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Beer was the staple drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers.
啤酒是美索不达米亚的主要饮料，用以分配给工人饮用。
Money, laws, trade, employment; this is the stuff of early writing, and it's writing like the writing on this little tablet that changes the nature of state control and state power-bureaucratic and economic.
金钱、法律、贸易、雇佣:这些便是早期写作的内容。 如本节中写字板般的记录，最终改变了国家管理与政府权力的本质。
Only later does writing move from rations to emotions; the accountants get there before the poets.
到后期，文字的作用才从记录变为抒情，这也就是说，会计师掌握书写的年代远比诗人更早。
It's all thoroughly bureaucratic stuff, and so we asked Gus O'Donnell, the head of the British civil service, to talk to us about why he thinks the first writing in Mesopotamia was about organising the state:
文字是彻头彻尾的行政系统的产物。我曾为此询问英国内阁秘书长格斯奥唐奈爵士的看法：
"This tablet is amazing. You've got a civil service here, starting to come into place in order to record what's going on.
这块写字板是对文字的最早记录，同时，它也能让我们了解早期国家的发展，当时巳有公务人员开始记录正在发生的事。
Here is very clearly the state paying some workers for some work that's been done, they need to keep a track of the public finances, they need to know how much they've paid: it needs to be fair."
很明显，这里记录的是国家向工人分发工作报酬。他们需要将公共财政的支出记下来，并了解付出的酬劳有多少，这些都要秉公处理。
So, by 3000 BC, the people who had to manage the various city-states of Mesopotamia were discovering how to use written records for all kinds of day-to-day administration, keeping large temples running or tracking the movement and storage of goods.
公元前三千年，美索不达米亚各个城邦的管理者发现了如何将文字记录运用到日常管理，运用到大型庙宇的运作、活动记录以及货物储存中的方法。
Most of the early clay tablets in our collection, like this one, come from the city of Uruk, roughly halfway between modern Baghdad and Basra.
大部分的早期黏土板，如本节中的这块，都来自今巴格达与巴士拉之间的乌鲁克。
Uruk was just one of the large rich city-states of Mesopotamia that had grown too big and too complex for anyone to be able to run them just by word of mouth. Gus O'Donnell again.
乌鲁克是美索不达米亚的大型富庶城邦之一，城市已经发展得过于庞大复杂，无法仅靠口头表达来进行统治。奥唐奈爵士再次解释道。
