What may be the earliest writing system on the planet was invented in southern Mesopotamia (Iraq) some time during the second half of the fourth millennium BCE. The almost six thousand clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script consist almost entirely of administrative accounts and word lists used for teaching writing. It would take a few hundred years before the system was elaborated so that it could be used to write poetry in the Sumerian language. And yet among the earliest tablets there are a few early experiments that bear witness to attempts to create a new form of artistic written medium and a unique form of narrative, evidencing the robustness of human semiotic imagination; this will be the subject of this presentation.