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When, around five thousand years ago, the earliest cities and states grew up in the world's fertile river valleys, one of the challenges for leaders was how to govern these new societies.
五千年前，当世界上肥沃的大河流域开始出现最早的城市与国家时， 统治者面临的最大问题便是如何管理新的社会。
How do you control not just a couple of hundred villagers, as it had been, but tens of thousands of new city dwellers?
他们面对的已不是数百村民，要如何把自己的意志凌驾于数万名城市居民之上呢？
Nearly all these new rulers discovered that, as well as using military force and official ideology, if you want to control populations on this scale you need to write things down.
几乎所有的 新统治者都发现，除了使用武力与官方意识形态之外，想要管理如此庞大的人口，一些东西必须成文。
We've already talked about a sandal label of an Egyptian pharaoh that had early writing on it, in hieroglyphs.
我们已经谈到埃及法老早期以象形文字做成的凉鞋标签。
Now we're back with the Mesopotamians who made the standard of Ur, and we're looking at one of the earliest examples of writing from there, in what is now southern Iraq.
现在我们用美索不达米亚人的标准,审视在现在伊拉克南部最早的例子。
It's on a little clay tablet, about four inches by three, made about five thousand years ago, and it's almost exactly the same shape as the mouse that controls your computer as you move it around your desk.
这块小粘土板,分为3行，每行4格,大约五千年前,几乎完全和现代人的鼠标相同。
We tend to think of writing as being about poetry or fiction or history,
我们总是容易把文字与诗歌、小说或历史，也就是人们通常所说的文学联系起来。
but early literature in that sense was in fact oral-learnt by heart and recited or sung.
但其实早期的文学都是口述的，靠人们用心记忆，一代代朗诵或吟唱出来。
You wrote down what you couldn't learn by heart, what you couldn't turn into verse, so that pretty well everywhere writing seems to have been about record-keeping, bean-counting, or, as in the case of this little tablet, beer-counting.
人们需要写下的是他们记不住、也编不成诗歌的东西。因此在世界各地，早期文字都是用来做记录、计数，或是像本节中的写字板一样，记录啤酒数量的。
