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Comment by slim | Hacker News Reader

a few years ago an article posted here in HN explained that writing was basically invented for accounting. So first forms were depicting symbols for items to be accounted for, then by composition they created new symbols to represent multiple symbols.

what's fascinating is words, numbers, money and computation seem to have the same origin in those proto-cuneiform boxes.

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Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a true American genius, develops the idea of writing from accounting for objects of common value like olive oil, wine, flour etc. She traces the development of literacy to an earlier phenomenon called numeracy - skill in counting and calls both literacy and numeracy as sources of power for the person who possessed those skills.

The following reference may be of help:

How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95.

This book is a summary of her earlier two volume study called 'Before Writing'.

Hope this helps.

I haven't read this book, but the earliest written signs we have are pictographic, and don't seem to have a relation to numbers per se, but are much closer in character to ancient cave drawings. The argument is interesting from the perspective of numeracy as ancient Egyptian magical stories often involved numerical quantities, the Tao Te Ching is another example of magic involved with numbers, but I think that would come from a later period of development of civilization, whereas the origins of writing itself probably predate something like an advanced agrarian economy such as Egypt, China, the Indus River Valley civilization and the Mayan civilization.

Here in Peru the quipu system, a form of proto-writing, was invented for accounting. It is said that it was used for balancing agricultural production across different regions.

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