Some scholars argue that the splitting of noun and number on clay tablets didn’t just allow kings to better track their taxes but was tantamount to a cognitive revolution: a leap forward that allowed humans to abstract and categorise the world around them like never before. Lists may not seem like cognitive dynamite, but their proliferation appears to have helped develop new modes of thought in early societies, encouraging us to think analytically about the world. ‘The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity,’ writes anthropologist Jack Goody. ‘[I]t encourages the ordering of the
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