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
That's an old theory, but the whole "water was unsafe to drink" thing has been debunked pretty well.
The bigger reason is that beer provided an excellent way to consume a lot of calories fast, in a moderately shelf-stable (~3 days) format. You could carry your meal in a water container, which you needed to take anyway.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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'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
> 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.
35 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadThe bigger reason is that beer provided an excellent way to consume a lot of calories fast, in a moderately shelf-stable (~3 days) format. You could carry your meal in a water container, which you needed to take anyway.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
For people who don't want to be assaulted by aggressive ads
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir
Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/comments/179wi32...
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.
Oops, im not on reddit, sorry
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.
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.
One could argue that it had 5000 years of downtime when no one knew where it was /s
> 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
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.
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.
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
https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
so about 42175 BC
:)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolit...
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
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.