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religious scriptures. Also fueling the Sumerian writing boom was the emerging institution of the temple. Ancient temples functioned as more than just purveyors of ritual; they were also the first national banks, lending out money at interest to individuals and small businesses. The Sumerian Savings and Loan managed an enormous volume of transactions, each recorded on a separate clay record, which in turn found its way into periodic “roll-up” reports issued on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Indeed, while we might think of information technology as a newish field, in fact Information Technologist may rank among the world’s oldest professions.
    Invoices and accounting records paved the way for records of taxes and tributes, property records, deeds, and property transactions, with graphic symbols confirming their legality. These early records, written on clay tablets or papyrus or engraved in bronze or copper, formed the foundation of government archives that would eventually grow to include laws, decrees, property records, contracts, treaties,and chronicles of events involving the state itself: the outcome of battles, the succession of monarchs, and other chronologies. Slowly, these chronological records took on the trappings of literature. “Since records of military conquests and biographies of kings often included as much fiction as fact, they added an element of literature to an otherwise staid collection.” 10 Over time the great stream of oral tradition found its way into print.
    As the scope of recorded information expanded, scribes began dividing into professional specialties with increasingly narrow domains of knowledge: the
dubsar kengira
specialized in the classics; the
dubsar nishid
plied mathematics; the
dubsar ashaga
labored at geometry. In the temples, scribes began to write down old spells and legends. As academic specialties began to coalesce, temples began to establish formal writing education programs to ensure the continuity of skills from generation to generation. As growing numbers of scribes mastered the literary arts, they began to produce more varied texts on, for example, astronomy, prophesies, and scientific observations. 11 The prolific Sumerian scribes created such a bulwark of recorded knowledge that by the time Sumerian civilization fell into decline it had created a written legacy that would reverberate for millennia.
    Eventually a new Semitic power rose in Babylon, displacing the Sumerians. Although the Babylonians spoke their own language, they preserved the written record of Sumerian religious texts, whose ancient pedigrees lent them an air of authority not unlike the veneration that more recent cultures have ascribed to the Bible, Koran, or Torah. As the Babylonians displaced the Sumerians, they placed a great emphasis on preserving the old civilization’s textual legacy, in much the same way that European nations went to great pains to preserve the ancient legacies of Greek and Latin literature. Like learned Europeans during the Middle Ages, the Babylonians established a bilingual standard: with a spoken vernacular for the common people and an exalted written text—Sumerian—for preserving ancient holy truths. 12 Why did the Babylonians invest so much effort in maintaining old texts in the language of an older empire? Historian A. C. Moorehouse speculates that for the Babylonians “there wasa deep bond between producing documents and maintaining political legitimacy.” Recognizing the essential relationship between the written word and political power helped cement the authority of the state over the older, preliterate, symbolically minded tribal cultures.
    The relationship between written language and political legitimacy stretches deep into antiquity. Just as the earliest literate cultures had invented fables to explain the spellbinding power of the written word, later civilizations would invoke mythologies to assert the bond between writing and the political authority of