Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

Possibly for the same reason you can't scan 88-year-old images of Mickey Mouse without being sued by Disney.

The academics who control things like that are protective with their finds (even if they didn't find it, but got control). The Dead Sea Scrolls weren't published for decades because the scholars who got to them first wouldn't let anyone else see them[1]; they got published only after the government intervened.

One scholar even sued[2] another over copyright infringement for publishing the words he painstakingly copied off the scrolls; the guy he sued had merely copied his copy of the 2000-year-old words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Publication

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Ownership

Once it's digital, you can let the internet devour it, one way or another. Shouldn't take long.

I've seen textbooks on Babylonian and Assyrian on Amazon, although I have no idea if they're any good. Any university with a Middle Eastern archaeology program might have an occasional class. You might check with /r/askahistorian on Reddit.

And yes, I think I've seen a translation of a largish tablet published by an amateur translator who learned on his own.

Also, the stratigraphy provides some degree of chronology, although iirc a lot of the tablets come from a single hittite document storage facility which had collapsed on itself, so...

That doesn't sound like much of an accountant to me.

It would be even more strange that Kushim could be called an accountant at a time where double-entry bookkeeping hadn't been invented. There were always people who kept records, sure. But a person who went to school to learn specifically about keeping and organizing financial records and, in all likelihood, is licensed by the state to ensure that all records are kept in a consistent manner - that's what's modern. It took a very long time for accounting to be a job instead of a task you did in certain jobs. There were even auditors who worked for the government and were basically tax-collectors. But they would actually go to a business and have the owners read aloud their financial records to ensure that they were being kept and they made sense ("audit" basically means to hear).

We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them.

Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor).

It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures.

In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.

Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?

i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small.

Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions.

There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true.

The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power.

We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.

I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities.

For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.

> ...[This] implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true.

No. The preceding statement does not imply either of those things. At all.

Let's take patriarchal societies which also had male slavery of hard labor, since hard labor slavery is nearly the antithesis of a "life of unrelenting leisure". Do you think that US society in the 1700s was at all patriarchal or misogynistic? Yes? So then would you deny that US society had male slaves at that time, or claim somehow that being a slave then implied a "life of unrelenting leisure"? Does having slavery including male slavery somehow make a society non-misogynistic or non-patriarchal? Do you think perhaps these are different dimensions and you are making wholly faulty logical leaps?

Or, let's be less extreme. Would you say that US society in, say, the 1920s or 1950s was at all patriarchal? Would you then claim that in the US in either decade "all men had lives of unrelenting leisure?"

Your logic is unsound to the extreme. Your entire line of reasoning is specious at best and employs reduction to absurdity throughout. You make these stark, extreme claims and assertions (like the quoted text above) with no logic justifying them whatsoever. Are you simply making bombastic statements for the sake of controversy?

No, it doesn't. It says nothing about "all men" other than their status relative to women. If I said "Alabama society in the 1950s was blatantly racist," why would you conclude that every white person in Alabama lived like a king?

> [From further down in this chain:] I'm arguing against the ideas proposed by certain groups of people. People who (in my experience) typically argue that "that culture is misogynistic" means "all men have it better than all women".

Ah. Okay. Thank you for explaining and admitting this.

I do NOT subscribe to the line of thinking you are apparently disputing at all. Saying that "culture is misogynistic" means "all men have it better than all women" is absolutely idiotic, in my view. Reference the statements I made regarding patriarchal societies that also had male slavery. Many, many (probably most?) ancient civilizations included class-based socioeconomic systems. In many, the women in higher classes were much better off than the men in lower classes, on average

I'm not making any of the arguments or statements which you are arguing against. Thank you for clarifying that what you were actually reacting to and arguing against was something other than my statements, as I found your leaps in logic very surprising based on what I actually said/claimed/argued.

> I've run into many of these people online and in daily life.

I understand. Unfortunately, extremism and poor logic are all too common in discussions of important matters today. It's disappointing and frustrating.

I hope you can reflect here, though, and realize you are adding to this problem, in this example. You made an assumption about my worldview which wasn't based on any particular statement I made, and which absolutely does not represent my thoughts whatsoever. You then argued, and were even incendiary, based on that flawed presumption. This is the sort of thing that spins debates online and offline into bad places, which partially happened here as well.

> If you don't believe this, I'm sorry for insinuating you do.

