Download or read book Archaic Bookkeeping written by Hans J. Nissen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work brings together current scholarship on the earliest true writing system in human history. Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the fourth millennium BC, this script, called proto-cuneiform, survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets, excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets was not to record language but to monitor the administration of local economies by means of a numerical system.