[gosheroo]

Yes. Past attitudes were absurdly parochial.

Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost. Writing was invented for tax purposes. Even natural selection sat on the genetic code for a billion years before branching out into multicellular life.

[jacobolus]

Actually, some of the earliest writings we have (in Mesopotamia) are for managing beer production supply chains.

Other early mathematical/written work was for taxes and debt records, but also recording business transactions, adjudicating land boundary disputes, managing subcontracted work quotas, and so on. Then later of course we get written legal codes, astronomical records, religious texts, satirical stories complaining about scribes’ incompetent and hypocritical bosses, personal letters, ...

[ceejayoz]

Complaint letters, too! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

[pjmlp]

Great read, it might be around 4000 years old and yet feels so actual.

[crottypeter]

> taxes and debt records

Probably along the lines of "X owes me a beer!"

[nebabyte]

Early hieroglyphics: "tipcoin! 1 beer"

[Nition]

Back when the blockchain was a chain of blocks.

[greaterscope]

You made me lol. Thank you :-)

[gosheroo]

Fine! Most of the credit goes to Chapter 6 of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.

[coldtea]

>Half of Bach's manuscripts were lost.

So? How does that make "past attitudes" any more "absurdly parochial" than ours, since the vast majority could care less for Bach and classical music today?

>Writing was invented for tax purposes.

Well, taxes were invented to help build cities and defend them, so there's that.