Writing Was Invented for Accounting and Scrawled on Baboon Bones
About this episode
The episode explores the origins of writing and data recording from ancient baboon bones to Mesopotamian clay tokens, featuring guest Roopika Risam.
A three-inch baboon bone bearing twenty-nine deliberate incisions was pulled from a South African mountain range in 1970. It is approximately 43,000 years old, and microscopic analysis shows the notches were made over time with different cutting tools, meaning someone was tracking something and coming back to update the record. It is the oldest known dataset in the world. Twenty thousand miles away and twenty thousand years later, temple administrators in Mesopotamia were pressing small clay tokens into wet clay to record quantities of grain and livestock, and in doing so they accidentally invented writing. Both were doing the same thing: turning observations into symbols that could outlast the observer. Both were creating data. And both were laying the foundation for every census, ledger, algorithm, and surveillance system that followed. Today's guest is Roopika Risam, author of Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate . We discuss how the Bronze Age collapsed in part because its diplomatic information network couldn't transmit clay tablets fast enough to coordinate a response to simultaneous crises, how Phoenician miners who couldn't read…
People in this episode
Host: History Unplugged
Guest: Roopika Risam
Topics covered
- history of writing
- data and information
- ancient civilizations
- accounting
- Bronze Age
- bureaucracy
Keywords
- writing
- accounting
- data
- ancient history
- Bronze Age
- Qin Shi Huang
- Herman Hollerith
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate
Places: South African mountain range, Mesopotamia, Sinai desert
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