Life, Death and Taxes

Maybe it's just the mid-April timeframe, but I found this a humorous way to open up the "invention of writing" story in the Elementary Program:

As you read about the people who lived in Çatalhöyük and Jericho, you may have wished that you knew more about what they thought and did and what stories they told each other before going to bed at night. Sadly, we will never know, because when those ancient towns were built writing had not yet been invented. People did not have any way to record their thoughts and stories for people many hundreds or thousands of years later to read.

Still, although we are glad that the ancients invented writing because it allows us to read the stories and histories that they wrote down, that is not what writing seems to have been invented for. Most of the earliest pieces of writing we have found are not stories, they are tax records.

In the growing cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt (which we will read about in a few more chapters) kings and their servants needed to keep track of who owed them grain and livestock and money. Perhaps writing began with the king's servants drawing little pictures to help them remember who had given the king how much of what, and how much was still owed. However it happened, many of the baked clay tablets that archeologists have dug up in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia are lists which simply record things like, "Two hundred baskets of wheat, three hundred baskets of barley, forty cattle, twenty camels, one hundred goats," and so on. [more...]

I know that I have a tendency to over-estimate how much you can convey to young students, so I hope that my attempt to talk about how cuneiform and heiroglyphics differed from the Pheonecian alphabet doesn't sail over kids heads...