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A very rare item was recently sold for a million: a clay plaque containing what is believed to be the signature of the oldest named person in history, Kushim. The painting provides a direct insight into the earliest history of written language.
Just over five thousand years ago, there was a great temple in the city of Uruk, in present-day southern Iraq, dedicated to the goddess Inanna. Apparently it was a large-scale business, where, among other things, large amounts of food and drink were consumed. To supply the temple with all the necessary raw materials, an extensive bureaucracy was built, where administrators kept a careful record of everything that was ordered and then consumed. We know this because several clay tablets with different cuneiform messages from the temple have been preserved to this day, and on some of them the name Kushim appears.
On the clay tablet that has just been sold, this man certifies by his own hand that for a period of four years he has received no less than 29,086 measures of barley, which were to be used to make beer.
This would be the oldest documented name of an individual in world history.
In any case, Kushim is believed to be a personal name. It could also be a title, but since the signature appears on various clay tablets and sometimes in connection with a word that you actually know means administrator in the temple, “chant”, you can assume that Kushim is actually the name of a real person.
This would be the oldest documented name of an individual in world history. Of Uruk also some very old names are conserved, but probably they are written a little later than Kushim; It is about a slave owner named Gal-Sal and his two slaves, En-pap X and Sukkalgir.
The clay tablets there Kushim signed their name was first noticed in the 1950s, when they were bought by a famous antiquarian. In recent years, they have become almost famous, especially since historian Yuval Harari gave Kushim a key role in the introduction of his hit book “Sapiens”. There, Harari emphasizes the fact that written language began as a way of organizing administrative activities, rather than being used for poems or tributes to kings, queens, or gods.
The facade of the inner temple can be seen in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
Photo: CM Dixon
Written language thus arose as a result of the societies of the time becoming increasingly complex when it came to trade and the payment of taxes. Over time, these activities became so numerically heavy that it became necessary to carefully monitor and account for them. Therefore, people began to use signs for different types of objects and their number. Only later, these symbols began to be used for other types of communication as well, and a comprehensive written language emerged. In the same way, other early written languages have developed, for example in China and Egypt.
Just under twenty different clay tablets have been found bearing Kushim’s signature, but the others are in institutions such as the Freie Universität in Berlin and the British Museum in London. The only one that has been privately owned is the one that has now been resold: it was bought by an anonymous collector in the United States for 175,000 pounds (almost two million crowns).
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The English church is decorated with sculptures from Narnia
A church in the English town of Beverley in Yorkshire will be decorated on the outside with no fewer than 14 sculptures inspired by figures from author CS Lewis’s books on Narnia. They will replace medieval stone carvings that were previously seen on church facades, but have become so worn over time that what they originally envisioned cannot be seen, writes The Guardian. Among the new sculptures is, for example, one representing the lion Aslan and another representing the White Witch. CS Lewis was a devout believer and has said, among other things, that Aslan can be seen as a symbol of Jesus and his sacrifice for human sins.
Sami didn’t used to eat a lot of reindeer meat
In ancient times, reindeer meat was not the most important food for the Sami, shows a new dissertation in archeology that studied Sami food culture during the years 600-1900, “Food cultures in Sápmi” by Markus Fjellström. The study, which examined the isotope composition in bone material of the Sami living in different parts of present-day Sweden and Norway, shows that their diet used to be highly varied with a mixture of mammals, birds and fish. For example, many Sami raised sheep and goats instead of reindeer. In a press release, Fjellström emphasizes that the image of Sami culture as very homogeneous and focused only on reindeer emerged during the 19th century with his racial biological research.
5,000
Hobbyist researcher Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, who has spent 50 years on the project, has recently published the same number of historical full-text cookbooks online. For more information, see the website thesifter.org
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