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It’s true, some of this is frivolous. It’s valuable though, since we think in narratives and achieving milestones helps us feel progress. It's like how Floyd Ma
by dalbasal 9y ago
It’s true, some of this is frivolous. It’s valuable though, since we think in narratives and achieving milestones helps us feel progress. It's like how Floyd Mayweather just achieved a contrived goal of "undefeated in 50 matches," or the long list of Roger Federer's achievements, all made up "firsts" or "mosts."
There’s a non-frivolous side too, I think. Firsts (and other data points) help to timeline the use of written language and its development. The Akkadian/Sumerian finds are really good for this, because of the quantity of finds and the ease of translation (Akkadian anyway). King List, Laws and other political/governance texts. Epic/mythological tablets and other “religious” tablets. Historical tablets. Some clay tablets are reproduced in the bible, and still form core parts of culture. A tremendous amount of accounting tablets appear in very early periods suggesting that clay was originally a finch startup idea.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoAnother thing we can glean from these records is how expensive/labor-intensive it was to produce them. If we find that in a certain time period, people were only writing about business and government as opposed to personal correspondence or frivolous things, then we can assume that the medium might have been costly at the time, and/or that people did less-official communication through media that were less durable, like paper or the brain of a messenger.