e earliest recorded permanent human communication is cave painting, dating to 33,000BcE. Written communication emerged in Sumer, the southern part of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), using a script called Cuneiform, written on clay tablets. It was used primarily for accounting. The Sumerians are responsible for our com

d, nomadic societies into a tight, enduring and largely effective authoritarianism. Wittfogel argued that the “irrigation societies” of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and South America all reflected this link between survival and water control. Power pooled in the hands of what he called a “Hydraulic Bureaucracy”.