The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

What Uruk is really famous for is writing. It is the first city for which we have extensive written records, and some of these documents do date back to the period before royal rule. Unfortunately, while they can be read, they are also extremely difficult to interpret. Most are cuneiform tablets recovered from trash dumps dug into the foundations of the acropolis, and they appear to provide only a very narrow window on to city life. The great majority are bureaucratic receipts, recording transactions of goods and services. There are also ‘school texts’ which comprise sign-lists, copied out by scribes in training to familiarize them with the standard administrative lexicon of the time. The historical value of the latter is unclear, because scribes may have had to learn to write all kinds of cuneiform signs – which were executed by pressing a reed stylus into moist clay – that had little application in practice. Such learning may well have been part of what was considered a proper literate training at the time.67