Today we starting a new GAIN Tax signature series called “𝐓𝐚𝐱 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐚𝐱.”

Each week we’ll look at fascinating moments where taxes shaped history, culture, and progress – from ancient empires and salt marches to modern digital systems and AI-driven economies.

This series isn’t about numbers or legislation. It’s about how societies defined fairness, power, and innovation through taxation, and what those lessons mean for today’s world.

Let’s begin where it all started: the first recorded tax in history, in ancient 𝐌𝐞𝐬𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐚, more than 𝟓,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐠𝐨.

Around 3,000 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia, temple priests invented something that would outlast empires, religions, and entire civilizations – the tax system. They demanded roughly 10% of every harvest and meticulously recorded each transaction using the world's earliest writing.

This was systematic. This was permanent. This was the foundation of everything that followed.

The temples wielded divine authority as their justification. Farmers couldn't refuse. Those grain stores represented survival when the Tigris flooded, when invaders attacked, when crops failed. The priests controlled the insurance policy for existence itself.

But the collected barley didn't just feed religious officials. It funded the construction of irrigation canals that tripled crop yields. It paid laborers who built roads connecting villages into trade networks. It fed workers who erected the first true cities in human history.

The Sumerians stumbled onto a brutal truth – public infrastructure requires collective resources. Complex societies need organized funding mechanisms. Nobody volunteers to dig a 50-mile canal alone.

Those clay tablets with their wedge-shaped marks? They're the direct ancestors of every tax form, every government budget, every treasury department in existence. Roman tribute, medieval tithes, modern income tax – all descendants of that first grain levy.

Five millennia later, we still grapple with the same fundamental question those Sumerian farmers faced: what portion of individual production should fund collective benefit?

The first tax transformed scattered agricultural communities into civilization. The price was steep. The return was everything we built since.
What do you think was the most important thing those early taxes actually bought for society?