A Gypsum Tablet with Archaic Numbers from Uruk, about 3300 BC
An accounting tablet from Late Uruk, about 3300 BC, in the British Museum. The marks are quantities, impressed with a stylus in the shapes the clay counting tokens they replaced had used. Nothing on it is a sentence; it is a record of goods, and writing began here.
For most of a century before anyone wrote a name, the tablets of southern Mesopotamia carry only numbers and commodity signs: measures of grain, counts of animals, allotments of beer. The system grew out of small clay tokens sealed inside hollow clay envelopes, whose contents were marked on the outside until someone realised the outside was sufficient. Literature, law and history all arrive later and all use a technology invented to keep track of stores. See how Bronze Age bookkeeping invented the written word.
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