Sometime around five thousand years ago, the first writing appeared in Uruk, on clay tablets in the temples of Eanna. More complexity meant more information, and writing was the new technology that allowed the wealthy and powerful to keep track of the increasing resources and energy flows at their disposal. Almost all the earliest writing in Mesopotamia consists of inventories—so many cows and bulls, so many sheep, so many bales of linen, so many slaves. They tell us that we are now in a world of rapidly increasing inequality in which networks of rulers, aristocrats, and officials control
...more
