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 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 recording simple transactions. If we go back even

further about 10,000 years we found evidence of bones with hash marks cut into them

which indicate that somebody was counting something.

Writing and counting were not originally invented for recording abstract thought and mathematics.

It was invented for the practical purpose of documenting economic transactions. Only later were those symbols

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