Writing was invented independently perhaps three times — in Mesopotamia, in China, and in Mesoamerica — and in each case the earliest surviving material is administrative rather than literary. The first Sumerian tablets record quantities of grain and numbers of animals, and the signs develop out of a token system used for accounting long before anything resembling a sentence appears. This has an implication that runs against how literacy is usually imagined: writing seems to have emerged as an instrument of storage and control rather than of expression, and the capacity to record speech was a later extension of a technology built for something else. The literature comes centuries after the ledgers.