The earliest writing we know of began as marks for counting goats and grain

Cuneiform emerged in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, around 3400-3200 BCE, evolving from simple pictographs that temple accountants pressed into wet clay with a cut reed stylus to track deliveries of livestock and grain. Over centuries the pictures grew more abstract and the system began recording sounds as well as objects, eventually becoming flexible enough to write poetry, law codes, and private letters, not just inventories, in several unrelated languages across the ancient Near East.

— Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer — University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956
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