… is from page 469 of Deirdre McCloskey’s wonderful 2006 book, The Bourgeois Virtues:
When I initiated a course in business history at the business school at the University of Chicago in 1979, I started it with Mesopotamia, having the kids read business letters from 2000 BC collected at the Oriental Institute, because I wanted them to know that they were embarking on an ancient and honorable profession, not, as the clerisy believe, a dirty modern aberration.