““I think government starts civilization not writing. In fact why did writing happen in the first place? What happened was bureaucrats were trying to figure out how to keep track of how many cows they had, how much wheat they had stored in the greeneries, how many swords they had, how many horses they had and the politicians went to the bureaucrats and said: you need to come up with some mechanism to keep track of all of this and so the bureaucrats began coming up with symbol sets for numbers and for items and over time those symbol sets evolved into writing.””
