At the Core, by Paul Klee (Date: 1935)
The Introduction
In a startling study published in 2015 Christopher Woods revealed the probable typical mental process of a senior Uruk administrator-accountant by means of a close analysis of their ‘written’ consolidated accounts of ‘disbursements and deliveries’ of agricultural commodities such as grain and livestock. The evidence is found on half a dozen proto-literate (logographic) numerical tablets produced in or near the central polity settlement of Uruk during its early period of formation, 3200–3000 BC, i.e. a short time before the invention—in Uruk—of the world’s first recorded true writing.
The commodities on these tablets are in most cases cereals, and the expenditures or exchange transactions appear to relate to those of an agricultural estate disbursing food rations within the estate and delivering the same foodstuffs outside the estate.
The designations of these agricultural estates are identified in symbol forms either by the individ…