* Astronomy

How the world's first accountants counted on cuneiform

The Egyptians used to believe that literacy was divine, a gift from baboon-faced Thoth, the god of knowledge.
Scholars no longer embrace that theory, but why ancient civilisations developed writing was a mystery for a long time. Was it for religious or artistic reasons? To communicate with distant armies?
The mystery deepened in 1929, when a German archaeologist named Julius Jordan unearthed a vast library of clay tablets that were 5,000 years old.
They were far older than the samples of writing already discovered in China, Egypt and Mesoamerica, and were written in an abstract script that became known as "cuneiform".
The tablets came from Uruk, a Mesopotamian settlement on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Iraq.
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