50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

People used to believe that writing had come from the gods.

The Greeks thought that Prometheus had given it to mankind as a gift.

The Egyptians also believed that literacy was divine.

Her benefaction from baboon faced thoth, the God of knowledge.

Mesopotamians thought that the goddess Inanna had stolen it from them from Enki, the God

of Wisdom.

Scholars no longer embraced the baboon faced thoth theory of literacy.

But why ancient civilizations developed writing was a mystery for a long time.

Was it for religious or artistic reasons?

To send messages to distant armies?

The mystery deepened in 1929 when a German archaeologist named Julius Jordan unearthed

a vast library of clay tablets that were 5,000 years old.

These were far older than the samples of writing that had been found in China and Egypt

in Mesoamerica and they were written in an abstract script that became known as

Cuniform.

The tablets came from Uruk, a Mesopotamian settlement on the banks of the Euphrates

in what is now Iraq.

Uruk was small by today's standards, with a few thousand inhabitants it would have

been a large village to us.

But by the standards of 5,000 years ago, Uruk was huge.

One of the world's first true cities.

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