What is the oldest name of a person in recorded history?
Adam?
Actually, we had a thread on this quite recently. IIR, I think the consensus was that the earliest recorded name was that of the Egyptian ruler Narmer, or possibly his predecessor, known as " Scorpion (or Selk) and/or Ka" (so I guess we don’t really know his name).
Adam: Madam, I’m Adam
Eve: Name no one man
(Those Edeners were darn clever with palindromes, considering that there were no written languages yet).
And they apparently spoke English, just like Jesus.
There is a 3500 year old Babylonian inscription in my anthropology text that says, in a script arguably related to the Hebrew something like “Ani Mesha, melek …”. Anyone who knows Hebrew (or, I assume, Arabic) will understand this as “I Mesha, king…”. So Mesha (Moses?) was apparently king of something or other 3500 years ago.
The inscription you refer to is famous, but is 2850 years old and from Palestine. This Mesha is mentioned in the Bible when King Jehoram (son of the famous Queen Jezebel) wages war against him:
[QUOTE=II Kings 3:4-7]
And Mesha king of Moab was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool.
But it came to pass, when Ahab was dead, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.
And king Jehoram went out of Samaria the same time, and numbered all Israel.
And he went and sent to Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, saying, The king of Moab hath rebelled against me: wilt thou go with me against Moab to battle? And he said, I will go up: I am as thou art, my people as thy people, and my horses as thy horses.
[/QUOTE]
Many letters from Hammurabi survive, 900 years earlier than Mesha’s time.
I wish I was a sheepmaster. * pouting *
Can you be more specific about what you’re looking for? Here are two possibilities of what your question might mean:[ul]
[li]Of all the people who have ever been written about, and mentioned by name, which such person lived first?[/li]
[*]Of all the people who have ever been written about, and mentioned by name, which of those writings is oldest?[/ul]Also: Exactly what do you mean by “recorded history”? For example, does it have to be a contemporaneous stone carving found by an archaeologist, or would it suffice be be the sort of record which was passed down (verbally or in writing) but we don’t have the original copy?