Oldest recorded transaction
avi.im
avi.im
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.
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.
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.
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.
We just need to keep in mind that and not word it as if it is a fact that writing stated with accounting
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.
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.
But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system.
For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.
The earliest evidence for this in cuneiform is from around 3200-3000 BCE. There is a famous tablet where the symbol for "reed" is used to represent the word "reimburse", because they're both pronounced like gi. By a few hundred years later, cuneiform was a fully fledged phonetic writing system.
Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no alterations to represent its own pronunciation, which was shared with the verb.
It's a mixed system with about 2 millennia of legacy. It started as logographic, then it got into phono-semantic compounds, with detours into the written-only official language (like Latin), and now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs (休，林，森), true phonosemantic compounds, and plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").
Don't confuse the origin of the system with what the system is now.
Using your example, what do you see as the difference between the "logographs" 森 and 林?
Neither can be a logograph, because neither one represents a word. But even if that weren't the case, on the assumption that they are simply pictures representing concepts, how would you know which one was which?
What does it mean, to you, that the word "forest" must be written 森林 and not 森?
> and [there are] plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").
...yes. 森 and 林 both belong to that category. But you've specifically contrasted them with it. I can't tell what you're thinking of.
Characters can be classified by origin, so that 森 is "从林从木", 切 is "从刀七声", and 下 is "指事". You seem to be reaching for this, but "bound morpheme" is a classification of the current use of the linguistic element, not of the origin of the way it's spelled.
When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically. They used the whole word when that worked, but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word, as well as the pronunciation from the pieces of other words where that character appeared, as well as the Chinese pronunciations. Then six hundred years or so later they imported them again, by which point the characters had evolved in Chinese but not in Japanese. So its sort of phonetic, but it's a complete mess.
Not 20%, more like 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
In Japanese at this point most kanji have an onyomi (the sound of the Chinese word, which has been adopted into Chinese the way Latin words like "adopt" are adopted into English) and at least one kunyomi (the sound of a synonymous Japanese word not derived from Chinese). This does add difficulty but it is somewhat compensated for by the smaller repertoire of characters used in Japanese. A lot of the most common Japanese words, all loanwords from languages like English, and all the inflectional suffixes are normally written with one of two purely phonetic syllabaries.
>> When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically.
Japanese kanji are much less phonetic than Chinese hanzi. For hanzi, you can ask "how is this character read?", and it's a simple question with a simple answer, because that question is the basis of the writing system. Kanji are assigned all kinds of different readings on the theory that what really counts is the semantics.
For example...
>> They used the whole word when that worked
Not even in the oldest Chinese writings do you see one character representing a multisyllabic word. Identifying characters with words rather than syllables is an innovation on the part of the Japanese.
Tangentially, you mentioned that the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds. I've been watching some youtube videos in which Japanese people are presented with kanji of varying levels of obscurity and asked to speculate on their pronunciation. Without fail, when they don't know the answer, the interviewees speculate that the two major components of the character both contribute to its meaning.
And that always surprises me because a two-meaningful-components construction is so rare in the character system. Almost all characters aren't constructed from two meaningful elements, and I would have thought the Japanese would be familiar with that fact even though they can't understand the phonetic hints. Do you think this is more of a case of them not knowing how characters are formed ("ignorance"), or more of a case of them speculating on the meaning of each component purely because they don't have the ability to speculate about the phonetics ("searching under the lamppost")?
[Particularly where the obscure kanji are part of an obscure phrase borrowed from Chinese, speculating about the phonetics would be helpful to the problem, but I'm assuming most Japanese just plain don't know what kinds of sounds a Chinese phonetic component might be hinting at.]
I agree with your "searching under the lamppost" theory. If I'm Japanese and I see an obscure kanji, its phonetic (component) only gives me information about its onyomi, which is almost certainly some wildly obscure loanword from late medieval Chinese that isn't even in my recognition vocabulary, much less my productive vocabulary.
It might also be true that I don't know offhand the onyomi of other characters with the same phonetic—in real life I'm a native English speaker, a second-language speaker of two or three Romance languages, and the kind of person who likes to go around thinking about obscure etymological trivia, but I was today days old when it first occurred to me that "suspicious" was probably etymologically "overseeish", cognate with "perspicuous", "spectrum", "speculum", etc. (I was right about "spicious" but wrong about "sus": it's actually "uplookish".)
So it would be totally unsurprising for even a highly literate native Japanese speaker to know the onyomi of numerous characters sharing the same phonetic, but not have that shared sound come to mind when looking at a novel character with the same phonetic, even if they can guess which part is the phonetic and that the obscure word is in fact Chinese in origin. And the YouTube video is likely edited to focus on the people who got things most entertainingly wrong.
> If I'm Japanese and I see an obscure kanji, its phonetic (component) only gives me information about its onyomi, which is almost certainly some wildly obscure loanword from late medieval Chinese that isn't even in my recognition vocabulary
I was highly amused when one of the "obscure" kanji presented was 論. It doesn't get much less obscure than that.
On the other hand, none of the interviewees recognized it. All of them got 檸檬. (Another one I wouldn't have expected to be obscure, but in that case I would have been right.)
