The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

There are some subjects that are perceived to be mind-numbingly dull and boring.

One such subject is accounting. Yet believe it or not, accounting

and bookkeeping have not only been around since the dawn of human civilization,

but they also had a hand in shaping it. Without accounting, the world would be a very different place today.

Learn more about accounting and bookkeeping and how they really aren't as boring as they seem

on this episode of Everything everywhere daily. It's easy to think of accounting as a stodgy boring profession of number

crunchers bent over a spreadsheet. However, accounting and the related

field of bookkeeping have been around since the dawn of civilization. In fact, you can

make an argument that accounting was the reason for the rise of civilization.

When humans move from the hunter-gatherer life was the reason for the rise of civilization.

When humans moved from the hunter-gatherer lifestyles

to more sedentary agricultural lifestyles,

there was a whole bunch of things that came along with it

that weren't an issue before.

Taxes had to be paid, grain storage had to be recorded,

trades and exchanges had to be documented. It's no surprise that the earliest

examples of written language that we have come from Mesopotamia and they're

basically receipts. The oldest

known examples come from the ancient Sumerian civilization in modern day Iraq.

It's a clay tablet that records a transaction of five goats. Other ancient writing systems arose independently in China, Egypt,

and Mesoamerica, and as far as we can tell, all of them began for the purpose of

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