Ah, I thought it was to complain about bad purchases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

“It is currently kept in the British Museum” aka Museum of Stolen Goods ;-)

That’s pretty hilarious. Although without looking it up I would bet the first use of writing would have been ownership documents and transactions

The earliest documents we have are lists, but I think it's hard to tell whether you're looking at a shopping list, an inventory, or what. Early scripts tend to be logographic for this reason, if you mostly write stuff like "Ten Amphoras of wine" then a symbol which means "Amphora of wine" seems pretty much as useful as a way to write numbers.

> The purpose of writing is to take up space

This is so true, which is why I’m compelled to share my agreement by typing words into this conveniently unoccupied textarea. Horror vacui!

Correction, it was invented to more accurately account for ad impressions.

The first ad was just a crude drawing of a shapely woman with an arrow pointing eastward. Urgak thought his addition of a penis to the drawing would bring in more customers and in flash of genius Kalik devised a counting scheme a lot more flexible than the stones they were using. It turns out Urgak’s suggestion was statistically insignificant but they all agreed that they liked the addition of the penis so they kept his variation.