Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams?
The administrative hypothesis is that great states developed writing to better account and control people and armies. And yet “For one thing, in the four wellsprings of writing, it never (as far as we know) sprang forth as fully phonographic but evolved to become that – there’s usually some kind of proto-writing, and some kind of proto-proto-writing. I like to think of writing as a layered invention. First there’s the graphic invention: the notion of making a durable mark on a surface. Humans have been doing this for at least 100,000 years.”
“In China, for example, the earliest writing samples, which were divination texts carved into bone and turtle shell” hundreds of years before an records of administrative writing.
“Further mysteries are posed by writing in Mesoamerica. The most prominent examples are Mayan and Zapotec writing, which date to 300BCE and 600 BCE respectively…Nothing economic or administrative exists.”