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Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
- cjbenedikt 10y agoAdam & Eve ;-)
- sounds 10y agoIsn't that the point of the article? Can we really read through all the history in that text and discover the original pronunciation?
- vacri 10y agoGod brought the world into being in 4004 BC. This article has a tablet from 5000 BC, so it looks like Kushim is indeed older than Adam'n'Eve :)
- triclops200 10y agoYou misread that a little. It says 3200 BCE (which is about 5000 years ago), not 5000 BCE.
- vacri 10y agoDamn, sorry. I liked that joke :)
- gumby 10y agoEvidence for the world's second oldest profession?
- pixel_fcker 10y agoInter stung article. Do yourself a favour and skip the comments.
- lisper 10y agoTwo things about this article registered on my bogometer: 1. In the image of the hands on the cave wall, some of the images are positive and some are negative. The negatives were plausibly made by the technique described in the article (put hand on wall, blow dust at wall) but the positive images could not possibly have been made that way. 2. The translations of the tablets seem implausibly precise. How could we possibly know that a particular bit of ancient Sumerian (or whatever it is) translates as the Anglicized name "Gal Sal" or "Sukkalgir" or (most implausibly) "En-pap X"? Seems just a tad odd.
- colanderman 10y agoThe "positive" handprints are still surrounded by a halo. So, blow dust on wall, put hand on wall, blow different-colored dust over hand on wall? Either that or dip hand in dust, put hand on wall.
- lisper 10y agoI thought of both of those possibilities, but I don't think they can explain these images. 1. For the dark colored positives I don't see any evidence of the dark color bleeding through the light halo. Also, some of the positives have fingers that are faded, and some are overlaid by negatives. A light halo overlaying a dark base layer can't account for those. 2. The positives are too solid to simply be handprints. If you just make a handprint, it will have gaps in the center of the palm and between the palm and fingers (among other places). But all the images are solid silhouettes.
- fallinghawks 10y ago> some of the images are positive and some are negative It depends on the color of the rock underneath. When white dust is blown on a dark surface one might get the impression of a handprint rather than the outline.
- lisper 10y agoDoesn't seem plausible. Some of the positives are the same dark color as the halo on some of the negatives. The rock looks to me like its all the same tan color underneath. Also, take a look at the hires: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/SantaCru... A the top center you will see a couple of positives that overlap each other. How did that happen?
- schoen 10y agoOther brief discussions about this topic suggesting other candidates: http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question114584.html http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question114584.html http://ask.metafilter.com/103405/Who-was-the-first-person-in-recorded-history http://ask.metafilter.com/103405/Who-was-the-first-person-in... One Metafilter user ("Riemann") makes the interesting point that a huge number of clay tablets that have been excavated remain untranslated, so it's quite possible that new candidates would turn up over time as scholars examine those artifacts. In support of this, Wikipedia says (internal references removed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script > Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 – 100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (c. 130,000), followed by the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (c.40,000) and Penn Museum. Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published," as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. Edit: if you become a cuneiformist, maybe you can discover the new earliest known named person! I'm reminded of the exciting time that Amir Aczel had in locating the first-known written numeral zero in history. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-aczel/worlds-first-zero_b_3276709.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-aczel/worlds-first-zero_b... (He has published a whole book on this if you want to hear a longer and more dramatic version of the story.)
- selimthegrim 10y agoAczel is no longer with us, I believe.
- brador 10y agoWhy can't we scan and use OCR with machine learning to automatically translate those clay tablets?
- rangibaby 10y agoThe same reason that doesn't work for (insert language here). Especially considering that there will be wildly varying scripts and styles of writing.
- thefastlane 10y agoif you're interested in early human history such as this, check out Gobekli Tepe (search youtube), the site of some very early temples. very fascinating.
- erdevs 10y agoThe first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male name. But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters. Nor is it at all likely that many of the hostile commenters on this author's article have the right idea that women in ancient history were equal contributors to society's evolution. They probably were not. Not because of any intrinsic inferiority of women, but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.
- contingencies 10y agoThe first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting. Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities. This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing. However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.
- 467568985476 10y agoWhat evidence is there of matriarchy, and how is that defined? I think you're right that today a popular theory among anthropologists is that agriculture led to many inequalities, but like all things ancient, there just isn't much data for anthropologists to draw conclusions from.
- contingencies 10y ago
- mzw_mzw 10y agoMan, those comments are poison. Amazing how many people flooded in to that article just to act righteously offended and signal how virtuous they are.
- visakanv 10y agoI too am here to signal my virtue!
- Snargorf 10y agoYeah, it was disappointing to read the cringe-y kowtowing apology edited onto the end of the article. This stuff is just everywhere nowadays.
- madaxe_again 10y agopeople It's anti-non-personists like you who are ruining the universe. I love how you assume all of those comments are by people, and not by capybara. Can you prove it wasn't capybara? Didn't think so. Huguenot!
- NoGravitas 10y agoYet here you are, signaling your virtue to a different community. This is a thing that humans do. There's no need to get bent out of shape about it.
- antoineMoPa 10y agoFor those trying to understand the numbers on the tablet, this could help: http://www.storyofmathematics.com/sumerian.html http://www.storyofmathematics.com/sumerian.html. However, I did not find success while trying to read that.
- InclinedPlane 10y agoThis is a way better set of answers to that question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tqfef/what_is_the_oldest_recorded_human_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tqfef/what_...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- raldi 10y agoI know that Sumerian numbers were written in a combination of bases 6 and 10 (symbols represented, e.g., 360, 600, etc), but how do they get 29,086 out of those symbols?
