On The Roots of Writing

“As a writer of nonfiction, I can’t help but love writing’s roots in enumerating concrete objects and reality itself. The textual analyst part of me loves how Mesopotamian tokens were wrapped in clay envelopes after being impressed on the soft exterior – perhaps clay-wrapped tokens of meaning give rise to the notion that text is both a surface and an interior, and that that’s what leads us to talk so relentlessly (in English and other languages) about what is ‘in’ a given text. The poet in me wants to repurpose the heavy thumb of authority’s use of writing on behalf of the powerless. The linguist in me recognises the cognitive significance of the layers of writing’s invention, none of which the brain was evolved to do specifically but with which we have co-evolved. And as a partisan of text, I know its deep history won’t ever be erased.”

Michael Erard - aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting. A very helpful summary of recent histories of writing's origins in religious and poetic human interests rather than government bureaucracy. "Over and over, what we see is that writing is more like gunpowder than like a nuclear bomb."