The First Name in History Is on a Receipt

About 5,000 years ago, in the city of Uruk in what is now Iraq, someone pressed a few marks into a lump of clay: roughly 28,000 measures of barley, 37 months, Kushim. That last word may be the oldest name of a real person that anyone can read. Not a king, not a poet, but an administrator who looked after barley and beer. So why was writing invented for bookkeeping? Is Kushim even a name? And how did his receipt survive five thousand years? CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:34 A city that needed a memory 3:41 Kushim 7:01 Saved by the trash 9:22 What we learned SOURCES CDLI, MS 1717 = MSVO 3, 29 (P005340): size 76 × 67 × 19 mm, Uruk III, provenience "Uruk [uncertain]", transliteration and translation "5617 1/5 N1's, exchange barley, 37 months, Kushim's final account, ca. 135,000 liters" (R. K. Englund): https://cdli.ucla.edu/P005340 (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2023/http...) Jürgen Renn, "Learning from Kushim About the Origins of Writing and Farming", in Culture and Cognition (Edition Open Access, 2019), after Nissen, Damerow & Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (1993), pp. 36–46 (Kushim a SANGA, 21 tablets, nine cereal products and eight kinds of beer on one tablet, five number systems, "1" written for "10", "his name is a poetic license"): https://www.mprl-series.mpg.de/media/... Christopher Woods (ed.), Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond (Oriental Institute, 2010), ch. 2 (Uruk 20,000–50,000 people on 2.5 km², the Eanna, about 6,000 tablets, about 90% administrative, tablets found in rubbish used as building fill, number systems by commodity, sanga sign as a tallying box, beveled-rim bowls and the "eat" sign, the professions list copied for about 1,000 years, no literature or letters for 700+ years, Gal-sal tablet, Enmerkar, Nisaba, tokens debate): https://isac-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/... Peter Damerow, "The Origins of Writing as a Problem of Historical Epistemology", CDLJ 2006:1 (proto-cuneiform not phonetic, language unknown): https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/arti... CDLI Bulletin 2003:4 (the barley capacity system, beveled-rim bowl about 0.8 litres, smallest unit about 4.8 litres): https://cdli.earth/articles/cdlb/2003-4 Oriental Institute *Annual Report 2010–2011*, frontispiece (OIM A2513: Gal-sal and two slaves, about 3100 BC): https://isac-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/... P. Zimansky, review of Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing*, *Journal of Field Archaeology 20 (1993) 513–517 (the "sheep" token only 15 times in 7,000 years), quoted in Woods 2010 p. 49. Y. N. Harari, Sapiens (2014), ch. 7, "Signed, Kushim" (gives 29,086 measures; calls Kushim possibly a title). Wikipedia, "Kushim (Uruk period)" (18 tablets as of 1993; person, office or institution; 29,086 a likely transcription error): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_...) Wikipedia, "Uruk" (German excavations from 1912/1928, Eanna, cone mosaics): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk Wikipedia, "Beveled rim bowl" (mass-produced, ration theory and alternatives): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveled... Wikipedia, "Iry-Hor" (early Egyptian rulers known by name, same centuries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iry-Hor The History Blog, "Tablet with earliest known personal name for sale" (2020; Erlenmeyer collection Basel 1950s, Christie's 1988, Schøyen 1993, Bloomsbury Auctions July 2020, reportedly about $229,000): https://www.thehistoryblog.com/?p=59374 Antiques Trade Gazette (June 2020), Bloomsbury Auctions lot: https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/... National Geographic (R. Krulwich, 2015), "Who's the first person in history whose name we know?": https://www.nationalgeographic.com/sc... ILLUSTRATIONS Illustrations generated with Google's Nano Banana image model, written and checked against the sources by ToonyHistory. MUSIC & SOUND Music and sound effects from the YouTube Audio Library. #history #ancienthistory #mesopotamia #uruk #writing