How the ancient Sumerians made accounting sexy | RP 97

History & the Arts

How the ancient Sumerians invented writing, made accounting sexy & established the first empire in history: 5 lessons

Contrary to popular belief, writing was not meant to document lessons, share stories, or publish newsletters.

What most people don’t know is that writing was first and foremost a tool to build kingdoms, cities, and empires. It was meant to record and store data and ultimately, to scale human cooperation.

Today we’ll be drawing from the multidisciplinary field of big history to look at how the growth of early human settlements created a need for accounting, how this led to the invention of writing, and the establishment of the Akkadian empire.

Size: Writing used to scale growing city-states

In Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Harari makes the case that the human brain is not a good storage device for empire-sized databases for three main reasons.

First, its capacity and processing power is limited. We can only remember so much in our short-term and long-term memories.

Secondly, humans die, and their brains die with them. Any information stored in a single brain will be erased in less than a century.

Thirdly and most importantly, the human brain has been adapted to store and process only particular types of information. We’re much better at remembering social, topographical, and visual information than we are at abstract concepts like numbers and words.

The ancient Sumerians felt these limitations when their city-state crept up to the 20,000 – 50,000 citizen range. Small numbers by our standards, but at that time, these populations were the largest human settlements on the planet.

If the Sumerian rulers wanted to grow an empire, they needed a way to pass along information from brain to brain, from generation to generation, even with their limited brain capacity and their inconvenient penchant for dying.

But first, they needed a way to keep track of all their resources.

Surplus: An accounting system to keep track of resources

According to Dr. David Christian, leading historian and author of Maps of Time the preeminent book on big history, the core of all agrarian civilizations were tribute-taking states.

Tribute-taking city-states like Ur exacted resources like labor, goods, and cash from its citizens, often based on religious grounds, but also with coercive force. The earliest accounting systems were invented as a response to the need to keep track of all the wheat, metals, and timber that went into the city’s storehouses.

Specialization: The invention of writing for record-keeping

Dr. Christian posits that ancient rulers used three systems to assert their power: literate bureaucracies, taxation systems, and paid armies. All of these needed rigorous record-keeping and resource allocation methods.

To keep count, Sumerian scribes first used tokens to represent objects. When that grew unwieldy they began cutting wedge-shaped marks in clay tablets. Today we call these tablets cuneiform (which translates to “wedge-shaped”).

Once they realized how much data they could store in these tablets, Sumer’s rulers eventually branched out and began keeping tabs on other commercial activities:

• The size of their population and their standing army

• The profits and losses they accrued from trading with other civilizations

• The amount citizens paid in tribute and taxes

Eventually, they realized that it was not enough to have scribes who knew how to enter records; they also needed a way to retrieve them.

Enter the highly trained accountants of Sumer.

Scribes & status: Sumerian accountants held celebrity status

The ancient Sumerians didn’t take being organized for granted, whether it was in their books or in their social stratification.

For starters, we know from the Code of Hammurrabi that the Sumerians relied heavily on hierarchy — male or female; nobility, merchant, or peasant — to maintain order in their society.

With the advent of writing, a new class of elite tribute-takers entered the scene: accountants, a.k.a. scribes.

Highly-trained scribes undertook all administrative tasks in the Sumerian bureaucracy. The earliest records of writing that we have are those of scribes, signing off on ledgers for resources. Scientists also unearthed reams of cuneiform text that contain nothing but words written over and over again. These were practice tablets for novice scribes learning how to write.

Finally, we know that these accountants held a special place in Sumerian society. Here’s an ancient text, extolling the benefits of being a scribe:

Writing’s legacy: Stories or numbers?

The first Sumerian city-states popped up around 3000 BCE. Around 1,000 years after that, Sargon, the ruler of the Sumerian city of Akkad, would unite all the states under his rule, establishing the first known empire in history.

Thanks to accounting and their legions of trained recordkeepers and retrievers the Sumerian empire had a system to scale itself beyond a handful of city-states.

Thanks to the invention of writing, they also had a way of spreading their culture and their political ideas beyond the reach of their military.

😉 You're welcome

A selection of interesting links & fun recommendations.

• ▶️ ”Mind-blowing stage sculptures that fuse music and technology” by Es Devlin. In this TED Talk, Devlin talks about her creative process and how she designed stages for the the likes of Beyoncé, Kanye West, Adele, and the Weeknd. Tons of lessons from the preeminent visual designer of our time.

• 📸 This man held a day job as a teacher for 30 years... So that he could keep performing as a dancer, even if he wasn’t paid much. Despite knowing he couldn’t cut it as a professional dancer, he held a job he didn’t love to practice an art he did love.

  Lesson: Just because you can’t make a living with your art does not mean performing it is any less worthy. Keep dancing.

• 🛠️ Peak Design Everyday Backpack (20L). I’ve had this bag for 5 years. I first bought because it allowed me to quickly access camera gear when I travelled. My needs have changed since then, but this is still my go-to bag when I’m in my home city.