Thank you, truly, very much for saying this. I feel a lot better now knowing what was actually happening here, as it made no sense to me previously. I think it's big of you to step back and reflect here.

> I was reacting to the normal use of that terminology, which, in my experience, does have the meaning I said.

I can see what you're saying, but again note that this doesn't apply to any argument I made. Thank you for clearing this up.

So... you're assuming that the earliest example we can find will literally be the first creation. The instance where it was invented.

I'm afraid you have an incredibly unrealistic view of the archaeological record.

The odds are infinitesimally low that we will ever find the actual first example of human writing, or that it has even survived.

But we should consider the logic and likelihoods here.

Take the monastic/priest role or class. Does it seem more likely this role or class would be considered low-class and hold little power in most ancient civilizations, or that it would hold considerable power? Well, we can reason about this. Consider, based on what we know today, did religion seem to intermingle with government quite frequently in early civilizations? It seems so. Then the monastic/religious class likely held considerable power. Then by definition, in a patriarchy, it is more likely men held these roles more often than women. It sucks, but it stands to reason that it's likely that in most early civilizations, men more frequently held these power roles than women.

Now, consider scholars. Ask: was the ability to write widespread in most early civs? If not, would knowing how to write be a form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex more often holds roles of power? We have an educated guess for scholars, scribes, etc now too.

Follow similar logic for government officials. Would participating in government, and especially being responsible for written records in government likely confer power? It would seem so.

Follow similar logic for finance roles. Were accounts and records important? Likely yes, else why were they meticulously kept in early civilization examples? If they were important, does being an official financial record keeper likely confer some form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex likely has those power roles?

We obviously can't say for sure. But we can reason and apply what knowledge we do have.

And it is only with the advent of "civilization"/agriculture that we find writing. Note that the writing discussed in this article is about someone owing some barley to someone else.

That is exactly what I'm saying. Do you somehow contend that hunter-gatherers societies are more likely to have left written records that have survived to today?

Right. With all of the slavery. And the emperor/pharaoh totalitarianism. And the state-sponsored religion. Very liberal.

> And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name?

I did not say whether Kushim specifically was a male or female name, did I? Show me where. I suggest you read more carefully before jumping to conclusions and certainly before making inflammatory and insulting accusations to someone.

> I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.

Since I made no such assumption nor such comment, I have no idea why you wrote this. I didn't even weigh in on whether "Kushim" is likely to be a name at all. (It could be a title or a number of other possible monikers.)

Most Indoeuropean languages have a vovel (most often "a") at the end of female names, and a consonant at the end of male names. It's just a consequence of the gender system and postfixes.

I'm not sure how old is this distinction, and I don't know if this writing system even preserved the vovels, if yes - it is indeed partial evidence that it was a male name.

More: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-female-names-end-in-vow...

In my (Slavic) language all female names end with "a" and all male names end with consonants.

1. For the dark colored positives I don't see any evidence of the dark color bleeding through the light halo. Also, some of the positives have fingers that are faded, and some are overlaid by negatives. A light halo overlaying a dark base layer can't account for those.

2. The positives are too solid to simply be handprints. If you just make a handprint, it will have gaps in the center of the palm and between the palm and fingers (among other places). But all the images are solid silhouettes.

"Overleaf: This text appears to identify two named slaves in the possession of a third individual. The sign for “slaves” in fact derives from two distinct signs, one for male ( ) and one for female ( ) slave. Typical of proto-cuneiform texts, the inscription does not include a preposition or verb, which would clarify the roles of the participants. This ambiguity is, in part, resolved by tablet format and the organization of information into cases. OIM A2513. Clay. Purchased (Jemdet Nasr?). Ca. 3100 bc. 4.6 x 4.6 x 2.4 cm. After Christopher Woods, “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing,” in Visible Language: inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and beyond , edited by Christopher Woods, p. 39, fig. 2.6 (Oriental Institute Museum Publications 32; Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2010). Photo by Jean Grant"

Pity the glyphs didn't make it through cut-n-paste.

Also, take a look at the hires:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/SantaCru...

A the top center you will see a couple of positives that overlap each other. How did that happen?

http://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/sapiensbriefhis...

I can even find references to what many of the units represent:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/su_numbers.gif

For example, the six big circles in the middle seem to represent 6 x 3600. But I can't figure out what to do next.