This isn't just the oldest recorded transaction, it's nearly the oldest known recognizable sample of human writing. Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance. There is one known older writing sample, the Kish Tablet of Jemet Nasr. Since that tablet represents lists and counts of goods (barley, oil, livestock), it may also be a receipt, or perhaps an inventory.
The oldest known non-commercial writing is a set of proverbs from around 2600 BCE, Instructions of Shuruppak.
With my luck my most cringe-worthy diary entries will probably last that long.
One of the theories of how writing was invented was via transactions and accounting.
You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.
> Not a love letter or a sermon or a story, but a receipt. This probably reflects their ubiquity rather than importance.
We humans are pretty good at remembering sermons and stories and we can recreate them from memory and pass them down to the next generations. We however suck at remembering numbers, that's why we invented writing so we could write the numbers down and rely on these records, instead of on bad human memory.
The earliest writings were actually logographic or semasiographic, meaning they represented ideas, objects, or concepts directly rather than the sounds of a specific spoken language.
We actually don't know what language(s) was/were spoken by the people who recorded the earliest tablets (not sure if that also applies to this particular one, though).
Phonographic writing developed much later and with it came all the forms of textual recordings we're familiar with.
I wonder how people store dates older than this.
Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details.
How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text?
The answer: Text.
Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X.
I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering.
I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
I think the world could use an “imprecise” data type, which would be a tuple (t, margin).
In your case: if you wanted a date plus minus 50yrs, that would be (date(d), range(years, 50)).
Some construction like this allows for I believe most use cases. You just need to be able to store: date, date time, date range, and the precise/imprecise versions of all of these.
That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601?
Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.
I'm 52 years old and it has been this way since I can remember but for some reason I can't make it not bug me. Any time we have the biggest/oldest/smallest/fastest/etc example of something, it's described without any qualification of seen, known, observed, etc.
For example, this isn't oldest recorded transaction, it's the oldest widely known record of a transaction (probably).
Why does that still bother me? Obviously nobody is saying it's the oldest recorded transaction, right? That would make it the first recorded transaction, and nobody is calling it that.
And here I am likely triggering your own pet peeve of useless comments on HN. xD
> This tablet with early writing most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple. Scholars have distinguished two phases in the development of writing in southern Mesopotamia. The earliest tablets, probably dating to around 3300 B.C., record economic information using pictographs and numerals drawn in the clay. A later phase, as represented by this tablet, reflects changes in the techniques of writing that altered the shapes of signs. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements. Such a system could be read in any language, but it is generally accepted that the underlying language is Sumerian. Indeed, by the first half of the third millennium B.C., the script had sufficiently developed to faithfully represent the Sumerian language, and the scope and application of writing was expanded to include written poetry. Nonetheless, even these later scribes rarely included grammatical elements, and the texts, created as memory aids, cannot be easily read today.
> A later phase, as represented by this tablet, reflects changes in the techniques of writing that altered the shapes of signs. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements.
From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:
> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep. Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
> I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? Use some custom system? How do I get it to support all the custom operations that a typical TIMESTAMP supports?
Think about how the museum physical text book store it, as simple text with processing offloaded to the reader (ie: circa 4000BC, Before 2000BC, After ...)
I wonder, if for some problems, we'll move to LLM computation instead of a developer coded solution.
Your variables will be
let date_1 = "2000 BC"
let date_2 = "3000 B.C."
and when you execute
if date_1 > date_2 { .. do something .. }
The ">" operator is overloaded to run this operation through an LLM and return True/False.
Essentially they have an "Object Date" field that's a human-readable string and could be anything, and then they include "Object Start Date" and "Object End Date" that are integer years so that it's machine readable and you can do those comparisons.
I think these numerical constraints are because range trees use numerical averages to construct themselves. This is important for OVERLAPS queries common with dates. But you could construct interval tree indexes lexicographically using text but they are quite uncommon. It’s something I’ve experimented with a decent amount though.
The idea that artifacts belong forever to whoever inhabits the land today is going to put under increasing pressure as ancient DNA continues to reveal the number and severity of population replacements over time.
I expected there would be constraints, but the chosen range is quite intriguing. The PostgreSQL spec says the 4-byte date type spans 4713 BC to 5,874,897 AD. It gives much more headroom for future dates—did they assume preserving data before 4713 BC is unlikely?
That range of dates seems to correspond to (1UL << 31) days so I suspect they're using only 31 bits so I wonder why they didn't make it signed and extend it to 5,884,322 BC.
There are many who think society itself was formed in order to make alcohol. Without alcohol there would be little reason to grow so much grain and thus little reason to have so many people in one place.
way before when the tablet was made, as residues on pottery 5 thousand years older, 8-9-10 k yrs bp
show that grains were soaked and lightly fermented, to increase nutritional content, palatability/texture, with this practice bieng practiced all the way through the stone ages.
some have suggested that fermentation was the primary impetus for building the first semi permanent dwellings....beer first, somewhere to hang out was a bonus
Interesting write-up marred by the injection of politics: Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep -theft- inventory details
Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
This is not an academic piece but a blog which is trying to be light hearted.. The first sentence says
"The other day I posted a tweet with this image which I thought was funny:'
So not being 100% serious is to be expected.
