I've been collecting interesting examples of information organisation in history, focusing on non-Western civilisations. I came across this example of an ancient Mesopotamian spreadsheet! It records wages paid to temple workers in 1295 BCE.

#History #AncientHistory #Cuneiform #Mesopotamia #CognitiveHistory

P.S. If this interested you, maybe you can help me out by pointing me to people researching this topic. I'm especially interested in how different languages/writing systems affect how people make catalogues/taxonomies/indexes.
@michelleful
Indexing by CJK ideographs (eg. in dictionaries) is also rather interesting topic - there is some concept or 'radicals' - minimal building blocks, and the characters are in some way sorted by the used radicals.