14 ms·
Oldest recorded transaction
- DaveZale 1y agobeer drinking goes waaaay back
- NL807 1y agomalt is used in baking as well
- DaveZale 1y agothey evolved in tandem. Back in the day, old bread would be used as a starter culture for beer. https://www.getty.edu/360/event_images/mesobeer.pdf https://www.getty.edu/360/event_images/mesobeer.pdf
- behringer 1y agoThere 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.
- metalman 1y agoway 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
- ceejayoz 1y agoEven kids drank (weak) beer, in part because the alcohol content kills pathogens. Even today clean water can be tough to find for some folks.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThat'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.
- Podrod 1y agoAnd here's the oldest recorded customer complaint https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir-the-oldest-recorded-customer-complaint https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
- Boogie_Man 1y agoExcellent and straightforward negotiation, reminds me a bit of how mobsters speak in film combined with how God speaks in the old testament.
- MangoToupe 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%... For people who don't want to be assaulted by aggressive ads
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ants_everywhere 1y agodude probably needed to make some swords or something
- alluro2 1y agoThis also sparked a somewhat widespread meme, that I find very amusing: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir
- IAmBroom 1y agoMy favorite was the cosplayer dressed as Ea-nasir. Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/comments/179wi32/eanasir_cosplay_clay_tablet_says_quality_copper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/comments/179wi32...
- pipeline_peak 1y agoMe buying a PlayStation 1 in 1997
- jitl 1y agoYou can store whatever ancient timestamp you want in SQLite, its Just Text or Just an Integer although the date library functions may not support it
- delichon 1y agoThis 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.
- sameermanek 1y agoIt was invented by store managers to counter the karens of that time. /s Oops, im not on reddit, sorry
- maratc 1y ago> 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.
- lazide 1y agoWell, we especially suck at remembering numbers when it’s something like ‘how much I owe Bob’ hah. At least for many people. I expect this writing was a way to help reduce civil unrest/murder by reducing he said/she said arguments about goods, services, money, etc.
- ahmedfromtunis 1y agoThat was not by (deliberate) choice. 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.
- barbazoo 1y ago> Considering this thing survived 5000 years (holy shit!) with zero downtime and has stronger durability guarantees than most databases today. One could argue that it had 5000 years of downtime when no one knew where it was /s
- all2 1y agoNetwork connectivity was an issue, though. If we look at only network uptime, it's quite low. Something like 0.02% uptime over 5000 years.
- throw0101c 1y agoSome more info: > 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://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/327385 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemdet_Nasr_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemdet_Nasr_period
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> 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.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- behnamoh 1y ago> I call it rock solid durability. 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 1y agoWhile survivor bias is relevant, I strongly doubt any modern transaction stored digitally in a DB such as Postgres could last 5k years.
- tonyhart7 1y agobut they can tho??? no one said about transferring such data into another disk
- MangoToupe 1y agoThe IBM 80-hole punch card will only turn 100 in 2028. Who knows what the world will look like in 2128.
- numbsafari 1y agoI bet the clay tablet will be just fine. No word on moldy cards.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoNote that it isn't the norm for clay tablets to survive. We have lots of them, far more than we're willing to provide the manpower to read, but in most cases[1] that's not because they were made to be durable. Whenever a city was conquered, the tablets there were immortalized as the city burned down. But cities that didn't get sacked didn't burn down, and their tablets could be lost. For example, we don't have the clay records from Hammurabi's reign in Babylon, because (a) he was a strong king, and Babylon wasn't conquered on his watch; and (b) he reigned a long time ago, and that period of Babylon sank below the water table, dissolving all the records. [1] Some tablets were intentionally fired for posterity.
- hagbard_c 1y agoInteresting 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.
- pasc1878 1y agoIt is not politics. British Museum manager did steal quite a few things. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68665773 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68665773 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 1y agoAs an aside to this aside on the aside… 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 1y agoI imagine the location of the museum would have been different in the original French, but the same European colonial attitude applies.
- croisillon 1y ago* Belgian
- kragen 1y agoNot a thing.
- keshavmr 1y ago"Six thousand years ago, Sumarians invented writing for transaction processing."... is the first sentence of the "Transaction Processing" book... https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techniques-Management/dp/1558601902 https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...
- giveita 1y agoWow that is the book to read for legacy systems
- kragen 1y agoNo, it is proposing an ambitious rearchitecture of current systems on new principles which it argues were present in an incomplete form in many existing systems. Since it was written, some of its proposals have been implemented to generally good effect, but by no means all. It's a visionary manifesto for the future, though filled with practical information.
- YJfcboaDaJRDw 1y ago[dead]
- tzury 1y agoQuote: 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
- ghurtado 1y ago> Sort by date" in museum registrars software 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.
- Waraqa 1y agoI assume an integer field is sufficient since mostly it's only the year that they know not the exact date.
- brazzy 1y agoNo, you need a lot more complexity if you really wanted to represent it semantically. The assumption that people in the past used calendars with sequentially numbered years you just need to offset, is simply wrong. You have things like "in the Xth year of the reign of King Y", where we can easily relate multiple entries with different values for X, but don't actually know which CE years they correspond to. Even weirder is the Roman habit of recording "the year of the consulship of X and Y", which doesn't even allow you to relate any two different years at all without a reference table (which we don't have completely). And no, "years from the foundong of the city" wasn't a thing.
- kragen 1y agoMostly true, but not absolutely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varronian_chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varronian_chronology > The Varronian chronology was adopted by the Roman state during the first century BC and gave rise to the traditional years ab urbe condita ("from the founding of the city"); most especially, those dates were used in monumental Augustan-era inscriptions, the fasti Capitolini and the fasti Triumphales.[40]
- ccorcos 1y agoI 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. https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/src/lib/AsyncIntervalTree.ts https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/...
- hexpeek 1y agoI 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?
- bloak 1y agoThat 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.
- IceHegel 1y agoThe 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.
- foundart 1y agoWow, so much older than the oldest known complaint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
- m463 1y agoIt might be that tally sticks go back further, maybe "between 44,200 and 43,000"¹ years ago. so about 42175 BC :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolithic_tally_sticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolit...
- jcims 1y agoI'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
- namenotrequired 1y agoIt can be the oldest without being the first, if the earlier ones no longer exists
- IAmBroom 1y agoNo, then it would be the "oldest surviving". Which is a qualifier, which is what the poster above you asked for.
- csomar 1y ago> 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.
- kehvyn 1y agoFortunately the Met's data is public, both via API and a 330MB CSV. https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess https://github.com/metmuseum/openaccess 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.