The Accountant’s Problem

The oldest substantial writing on earth is not a hymn or a chronicle. It is a pile of clay tablets from Uruk listing barley, beer, textiles and labour rations. Take a message a temple actually needed to move, choose the recording technology available at a given date, and watch what the clay can and cannot hold. Six messages, five technologies — find the cheapest one that works for each, and you will walk straight into the breakthrough that turned bookkeeping into literature.