How did writing get invented long ago?
Sheep to Symbols
How did writing get invented long ago?
Imagine you owned five sheep, three jars of oil, and a debt that someone owed you. Now imagine trying to remember all of that, perfectly, for a whole year. Your brain is good, but it isn't THAT good. So long ago, people had a problem — and the fix they invented was writing.
The very first writing wasn't poems or stories. It was accounting — boring, beautiful accounting. In ancient Mesopotamia (a region that today is mostly Iraq), people kept track of who owed what. For thousands of years before letters, they used little clay tokens: a cone meant one measure of grain, a sphere meant another. Counting stuff was the whole point.
