I KNOW we’ve discussed this before on this Board, but it showed up on someone’s blog today:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/19/whos-the-first-person-in-history-whose-name-we-know/
So I trolled the internet, read some books, and to my great surprise—the first name in recorded history isn’t a king. Nor a warrior. Or a poet. He was, it turns out … an accountant. In his new book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari goes back 33 centuries before Christ to a 5,000-year-old clay tablet found in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). It has dots, brackets, and little drawings carved on it and appears to record a business deal.
Picture of an ancient tablet depicting beer production Inanna Temple in UrukMS 1717 - The Schoyen Collection
It’s a receipt for multiple shipments of barley. The tablet says, very simply:
29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim
“The most probable reading of this sentence,” Harari writes, “is: ‘A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.’ ”
I would’ve thought the Egyptian King Scorpion was the first. A quick check on dates puts him about level with Kushim (and Krulwich’s other candidates). I don’t recall who the SDMB nominated earlier, but I’ll bet Scorpion was among them.
Pretty sure it was Fred Flintstone. I mean, he co-existed with dinosaurs and everything.
Jed Flintstone, Fred’s great-grandfather, is his earliest ancestor we have a name for.
So…not Tom Bombadil, then?
In my case it was “Mama”.
It wasn’t “Handy”, the guy who put his hands all over those cave walls?
“Handy” is like “Kilroy” from WWII – he seems to be everywhere because random people keep copying his logo and signature all over the place.
It was the Paleolithic Era. Copyright Laws were in a primitive state.