Whenever spring rolls around and I do my taxes, I think of the Sumerians. Cuneiform may have been used to write literary works, hymns of praise, and personal letters, but a massive chunk of the texts in Sumerian we have today are account ledgers, business records, and especially tax documents. It’s been theorized that the earliest writing was, in fact, developed for the purpose of keeping track of property and taxation records.

This tablet, from the Indiana State Library, is a list of taxable produce from about 2350 BCE. It predates what was probably the pinnacle of the Mesopotamian tax system, called bala taxation, in the 22nd and 21st centuries. Under the bala system, tens of millions of liters of grain were moved around Mesopotamia to support a population of state workers possibly numbering as many as 500,000, using an accounting system of thousands of tablets a year. More than ten thousand such tablets have been found at Puzrish-Dagan, an administrative center founded by King Shulgi at which tax records from across the Neo-Sumerian Empire. When I send my tax forms in to the IRS center in Austin, Charlotte or Kansas City, I think of it as a modern Puzrish-Dagan.

Though the damage on the right side of the above tablet is probably more recent, I like to imagine someone got frustrated with the local tax-collector-scribe and tried to deface their documentation. So when you fill in those tax forms, think of the Sumerians, and the connections we have across millennia, with love, and sometimes just a touch of frustration.