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The oldest surviving piece of writing is a cuneiform tablet that was inscribed with a contract for, iirc, bushels of wheat. Would be historically congruent if

by spaceman_2020 3y ago

The oldest surviving piece of writing is a cuneiform tablet that was inscribed with a contract for, iirc, bushels of wheat. Would be historically congruent if we leave behind equally trivial artefacts.

bombcar 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_tablet is apparently the oldest, and not deciphered. It's probably a complaint about the quality of the wheat.
retrac 3y ago
We probably would. Thinking about writing on paper in the late 20th century, in terms of sheer quantity, it's mostly ordinary paperwork, package labelling, receipts. A random piece of paper from the ordinary home is probably more likely to be a shopping list than a work of literature. Circa 1650 BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a fairly large city for the times, Sippar. Probably Sumerian originally, then Babylonian culturally. Pesky barbarians on horseback came and razed parts of the city. It was not abandoned entirely and remained important until the fall of Babylon another millennia later. But the archaeological situation was ideal; many homes had been abandoned quickly and never re-occupied. The majority of abandoned houses from that event, have at least some paperwork in the form of property deeds and sales receipts. Some houses were absolutely stuffed with archives of paperwork (claywork?), large rooms full of boxes, particularly in the homes of merchants and traders and the like. The biggest find, of a prominent man, an important religious functionary, and also expedition trader, was some 2500 tablets in his house. It provides one of the few cases where we can point to a room, and know the name of a person who lived or worked in that room in ancient times. Though it still maybe doesn't tell us very much about him: > Perhaps paradoxically, although Ur-Utu’s rich and well-documented archive provides unique insights in social and economic life during the second half of the Old Babylonian period, it does not provide us with much direct information about Ur-Utu as a person. The archive contains contracts and administrative texts documenting his economic activities and those of his family, but this does not tell us much about him. The more than 200 letters in the same archive look more promising at first sight, but these were almost all sent to him by other people, and there are only a few copies of letters he sent; as they mostly concern economic matters, or allude to situations we do not otherwise know about, the letters are also of little help to us. > [...] A small group of sixty-three tablets from this special box were brought by Inana- mansum from Sippar-Yahrurum, from his father’s archive, to Sippar-Amnanum, to his first house. Quite surprisingly, these documents never mention Inana-mansum’s name, they do not relate to any property he inherited, and most of them—if not all—were many years out of date. What then could have prompted him to take precisely these documents? The oldest document in the box is a tablet dated to Hammurabi 3 (1790) concerning silver to be returned to two members of the family, four generations before Inana-mansum (Di 1911). It is the oldest tablet of the archive mentioning members of the family. This tablet must have entered the archive at the time it was written. For the last of the archive’s owners, Ur-Utu, this tablet went back five generations. Each generation had carefully kept and transmitted this document which in the meantime had become economically useless. When the archive was brutally terminated by fire in Aṣ 18 it still contained this tablet, which by then had reached the venerable age of 161. Congruence indeed. I also have such a box. (Excerpts from "Learned, Rich, and Unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar", Chapter 13 The Oxford handbook of cuneiform culture, 2011)

bombcar 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_tablet is apparently the oldest, and not deciphered. It's probably a complaint about the quality of the wheat.

retrac 3y ago

We probably would. Thinking about writing on paper in the late 20th century, in terms of sheer quantity, it's mostly ordinary paperwork, package labelling, receipts. A random piece of paper from the ordinary home is probably more likely to be a shopping list than a work of literature. Circa 1650 BC, in Mesopotamia, there was a fairly large city for the times, Sippar. Probably Sumerian originally, then Babylonian culturally. Pesky barbarians on horseback came and razed parts of the city. It was not abandoned entirely and remained important until the fall of Babylon another millennia later. But the archaeological situation was ideal; many homes had been abandoned quickly and never re-occupied. The majority of abandoned houses from that event, have at least some paperwork in the form of property deeds and sales receipts. Some houses were absolutely stuffed with archives of paperwork (claywork?), large rooms full of boxes, particularly in the homes of merchants and traders and the like. The biggest find, of a prominent man, an important religious functionary, and also expedition trader, was some 2500 tablets in his house. It provides one of the few cases where we can point to a room, and know the name of a person who lived or worked in that room in ancient times. Though it still maybe doesn't tell us very much about him: > Perhaps paradoxically, although Ur-Utu’s rich and well-documented archive provides unique insights in social and economic life during the second half of the Old Babylonian period, it does not provide us with much direct information about Ur-Utu as a person. The archive contains contracts and administrative texts documenting his economic activities and those of his family, but this does not tell us much about him. The more than 200 letters in the same archive look more promising at first sight, but these were almost all sent to him by other people, and there are only a few copies of letters he sent; as they mostly concern economic matters, or allude to situations we do not otherwise know about, the letters are also of little help to us. > [...] A small group of sixty-three tablets from this special box were brought by Inana- mansum from Sippar-Yahrurum, from his father’s archive, to Sippar-Amnanum, to his first house. Quite surprisingly, these documents never mention Inana-mansum’s name, they do not relate to any property he inherited, and most of them—if not all—were many years out of date. What then could have prompted him to take precisely these documents? The oldest document in the box is a tablet dated to Hammurabi 3 (1790) concerning silver to be returned to two members of the family, four generations before Inana-mansum (Di 1911). It is the oldest tablet of the archive mentioning members of the family. This tablet must have entered the archive at the time it was written. For the last of the archive’s owners, Ur-Utu, this tablet went back five generations. Each generation had carefully kept and transmitted this document which in the meantime had become economically useless. When the archive was brutally terminated by fire in Aṣ 18 it still contained this tablet, which by then had reached the venerable age of 161. Congruence indeed. I also have such a box. (Excerpts from "Learned, Rich, and Unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar", Chapter 13 The Oxford handbook of cuneiform culture, 2011)