Writing wasn't invented for poetry or law — it began as a way to track goats and grain

Around 8000 BC, communities across the ancient Near East began using small clay tokens shaped like cones, spheres and discs to represent fixed quantities of goods: a cone for a measure of grain, a sphere for a larger one. Archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat argued these tokens evolved into sealed clay envelopes with the shapes pressed into the outside as a record of the contents, and that flattening those impressions produced cuneiform script's first pictographic signs around 3100 BC.

— Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, Vol. I: From Counting to Cuneiform — 1992