Summary

Chapter 7 describes the emergence of record keeping and its important role in society. Harari notes that imagined orders, like cities and empires, generate huge amounts of information. Humans cannot store information in their DNA as some species do, nor can a single human mind process the amount required to organize and entire society. For millennia, this constrained the size of human communities. This restriction began to be lifted by the ancient Sumerian civilization, the first to develop writing. Sumerian cuneiform was partial script, it could express poetic or literary ideas, but it was extremely useful for data-processing. Their writing system allowed the Sumerians to collect and store information about taxation, inventories, and property that maintained a large and complex society. Similarly, the Incan civilization developed a system of tied knots, referred to as quipus, that allowed them to maintain inventories and communicate basic...