I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.
But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.
delichon|5 months ago
The oldest known non-commercial writing is a set of proverbs from around 2600 BCE, Instructions of Shuruppak.
With my luck my most cringe-worthy diary entries will probably last that long.
ants_everywhere|5 months ago
You start keeping items in clay jars. You eventually mark the jars with a depiction of what's in it. Those marks begin standing in for the items themselves when communicating across languages or keeping records of how many items and jars you have.
maratc|5 months ago
We humans are pretty good at remembering sermons and stories and we can recreate them from memory and pass them down to the next generations. We however suck at remembering numbers, that's why we invented writing so we could write the numbers down and rely on these records, instead of on bad human memory.
ahmedfromtunis|5 months ago
The earliest writings were actually logographic or semasiographic, meaning they represented ideas, objects, or concepts directly rather than the sounds of a specific spoken language.
We actually don't know what language(s) was/were spoken by the people who recorded the earliest tablets (not sure if that also applies to this particular one, though).
Phonographic writing developed much later and with it came all the forms of textual recordings we're familiar with.
sameermanek|5 months ago
Oops, im not on reddit, sorry
tzury|5 months ago
Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
ghurtado|5 months ago
This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering.
I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
scrollaway|5 months ago
In your case: if you wanted a date plus minus 50yrs, that would be (date(d), range(years, 50)).
Some construction like this allows for I believe most use cases. You just need to be able to store: date, date time, date range, and the precise/imprecise versions of all of these.
divbzero|5 months ago
That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601?
Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.
jcims|5 months ago
For example, this isn't oldest recorded transaction, it's the oldest widely known record of a transaction (probably).
Why does that still bother me? Obviously nobody is saying it's the oldest recorded transaction, right? That would make it the first recorded transaction, and nobody is calling it that.
And here I am likely triggering your own pet peeve of useless comments on HN. xD
namenotrequired|5 months ago
throw0101c|5 months ago
> This tablet with early writing most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple. Scholars have distinguished two phases in the development of writing in southern Mesopotamia. The earliest tablets, probably dating to around 3300 B.C., record economic information using pictographs and numerals drawn in the clay. A later phase, as represented by this tablet, reflects changes in the techniques of writing that altered the shapes of signs. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements. Such a system could be read in any language, but it is generally accepted that the underlying language is Sumerian. Indeed, by the first half of the third millennium B.C., the script had sufficiently developed to faithfully represent the Sumerian language, and the scope and application of writing was expanded to include written poetry. Nonetheless, even these later scribes rarely included grammatical elements, and the texts, created as memory aids, cannot be easily read today.
* https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/327385
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemdet_Nasr_period
thaumasiotes|5 months ago
From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:
> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep. Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
keshavmr|5 months ago
giveita|5 months ago
Podrod|5 months ago
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
MangoToupe|5 months ago
For people who don't want to be assaulted by aggressive ads
alluro2|5 months ago
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir
Boogie_Man|5 months ago
ants_everywhere|5 months ago
behnamoh|5 months ago
Literally! But this is survivor bias: you only see a piece that remained intact for 5k years, and I bet 99% of them were eroded/destroyed over time.
rthnbgrredf|5 months ago
csomar|5 months ago
Think about how the museum physical text book store it, as simple text with processing offloaded to the reader (ie: circa 4000BC, Before 2000BC, After ...)
I wonder, if for some problems, we'll move to LLM computation instead of a developer coded solution.
Your variables will be
and when you execute The ">" operator is overloaded to run this operation through an LLM and return True/False.kehvyn|5 months ago
Essentially they have an "Object Date" field that's a human-readable string and could be anything, and then they include "Object Start Date" and "Object End Date" that are integer years so that it's machine readable and you can do those comparisons.
m463|5 months ago
so about 42175 BC
:)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolit...
ccorcos|5 months ago
https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/...
IceHegel|5 months ago
hexpeek|5 months ago
bloak|5 months ago
foundart|5 months ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
jitl|5 months ago
DaveZale|5 months ago
behringer|5 months ago
ceejayoz|5 months ago
metalman|5 months ago
NL807|5 months ago
pipeline_peak|5 months ago
curtisszmania|5 months ago
[deleted]
barbazoo|5 months ago
One could argue that it had 5000 years of downtime when no one knew where it was /s
all2|5 months ago
YJfcboaDaJRDw|5 months ago
[deleted]
hagbard_c|5 months ago
Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
pasc1878|5 months ago
This is not an academic piece but a blog which is trying to be light hearted.. The first sentence says "The other day I posted a tweet with this image which I thought was funny:' So not being 100% serious is to be expected.
aaronharnly|5 months ago
I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.
But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.
antonvs|5 months ago
novemp|5 months ago