gold glitinian grunde getenge,
wunder on wealle, ond paes wyrmes denn,

(.....a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground,
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den.....)

Beowulf, A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney, 2000, original Old English text - c.7th-10th Century C.E., pp. 186-187.

 “The heap glitters melodiously. It is clearly exotic, a landscape of desire. The fact that the material is with puritanical strictness, in demonic purity junk - in substance, shape and monetarily of absolutely no value - isolates this longing into its form of pure sentiment. But this is no dream world, it is not even the world of daydreams, tho’ that is closer: it is the world of art, a formally artificial arrangement.”

Stephen Brecht, “Jack Smith, 1961-71. The Sheer Beauty of Junk,” Queer Theatre, 1978.

    In their most basic and primeval form, hoards are accumulations of the energy necessary for the survival of life itself. An apple tree hoards the sun’s energy into a piece of fruit with the goal of reproducing life. A squirrel stores away nuts in a tree hollow with the intent of surviving winter.

    By going back to the very beginnings of language and mathematics in his book Fermat’s Last Theorem, Amir Aczel illuminates the earliest moments of written words and numbers, linking them directly to economic issues. General prosperity and survival are tied to the ability to list and account for resources.

    Still extant Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets, starting from the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., indicate their use in cataloging possessions, land management and architectural problem solving. Wealth, however, is more than a listing of possessions; the very nature of production is caught up in the multiplication of the “linear” values contained in lists and transforming them into areas and volumes of value. In particular Aczel states, “A farmer’s prosperity is dependent on the amount of crops he is able to produce. These crops, in turn, depend on the area that is available to the farmer. The area is a product of the length and the width of the field, and this is where squares come in. A field that has length and width equal to a has area equal to a-squared. In this sense, therefore, wealth is a squared quantity.”

    Record-keeping of possessions and mathematics, combined with emerging legal systems that began to define notions of “” allowed for yields to be calculated, rents set, and different sized properties to be bought, sold, exchanged and taxed.

    The first bibliography may have been a cuneiform clay tablet that listed other clay tablets that recorded wealth (“linear” values such as simple possessions plus “areas” of value such as pieces of land) and/or techniques for managing that wealth (lists of Pythagorean triples that helped in measuring the value of one piece of land against another). In the “bibliography/catalogue/list” as a written form, we see glimpses of the ways in which human-created technologies have worked to produce our contemporary economy.