Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. Can you imagine a world without writing, without any writing at all? No forms to fit in of course no tax returns, but also no literature, no science, no history.

It is almost beyond imagining, because our modern life and above all our modern government is based almost entirely on writing.

Of all mankind's great advances, the development of writing is surely the giant. I think you can say it

has had more impact on the evolution of human society than any other invention.

But when and where did it begin and how? This program's object is a piece of clay made just over 5,000 years ago in a Mesopotamian city.

It's one of the earliest examples of writing that we know.

It's about beer and the birth of bureaucracy.

For me, it's a first sign of writing, but it also tells you about the growth of the early beginnings of a state.

It's essential for the creation of what we think of as human civilization.

It has a creative capacity that may not even have been intended.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Clay writing tablet, approximately 5,000 years old, discovered in southern Iraq.

When around 5,000 years ago the earliest cities and states grew up in the world's fertile

river valleys, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies.

How do you control not just a couple of hundred villagers, as it had been,

but tens of thousands of new city dwellers. Nearly all these new rulers discovered that as well as using military force and official ideology,

if you want to control populations on this scale, you need to write things down.

We've already talked about a sandal label from an Egyptian Pharaoh that had early writing on it in hieroglyphs.

Now we're back with the Mesopotamians who made the standard of er, and we're looking at one

of the earliest examples of writing from there in what is now Southern Iraq.

It's on a little clay tablet about four inches by three, made about 5,000 years ago and it's almost exactly

the same shape as the mouse that controls your computer as you move it around

your desk. We tend to think of writing as being about

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