All this has its bearing on the actual origin of libraries. Messrs. Tedder and Brown in their excellent article in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica say that “the earliest use to which the invention of inscribed or written signs was put was probably to record important religious and political transactions”. Now as a matter of fact, the conscious record of events and transactions selected as important for the knowledge of posterity, or even, what was probably a much earlier matter, for evidence of contract or practical memorandum, represents a rather late stage in the evolution of record. It is likely that there were many record collections before this stage was reached, trophy, votive, etc., object records and economic records of various sorts. In point of fact as King remarks of the earliest Sumerian records, a large quantity of the earliest records are land deeds, and any one who looks over the cuneiform documents will be impressed with the fact that an enormously large proportion of the existing documents of the early historical period are contracts or lists of cattle or, as in the Cretan excavation, labels, or lists of arrows and other materials laid up in storehouses. Among Egyptian documents too, the annals of the Palermo stone, the earliest systematic annals of Egypt, which incorporate earlier documents from its own time (say 2700 B.C.) to six or seven centuries farther back, are to a considerable extent filled with memoranda of census lists of cattle taken and other lists of possessions. It has already been noticed that among the commonest earliest uses of notch, knot and pebble systems was use for the record of cattle or other numerical lists of possessions.