As an accountant, I was fascinated to learn about the ancient Sumerian public-works payroll tablets, and then that they deciphered Linear A only to find “Ten bolts of cloth, twenty spools of thread.” “Fifty amphorae of wine, twelve of oil,” and stuff like that.
So they basically deciphered a shopping list?
Linear B, but yeah — inventories of offerings and larder.
The desire to collect taxes correctly and fully probably drove more innovation than we want to admit, from writing and math for accounting to social structures and laws to enforce it.
So jokes about death and taxes being inevitable are probably as old as the dead parrot/slave being sold joke.