Grain is special, but for a different reason. It is easy to standardize -- to plant in rows or paddies, and store and record in units such as bushels. This makes grain an ideal target for taxation. Unlike underground tubers or legumes, grain grows tall and needs harvesting all at once, so officials can easily estimate annual yields. And unlike fugitive wild foods, grain creates a relatively consistent surplus, allowing a ruling class to skim off peasant laborers' production through a tax regime of manageable complexity. Grain, in Scott's lexicon, is the kind of thing a state can see. On this account, the first cities were not so much a great leap forward for humanity as a new mode of exploitation that enabled the world's first leisured ruling class to live on the sweat of the world's first peasant-serfs. As for writing, that great gateway to history, Scott reports that its earliest uses suggest it was basically a grain-counting technology. Literary culture and shared memory existed in abundance both before and after the first pictographs and alphabets -- consider Homer's epics, the products of a nonliterate Greek "dark age" before the Classical period. Writing contributed a ledger of exploitation.