A new book for children decodes one of humanity’s biggest mysteries: How did we discover language?

The first person who ever wrote anything won’t go down in history, but the first people will.

Civilisations across the world independently came up with their own system of recording things, each in their own land. The early Sumerians began recording their transactions on cuneiform tablets way back in the fourth century BCE.

In close competition with cuneiform were the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Indus Valley script. Why did they start writing? So that no one could, for example, claim later that they had got two eggs less because he said, or she said, or you said. It was all down there in writing. Those little squiggles found today on thousands of clay tablets are a record. A fly-on-the-wall look at people’s daily lives, trades, wages, gifts, lists and even their fashions.

Tablet school

If you were a child from a wealthy family back then, you were sent off to school to be taught to write on clay tablets. You were taught the art of pressing a stylus made of reed, just so, on the little clay tablet. All sun-baked and permanent; no backspace key. In fact, if you made a mistake, some scholar from 5,000 years in the future would catch you out. The students made elaborate excuses to bunk class (nothing’s changed, has it?) and more creative ones even to get parental sympathy.

Not fair, Mummy!

Iddin-Sin’s unwittingly hilarious note on a clay tablet from the 18th century BCE is being chuckled over till today. The son of an aristocrat sent off to boarding school, Iddin-Sin, was trying some emotional blackmail on his mother. He claimed that she sent him no new clothes; he had only poor and scanty clothes, while his classmate received newer, fancier clothes. “You do not love me,” he ended the note with a whine. We won’t know whether the whine worked or not, since we haven’t yet found his mother’s reply.

More written records kept showing up over more digs. Some cuneiform tablets were even bound together so that messengers couldn’t cheat and edit the accounts within them. Some of the funnier discoveries are coming up.

The lion’s diet

4500 years ago, a Sumerian official in Akkaka found himself with a lion. A real live lion, which he was worried wouldn’t stay alive much longer. His cuneiform tablet to his lord details his sorry state. A lion had entered their loft. Far from worrying about the well-being of the people in the house, the official was agitated about the health of the lion. It was presented with a pig and a dog and refused to eat either (lucky animals!). Anxious about the self-imposed hunger strike of this self-invited guest, the official wrote that after five days, he had decided to have the lion shipped to his lord. We hope that both the lion and the lord (and the pig and the dog, and, of course, the stressed-out official) survived, but, once again, there is no response that has been found to this suspenseful story.

Four-thousand-year-old food

Moving on from a lion’s food to that of humans, researchers from Yale University decided to try out a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian lamb stew. None of them fell sick. Let’s quickly add that the ingredients weren’t that old. Only the recipe was.

The stew is made with meat, water, onions, garlic, leeks, salt, milk, and dried barley cakes. That’s all it says in about four lines on the cuneiform tablet.

Black humour

Humour, unlike stew, never grows stale. In this Akkadian tale from the first century BCE, a poor man of Nippur tried to impress the mayor and get invited to his banquet by gifting him a goat. The plan backfired. The mean mayor insulted him instead. The poor man wreaked revenge in a plot involving disguises, bloodshed and hahas aplenty.

The first graphic novel

The battle of Til Tuba between the Assyrians and the Elamites is depicted in gory detail on a massive stone, one of Mesopotamia’s most significant finds. It is a story of victory because the Assyrians won. Not too sure they would have put it up on a six-by-six-foot wall if the battle had turned the other way. The stone shows heads being chopped off and arrows struck into soldiers. Look, it warns about what happens to those who dare go against our king.

A crook caught centuries later

The buried city of Ur uncovered a cheat who will never be forgotten. Ea-Nasir, the trader himself, wasn’t excavated, but archaeologists stumbled upon a collection of complaints in his house, all etched on cuneiform tablets. Like most men keep trophies, Ea-Nasir kept his pile of complaints safe.

Most of the complainants are agitated about giving Ea-Nasir silver and getting bad copper in return. Whether Ea-Nasir gave them all better copper as compensation is a mystery that remains buried, but we think not. He turned to selling second-hand clothes next.

The next time an adult tells you to stop complaining, tell them about the complaints that have survived for centuries. Threaten to etch yours into clay and bake it too.

Excerpted with permission from The Talking Book, Jane De Suza, Puffin.