Archaic Bookkeeping

Book excerpt: This work brings together current scholarship on the earliest true writing system in human history. Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the fourth millennium BC, this script, called proto-cuneiform, survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets, excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets was not to record language but to monitor the administration of local economies by means of a numerical system.