The Wave, by Gustave Courbet (Date: 1871)
Uruk to Ur, two mounds and a long wave, 3000 years
In his study of administrative bookkeeping texts from the areas of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia and Sippar in northern Mesopotamia in the first millennium BC Michael Jursa drew a π-relevant conclusion that I think captures the trajectory of recorded administered governance which had taken off in the same area nearly three thousand years earlier. By the first millennium there were thoroughly efficient systems in place for regulating all the many steps taken in the production and transfer of commodities and in the management of labour and resources in both private and public sectors of economic action. Jursa was taking part in a conference debate with his colleagues about whether the function of the administration was to ‘control’ or ‘plan’ economies. That debate is a distraction and need not concern us here. It should be fairly obvious that administration fulfilled both purposes from the outset.…