India, April 26 -- A mong the earliest surviving pieces of writing is a sort of bar tab. About 5,300 years ago, in the city of Uruk in present-day Iraq, a man named Kushim was in charge of a storage facility that held nine cereals used to make beer, which was among the rations handed out to agricultural workers. Kushim had to keep a highly complex log, so he used small clay tokens as memory aids, notes Assyriologist and historian Moudhy Al-Rashid, in her astonishing book, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (2025). Such tokens "have been found at numerous sites throughout the ancient Middle East, from Turkey. all the way to Iran... As methods for counting and accounting, they may have been used as early as 7500 ...