The concept of history begins with writing. Before we could write things down, back when we only had oral tradition,

the telling of stories to share what we'd learned with each other, that was a period called

prehistory. Prehistory does offer us artifacts. History began during the Stone Age, so there are

tools and cave paintings and things like that, but it offers us very

little in terms of intangible data. A single sentence written on a tablet somewhere

might not tell us anything revelatory about the people who wrote it, but it would tell us

something quite different from what the tools and art that

they left behind tell us. Up until very recently, conventional theory placed the earliest known

writing in Mesopotamia, beginning around 4,000 BCE. Burgeoning commercial powers in this region began using little clay tokens as part of their

trading process several thousand years earlier. As early as 8,000 BCE, these tokens were not currency. They

helped the traders in the region do business with other traders, using the tokens to represent quantities

of agricultural and other products to aid them in the trading process, when crops had not

yet been harvested, and when they couldn't otherwise easily express what they were trading

for what with nearby cultures. These tokens were stand-ins for these products.

Eventually, as trade increased, and so too did the amount of trade that they were engaging in,

they began to hold these tokens in jars, and the number of tokens in the jars were imprinted

on the outside. So you might have a 100 token jar that was

used during trade negotiations, instead of just 100 loose tokens, just sitting there, needing to be

recounted over and over again, and that jar would have the impression of 100 tokens marked on its surface. By around 4,000 BCE, they had simplified

this process further, symbolizing these jars full of tokens with another set of symbols that

they would mark on clay surfaces. So instead of bringing 30 jars of 100 tokens, they could make marks on a tablet

that represented those 30 jars, that showed the concept of a jar and the concept of 30,

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