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When, around five thousand years ago, the earliest cities and states grew up in the world's fertile river valleys, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies.
五千年前，當世界上肥沃的大河流域開始出現最早的城市與國家時， 統治者面臨的最大問題便是如何管理新的社會。
How do you control not just a couple of hundred villagers, as it had been, but tens of thousands of new city dwellers?
他們面對的已不是數百村民，要如何把自己的意志凌駕于數萬名城市居民之上呢？
Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.
幾乎所有的 新統治者都發現，除了使用武力與官方意識形態之外，想要管理如此龐大的人口，一些東西必須成文。
We've already talked about a sandal label of an Egyptian pharaoh that had early writing on it, in hieroglyphs.
我們已經談到埃及法老早期以象形文字做成的涼鞋標簽。
Now we're back with the Mesopotamians who made the standard of Ur, and we're looking at one of the earliest examples of writing from there, in what is now southern Iraq.
現在我們用美索不達米亞人的標準,審視在現在伊拉克南部最早的例子。
It's on a little clay tablet, about four inches by three, made about five thousand years ago, and it's almost exactly the same shape as the mouse that controls your computer as you move it around your desk.
這塊小粘土板,分為3行，每行4格,大約五千年前,幾乎完全和現代人的鼠標相同。
We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history,
我們總是容易把文字與詩歌、小說或歷史，也就是人們通常所說的文學聯系起來。
but early literature in that sense was in fact oral-learnt by heart and recited or sung.
但其實早期的文學都是口述的，靠人們用心記憶，一代代朗誦或吟唱出來。
You wrote down what you couldn't learn by heart, what you couldn't turn into verse, so that pretty well everywhere writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting, or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer-counting.
人們需要寫下的是他們記不住、也編不成詩歌的東西。因此在世界各地，早期文字都是用來做記錄、計數，或是像本節中的寫字板一樣，記錄啤酒數量的。
