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Nice technical metaphor: "The first things worth writing down were the terms of deals—in what is perhaps a metaphor for the destructive nature of non-market conflict, some of the oldest writing we have consists of cuneiform tablets recording the terms of loans and forward commodities contracts. These were written on clay, which could be reused, but when a city was razed the fires would bake the clay, writing the contract from random-access memory to permanent storage."