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Probably not a place you’ll have heard of unless you are a scholar of ancient Mesopotamia. But all those dodgy accountants fleeing from the Enron and Worldcom scandals might find solace there. For study of Eridug shows that we owe a big debt even to dodgy accountants. Without fraud – and strenuous efforts to avoid it – we would never have had writing at all.

Travel back 10,000 years to the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq. Its alluvial plains were the birthplace of agriculture, creating a settled population ruled by the kings of Eridug. As agriculture boomed, so the first means for recording trade and taxes appeared. Archaeologists have found thousands of small clay tokens in the shape of cylinders, cones, spheres, even models of animals and tools from the area. Each token probably stood for a particular product: an egg shape represented a jar of olive oil and a cylinder a sheep.

But how do you stop someone just heading for the nearest clay pit and rolling out a few hundred egg shapes without even cultivating an olive tree? One solution was to store the tokens in secure places, such as palaces or temples. That’s where archaeologists find them today.

But there was clearly pressure from fraudsters. By 6000 BC, the Mesopotamians were stringing the tokens together then marking each string with a lump of clay impressed with a personal seal. The seal shows who was in on the deal. Changing the tokens would break the seal, revealing tampering.

After the Mesopotamians came the Sumerians. One of their accountants invented something even better – the clay envelope. It could be filled with tokens, pinched shut, and then marked with seals, making it tamper-proof. But that created a problem of what was inside the envelope: you had to break it open to know the exact deal. So details were marked on the outside too, first by pressing the tokens into the envelope’s surface.

From fraud protection it was a short step to writing. Some of the tokens were so elaborate they could not create a good impression on the clay envelope, so accountants drew pictures of them instead. Laziness led to simpler shapes to represent the elaborate tokens, then to a full syllabic alphabet.

Writing truly took off much later. But in ancient Sumer, accountants and tax collectors clearly ruled the world – perhaps they still do.