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How Did Counting Clay Tokens Become Written Language? - The Administrative Origins of Ancient Writing | Sleepy Facts About History
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Before anyone wrote a word of poetry, a law, or a prayer, someone pressed a small clay cone into wet clay to prove that three measures of grain were inside a sealed envelope. This episode explores how the practical need to count agricultural goods in ancient Mesopotamia slowly transformed into the technology of written language. We trace the long evolution from three-dimensional clay tokens used for basic accounting, to the creation of sealed clay bullae, and finally to the flat tablets…
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