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 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.
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.
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.
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.