Late in the Uruk period clay tablets appear with uniform marks on them meticulously accounting for merchants’ stocks and profits. Those dull records, dug into the surfaces of clay tablets, are the ancestors of writing – accountancy was its first application. The message those tablets tell is that the market came long before the other appurtenances of civilisation. Exchange and trade were well established traditions before the first city, and record keeping may have played a crucial role in allowing cities to emerge full of strangers who could trust each other in transactions. It was the habit
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