- bhaak 10y agoLooking at the example image on Wikipedia's page, I still have a hard time recognizing the numbers, even though they are marked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Examples People have always been using short hand and sloppy hand writing, I don't find it surprising that you can't recognize the numbers without some practise.
- raldi 10y agoRecognizing the "digits" isn't the problem; that's already been solved and published: http://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/sapiensbriefhistory.files/image023.jpg http://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/sapiensbriefhis... I can even find references to what many of the units represent: http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/su_numbers.gif http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/su_numbers.gif For example, the six big circles in the middle seem to represent 6 x 3600. But I can't figure out what to do next.
- mcguire 10y agoNice links! Probably because it's not as simple as it looks. According to a handy copy of A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC, by Marc Van de Mieroop, "The Uruk IV notations seem complicated to us because seven different systems were used, each of which varied the physical shape of the numeral according to what was measured. For example, a sexagesimal system, relying on units with increments of ten and six, was used to account for animals, humans, and dried fish, among other things. A bisexagesimal system, which diverges from the previous one as its units also show increments of two, was used for processed grain products, cheese, and fresh fish. Volumes of grain or surfaces of fields were measured differently. [...] Although the shape of the number signs could differ between systems, the same shapes are found in various systems but sometimes with different values." Wikipedia, citing Archaic Bookkeeping Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East by Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund (gonna have to get a copy of that one), claims more than a dozen different numeric systems. So, yay, proto-cuneiform.
- c3534l 10y agoTraditionally history is said to start where we have written records, the time before the being relegated to anthropology and archeology. But they say that the scope of economic history is larger because we have accounting records before we have written records. Before we had any clay tablets telling legends and recording the events of kings, we have the exchange rate between fish and barley, records of indebtedness, estimates for how many customers a shop might get in a day. Writing in the near-east was essentially developed as a more sophisticated accounting tool. So before I even clicked on the link, I was placing all my bets on a shopkeep. However, as a nitpick accounting as an individual profession really didn't develop until the industrial revolution when large corporations requiring high investment costs to leverage economies of scale led to changes in corporations and bankruptcy proceedings, establishing accounting as a specialty and profession in it's own right, rather than a skill that a business person was expected to learn. So Kushim wasn't an accountant, that's a very modern idea of a job. Kushim was a businessman who kept books to keep track of trade.
- huuu 10y ago"that's a very modern idea of a job" I don't agree. A vizier [1] is very related to an accountant. For example: Joseph (book of Genesis) became a vizier and had to account for the supplies in storehouses. Maybe he didn't do the accounting himself, but I'm sure they had a way to write down what was in stock and what not. They also traded with surrounding countries that were out of stock, so I'm sure this was bigger than the work of a small businessman. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizier_(Ancient_Egypt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizier_(Ancient_Egypt)
- c3534l 10y ago"The vizier's paramount duty was to supervise the running of the country, such as a prime minister, at times even small details of it such as sampling the city's water supply." That doesn't sound like much of an accountant to me. It would be even more strange that Kushim could be called an accountant at a time where double-entry bookkeeping hadn't been invented. There were always people who kept records, sure. But a person who went to school to learn specifically about keeping and organizing financial records and, in all likelihood, is licensed by the state to ensure that all records are kept in a consistent manner - that's what's modern. It took a very long time for accounting to be a job instead of a task you did in certain jobs. There were even auditors who worked for the government and were basically tax-collectors. But they would actually go to a business and have the owners read aloud their financial records to ensure that they were being kept and they made sense ("audit" basically means to hear).
- lagirl1994 10y agoHmm... If we speak about Holy Bible too, the first one is Noah, I suppose
- martinko 10y ago"Note from Robert Krulwich: I see that this column has offended a whole bunch of you. Yes, as many of you point out, my viewpoint was white, male (and hung up on fame and power) and many of you have serious, and totally legitimate arguments with my assumptions. Now that I read your comments, I’m a little surprised, and a touch ashamed of myself. But the thing is—those were my assumptions. They were wrong. I say so." It is so sad that so may discussions end up in places like this. Absolute bullshit.
- twblalock 10y agoHe said something stupid, people didn't like it, and he apologized for it. Where is the bullshit in this situation? There are legitimate historical reasons for assuming the first person who appears in records is a man, but the reason he gave was just dumb: "I’m figuring a he, because writing was a new thing, and males are usually the early adopters."
- mgalka 10y ago1. Didn't know Krulwich maintained a blog. It's awesome. 2. I respect that he took the time to write a thoughtful response. But reading the comments, it just looks like your standard troll BS that you see everywhere. Had very little merit. 3. Agree, it's sad that so many people seem to take pleasure in criticizing when they are anonymous.
- minikites 10y agoWhy is it bullshit to consider the feelings and dignity of people who are different from you?
- minikites 10y agoWhy did this comment inspire this quantity of downvoting?
- SeanDav 10y agoI am surprised that Lucy is not mentioned, or her affectionate nickname AL 288-1. Her time of 3.2 million years ago dwarfs the 3200 B.C. mentioned in the article! (disclaimer: TIC - Tongue-in-cheek)
- buddapalm 10y agoI really enjoyed the intellectual curiosity of the article and it's author.
- twic 10y agoThe article somehow neglects to mention why Kushim wanted all this barley - it was because they were a brewer: http://www.schoyencollection.com/24-smaller-collections/wine-beer/ms-1717-beer-inanna-uruk http://www.schoyencollection.com/24-smaller-collections/wine...