Bloomberg Opinion's Virginia Postrel writing for the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason Magazine:
When there's business to be done over long distances, you don't want to depend on a scribe.
One of the many interesting scholars I met while researching The Fabric of Civilization was Cécile Michele, a French Assyriologist who has translated many of the 23,000 cuneiform tablets excavated from a site in Turkey. Here she is teaching us the basics of how to write in cuneiform....
....The tablets, known as the Old Assyrian private archives, are about 4,000 years old. They were found in the homes of expatriate merchants in the city of Kanesh, now the archaeological site called Kültepe. These letters and legal documents preserve the practices and personalities of a thriving commercial culture. They are our oldest records of long-distance trade.
Capturing dilemmas and decisions still faced by commercial businesses, these ancient records testify to the central role of textiles in the innovations that enable economic exchange. Here, the inventions aren't material artifacts or physical processes but "social technologies": the records, agreements, laws, practices, and standards that foster trust, ameliorate risks, and allow transactions across time and distance. Four millennia later, we can still hear the voices they record.....
....MUCH MORE