It's possible that there's some selection for interviewees who provide entertaining responses, but the effect seems weak to me for two reasons:
(1) Of the people featured in a video, you see all of them respond to every prompt. So selection has to be limited to "which people are going to appear", and even then if an entertaining person is boring on some prompts you'll still see that.
(2) Getting things wrong almost always consists of making one or two wrong guesses and saying "I don't know". It's much more entertaining when people get them right, unless they turn out to be obvious and everyone gets them right.
> (I was right about "spicious" but wrong about "sus": it's actually "uplookish".)
You'd need super, not sub, for "up" or "over". Traditionally it's "over"; I'm not sure if there's another Latin prefix that gets used for "up". There is one for "down", de (as in "depend", "descend", or even "defenestrate"), but nothing comes to mind for "up". The opposite of "descend" is "ascend", where the prefix just means "toward".
There are kanji less obscure than 論. There are some that are so common that even I know them. It is in the 6th grade jōyō kanji, but I doubt it's in the top 1000 most common characters in Japanese, maybe not even the top 2000. You could probably guess that 侖 is the phonetic, and 論 is a Chinese loanword so that might help, but by itself that's an even less common character, so you probably won't know it if you don't know 論. 侖 occurs as a phonetic in 倫 and 輪, but that's no help, because there it's "rin" instead of "ron". Did anyone guess "rin"?
"Sus" actually is "sub"! As in "look up to". From below, I guess, like the South Wind. Just as an overseer or supervisor sees from above rather than seeing something above him.
The Japanese word for the fruit is also borrowed from English, resulting in the much closer レモン remon. But the spelling is borrowed from Chinese (when kanji are used at all), despite the pronunciation coming from elsewhere.
> There are kanji less obscure than 論. There are some that are so common that even I know them. It is in the 6th grade jōyō kanji, but I doubt it's in the top 1000 most common characters in Japanese, maybe not even the top 2000. You could probably guess that 侖 is the phonetic
It's not an especially common character in Chinese either, though it is part of some common words like 讨论. (论 is the simplified form of 論.) But frequency of occurrence isn't the only way you can fail to be obscure. I call this one of the least obscure characters in existence because it is the name of the most prominent Confucian work, the one conventionally titled Analects in English, 論語 "discussions".
Consider that "spangled" is not a word in common use in the USA, but Americans can be expected to recognize it anyway.
> Did anyone guess "rin"?
I don't remember.
> Presumably when prewett said "When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically," they meant onyomi. (Perhaps they didn't know about kunyomi.) When they say, "but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word," that is mostly wrong as a description of how Japanese writing uses kanji today
I read prewett very differently than you do. To me, when he says "the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word", he is referring to kunyomi. I don't think that's wrong as a description of how Japanese writing uses kanji today. But I do think it's wrong to describe that use as "much more phonetic" than the Chinese writing system. I see it as much less phonetic.
Hmm, I was probably working too hard to interpret prewett's comment as something sensible.
Oops, im not on reddit, sorry
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?
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
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.
any time they enter and expression (auto complete), it they introduce a new one, they needed to add the range.
this did the job.
the time I spent the most was to sort the existing data and restore it in the new dictionary.
My main testing dataset is the 470,000 records from the Met, with 33k unique date values. Fortunately they include machine-readable dates I can validate against.
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.
There are references to the Islamic and Japanese calendar systems, but always next to the CE equivalent.
Data entry is fortunately being done by modern people, so the translation to CE/BCE is usually baked in, and all you need to support is every possible way somebody could say "the early half of" and "5th millenium B.C. to mid 1914"
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]
In your case: if you wanted a date plus minus 50yrs, that would be (date(d), range(years, 50)).
Some construction like this allows for I believe most use cases. You just need to be able to store: date, date time, date range, and the precise/imprecise versions of all of these.
That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601?
Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.
IMHO if code is doing extra parsing to handle -ve years, they should have enough logic to know to how to skip the zeroth year when converting to and from the human readable form.
edit: Apparently that’s how they do dates in astronomy since it makes the math easier. Can’t even count on years being gregorian these days…
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
> 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.
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.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
For people who don't want to be assaulted by aggressive ads
Found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/comments/179wi32...
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.
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.
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."
if date_1 > date_2 { .. do something .. }
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.
so about 42175 BC
:)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolit...
https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
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.
One could argue that it had 5000 years of downtime when no one knew where it was /s
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.
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.
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.
Delaware, sure. But I'm pretty sure Belgium exists.
I'm pretty sure that's what the comment was implying.
You can tell that "the original French" is a noun phrase, because it's the object of the preposition "in", and prepositional objects are always noun phrases in English. Given that, there are two possible parses: either "original" is an adjective and "French" is a noun, or "original" is a noun and "French" is an adjective. In English, adjectives nearly always precede nouns, so the second possibility is very weak.
The noun "French" in English can refer either to the French language or (always with "the") the French people. But interpreting the phrase as meaning "in the original French people" is clearly incorrect, because a museum is too large to fit inside a person, and even a somehow miniaturized museum could only be inserted into one person, not many people.
So the phrase unambiguously means "in the original French language", that is, "in the French-language text originally written".
I hope this helps!
"In the original French" does not refer to the nationality of the author or the location of the museum.