Getting Medieval On Your Text - Susan Price
I think it must have been something like that. People don't change much. Writing was a gob-smacking break-through. Think of it - instead of memorising all the harvest records, you could write them down on clay-tablets and refer back to them to work out, say, which fields were the most productive. (Writing seems to have been used for record-keeping before any artistic use.) And then - another break-through! - instead of struggling to hear the story-teller above the rowdy singing, you had the story pressed into clay, and read it while sitting quietly by yourself. Bliss! It was worth selling those slaves to afford it. A clay tablet with cuniform writing Heavy clay tablets must have been a nuisance, though - difficult to hold and bulky to store - but th...