Beer o’clock, 3000 BC The Trustees of the British Museum

Perhaps it’s no surprise that one of the earliest known examples of writing features two basic human concerns: alcohol and work. About 5000 years ago, the people living in the city of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, wrote in a picture language called cuneiform. On one tablet excavated from the area we can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning “ration”, and a conical vessel, meaning “beer”. Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker. It’s the world’s oldest known payslip, implying that the concept of worker and employer was familiar five millennia ago.

It was not ever thus. Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey was one of the first towns. Houses and human remains dating from its foundation some 9000 years ago are all very similar, suggesting equality. “Everyone was involved in small-scale farming or hunting,” says Ian Hodder, an anthropologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated at Çatalhöyük since 1993. No one owned the land, and produce was shared. The residents of this city are unlikely to have considered their daily chores “work”, says Hodder. “My view is that they would see it as just part of their daily activities, along with cooking, rituals and feasts that were such an important part of their lives.”

Change came a few thousand years later. The trigger seems to have been an agricultural revolution in which new methods of cultivation and animal domestication increased food production and allowed some individuals to build up wealth. The surplus food …