Dr. Irving Finkel

Well, the received law when I was a student was this, that Sumerian in its early form manifested itself in the world in a cultural and political environment in which the country, which ancient Iraq, because we're talking about the ancient landscape of Iraq, was not under a single ruler, but consisted of more or less independent conglomerations, which we call city-states,

where quite a lot of people lived together under somebody who was in charge.

There'd be a temple, there'd be a local N, or not rulers, not quite the word, but somebody in charge of it with a kind of structure overseeing everybody and taking responsibility.

for security on the one hand, and food and drink for everybody, and the tilling of the soil, and the production of stuff.

Some kind of early structure like this, where these city-states functioned independently of one another, quite extensive in reach and duration, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not.

But underneath

I think they had a kind of agreed sense of unity because there's a very early seal attested on some clay surfaces where the symbols which represent these cities are all put in a row like that, like on the head of notepaper.

And they had these symbols.

Sometimes we can understand them.

Sometimes they're

what people would call mythological birds or something like that.

But they're something like that, avine forms or symbols, one for each city, all in a row, meaning that underpinning them was some unity.

And I think it would manifest, for example, if there was an invasion from outside, then they would all pull together.

When there's peace and quiet, then there's rivalry, and maybe there's sometimes struggle or dynastic this and that.

But in principle, that's how it worked, as far as I understand it.

And when you have such an institution with a central authority, which is crucial,

where ingoing and outgoing stuff needs to be controlled and monitored.

The theory is that bookkeeping, accountability, and control for a large number, an ungainly number of persons, perhaps in an ungainly number of areas, required a recording system to keep track of everything and ultimately to make people accountable for what they were responsible for.

It's the emergence in the world of the inland revenue argument.

Well, we can all have something to say about that.