Our greatest tool, invention, etc. is clearly writing; that’s what separates history from prehistory. One of the earliest pieces of writing they’ve got at the British Museum is this Sumerian clay tablet (actually, they have a whole room full of ‘em, but this one is on display), in which you read the boxes right to left and the little wedge-marks in the clay are pictograms, not quite letters. Meaning, once upon a time the picture looked something like what it stood for. It’s obviously a nice leap from pictograms to characters that stand for sounds, and MacGregor suggests that once that got started it happened very quickly. If you complain that clay is not as beautiful a writing surface as papyrus, or that Egyptian characters are prettier and the writing more appealing than Sumerian, sure, but papyrus disintegrates; the clay is still here. As for what’s on this tablet, it’s a bureacratic worksheet about how to divvy up your beer ration among your workers.
(By the way, I'm adding Tom Standage's "History of the World in Six Glasses" to my list of other fun syncretic histories to the right here...in this case, it's really more the history of western civ in beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, coca-cola. Kind of a fun read, and lighter than the BBC/British Museum creation. The two histories intersect here, in ancient Mesopotamia, with the first documented use of beer, aka 'liquid bread'. They had it in the Fertile Crescent long before we got it up north in the Anglo-Germanic-Scandihoovian worlds which today seem so shaped by beer.)
Beer is still great (I happily biked past a recent Pacific NW local craft breweries' fair in Tacoma), five thousand years later. Although the bureacracy of beer is presumably still pretty dull. But as with King Den’s Sandal Label, the difficulty of maintaining big city-states demands dull bureacracy, and bureacracy demands writing: thus from agriculture comes cities, and with cities comes writing.
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