4 ms·

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, bu

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.

sameermanek 1y ago
It 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
That 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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    > Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't know how to express, but not for lack of language. Rather, some ideas are too complex for our simple speech. Just as a dog would be unable to bark the idea "energy is neither created nor destroyed".
    - smj-edison 1y ago
      Bit of a tangent, but have you followed dynamic land at all? Their whole thing is expressing ideas through a dynamic medium, to convey things we can't explain through speech. You might find it interesting :) https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
      - dotancohen 1y ago
        Never heard of it, thank you!
    - deaddodo 1y ago
      Do you have an example? I can’t possibly think of a single idea that’s completely expressionless. Even drug-fueled hallucinations can eventually be given a description; albeit without being able to actually transfer the feeling/internalization of it. You might have to be overly verbose and explicit in your language, but ultimately you can describe pretty much anything using “like”, “as”, and “akin to” with qualifiers.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
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.
- jeanlucas 1y ago
  Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive. What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional. Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    That's true we don't know anything about markings that were made on organic materials. We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect. But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.
    - jeanlucas 1y ago
      Exactly, it's not a good theory, but it's the best one we have. We just need to keep in mind that and not word it as if it is a fact that writing stated with accounting
- tycho-newman 1y ago
  Writing probably arose from reading animal tracks in soft mud.

sameermanek 1y ago

It 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 ago
Well, 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 ago

That 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.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  > Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't know how to express, but not for lack of language. Rather, some ideas are too complex for our simple speech. Just as a dog would be unable to bark the idea "energy is neither created nor destroyed".
  - smj-edison 1y ago
    Bit of a tangent, but have you followed dynamic land at all? Their whole thing is expressing ideas through a dynamic medium, to convey things we can't explain through speech. You might find it interesting :) https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Never heard of it, thank you!
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    Do you have an example? I can’t possibly think of a single idea that’s completely expressionless. Even drug-fueled hallucinations can eventually be given a description; albeit without being able to actually transfer the feeling/internalization of it. You might have to be overly verbose and explicit in your language, but ultimately you can describe pretty much anything using “like”, “as”, and “akin to” with qualifiers.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

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.

jeanlucas 1y ago
Impossible to truly know. Writing may well have started with doodles, notes, even jokes on materials like leaves or wood that didn’t survive. What survives are the "important" texts because you would deliberately put them on durable material. That creates a bias where early writing looks purely transactional. Same reason we think of pyramids when we think of ancient architecture: stone lasts, wood doesn’t.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  That's true we don't know anything about markings that were made on organic materials. We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect. But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.
  - jeanlucas 1y ago
    Exactly, it's not a good theory, but it's the best one we have. We just need to keep in mind that and not word it as if it is a fact that writing stated with accounting
tycho-newman 1y ago
Writing probably arose from reading animal tracks in soft mud.