Paperwork stories
Writing was invented. Paperwork followed almost immediately.
Before epic poems, bestselling novels and group chats, there were records of grain, bread and beer.
2 min read
Writing is one of humanity's greatest inventions. It gave us literature, science, history and the ability to leave messages for people thousands of years in the future. But some of the earliest known writing had a rather more practical purpose: keeping track of stuff.
The first killer app was accounting.
In ancient Mesopotamia, growing cities needed ways to record goods, rations and transactions.
So people began marking clay tablets with signs and numbers to keep track of things such as grain and other supplies.
In other words, one of writing's earliest jobs was administration.
Yes, bread and beer were involved.
British Museum curators describe early cuneiform as a bookkeeping tool used to track bread and beer rations in cities such as Uruk.
This is somehow both historically important and extremely human.
Thousands of years later, office systems are more complicated, but refreshments are still a powerful administrative concern.
At first, writing did not look much like writing.
The earliest records used simple pictorial signs and numbers pressed or drawn into wet clay.
Over time, those signs became more abstract and developed into the wedge-shaped system we now call cuneiform.
Eventually, the system could represent full languages and was used for everything from contracts and letters to literature and law.
Paper came much later. Paperwork did not.
The material was clay, not paper, but the basic idea is instantly recognisable: record who received what, how much there was and what happened to it.
The oldest office archive did not need filing cabinets. It needed shelves strong enough to hold a lot of clay.
Digital transformation would take a while.
Bureaucracy may be older than civilisation's greatest stories.
We tend to imagine that writing was invented so people could compose poetry or record profound ideas. In reality, administration was there from the beginning. Apparently, humanity has always needed somewhere to write down who got the bread.
Fortunately, your paperwork is lighter than clay.
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