuneiform signs spread, other writing systems emerged in Egypt and China. In 1906, Italian archaeologists discovered a disk in Crete, 16 cm in diameter, made of clay and covered on both sides with 45 spirally arranged marks. This writing, with its indecipherable hieroglyphic symbols, developed in the 1st millennium BC in Crete and mainland Greece. This disk was named the "Disk of Phaistos" (1700 BC). Throughout Greece at that time, the Greeks "wrote" pictographically. With an evolution of this writing, they developed syllabic and phonetic scripts (Linear A - Linear B - Cypriot syllabary, 1100 BC). To date, Linear A has not been deciphered. However, Linear B, composed of 87 symbols, was deciphered by Ventris and Chadwick.