In contrast to the other commenter, I don't think it's overstating things. In my opinion, it's understating things. Accounting was the killer app for writing th

In contrast to the other commenter, I don't think it's overstating things. In my opinion, it's understating things. Accounting was the killer app for writing things down back in the earliest historical times. Many clay tablets in Akkad are about accounting, and the earliest Phoenician records were accounts as well. The more familiar will recognize that it is the Phoenician alphabet that evolved into most of the Mediterranean world's alphabets, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic script. So arguably, without the need for accounting, writing, would have been invented far later, and the literature that we have from ancient times would have been lost to oral tradition.