The Worst Businessman of the 18th Century BC (2018)
forbes.com
forbes.com
(Source: the ancient near eastern librarian at Penn State, Chuck Jones, who happens to be my brother.)
It's great that Dr. Killgrove and her team were able to find an actual story to tell from that trove. And an interesting story, too.
More like dropping a stack of compiled cards for early computers.
The reeds were more expressive for individual marks, but the major concepts are highly similar.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XL0f3Kq1He4
(Am now contemplating a Lentil Tabulating Company creating automated readers for an early Babylonian census, and resulting in an early Intertribal Babylonian Machines information monopoly.)
I bet copying and writing such tablets was a business back then.
The equivalent of today's front-end engineers.
Same thing happened in China and Mesoamerica. The degree to which people were aware of the change in the characters is debatable, but there was certainly some awareness among the scribes and elites in later centuries (e.g. the Talmud records a debate about the Hebrew writing system). I suspect that at least the elites of Mesopotamia knew that the system had changed because they had access to much older tablets than what they themselves were producing. At a minimum they knew that the language had changed, since they were literate in both ancient Sumerian and whatever the common language of their city was (Akkadian, Elamite, etc.), and they likely recognized regional variations in the characters on tablets they received from other cities.
And, yes, the actual language being written changed as armies swept through, except for religious matters which had to be conducted in (what would have been imagined to match) the original language and pronunciation. Can't expect the gods to learn a new language, or expect incantations to work when pronounced "wrong"!
Apparently the Hindu priesthood, from Vedic times, had a terrifyingly rigorous system for maintaining exact wording and pronunciation for their rites, for that reason; and preserved mathematical lore used for astronomical calculations the same way, before they got to writing it all down many centuries later.
Many Chinese people imagine they can read documents from two millennia ago, but rely on the inherent ambiguity of their script to construct an apparent "poetic" meaning entirely disjoint from what was written.
Huh. Wonder why...
It's comforting to see even angry people from eras ago working just as hard at complaining as they do nowadays.
I'm alway hugely sceptical of claims that technology creates human behviour. Human nature seems to be remarkably consistent in many ways, technology just seems to provide outlets for it. People complain about performative desplays on Facebook/Insta/Twitter, but it's no different from people in the 70s inviting their friends round to show them a slide-show of their holiday photos. Instagram didn't create narcessism, it just made it much more visible.