Speech (Discovery 09) could connect one mind to another, but it vanished the instant it was spoken, and disappeared entirely once the speaker was gone. Around 3200 BCE in the Sumerian city of Uruk, humans invented cuneiform writing — not as poetry, but as an accounting ledger for counting grain and livestock. Archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat showed in Before Writing (1992) that this script evolved gradually out of an older system of clay counting-tokens. Two very different legends frame the invention of writing: Chinese tradition holds that the scribe Cangjie created characters by studying the tracks of birds and beasts, an event so momentous that grain reportedly rained from the sky and spirits wept through the night; but in Plato's Phaedrus, the Egyptian god Theuth offers writing to King Thamus as a gift for memory, only to be warned that people will come to rely on external marks instead of remembering for themselves — appearing wise without truly being so. What speech alone could never carry across time, writing finally could.