[natroniks]

If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets, this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been invented, but because it was not used for literary material.

[jcranmer]

Something important to remember is that the transient documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian days were scratched into clay (a medium which allows it to be easily erased and adjusted if necessary, and is plentifully available in quantity). One consequence is that if you have these things in a storage building that catches on fire, the clay is baked into pottery and essentially permanently preserved for archaeologists to uncover. Texts written on organic parchment or papyrus are far less durable, as they tend to decompose unless properly stored.

This means we probably have an exaggerated abundance of economic documents due to survivorship bias of the things they wrote economic data on.