Sumerians were the earliest practitioners of diplomacy (3000-2370 BCE). The diplomatic tradition emerged from this site mainly because the Sumerians were the civilization which invented writing sometime in the 4th millennium BCE. In the meantime, Sumeria was the site of the first urban communities consisted of complex social, economic and political structures each of which was ruled by an independent King.

Diplomacy was used by Sumerians with a motivation to end conflicts through the conventional method of sending messengers with the messages written on clay tablets in cuneiform. Sumerian was used as the lingua franca of diplomacy until the Akkadian hegemony was established in the region.