In this thread, someone (Triskadecamus?) mentions the oldest “historic autograph”. It got me to ‘speculatin’… what is the oldest verified autograph we know of.
Parameters: Need not be famous, just the oldest autograph of someone we think actually signed something (not the authority to do so, but the actual sig of the individual).
I love those. I used to live in both NM and Arizona and found quite a few exploring on my own. But what I was really looking for was a specific individual who wrote, carved or otherwise scrawled his or her name into eternity.
An older edition of the Guinness Book of World Records said that an autograph of El Cid (1044-1099) is the oldest existing of a notable person.
The 1991 Guinness Book of Records, and I really must update this tome, gives the following:
(1) Cuneiform clay tablets: From Tell Abu Salabikh, Iraq (c. 2600 BC). A scribe named ‘a-du’ added ‘dub-sar’ after his name thus translating to ‘Adu, scribe’.
(2) Papyrus: From the Egyptian middle kingdom period (c. 2130 BC) the signature of the scribe Amen-'aa appears on a papyrus now located in the Leningrad Museum.
The article states also that the earliest full signature extant from the British monarchy is that of Richard II (dated 26 July 1386) but fails to define the stationery.
He was no fool.
If my name was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar then I’d sign my autographs El Cid as well.
All of Hammurabi’s (1700s BC) letters on clay tablets are written in the same hand. Some believe that Hammurabi himself wrote them. (Given the length of his reign and all.) His name of course appears in the tablets and might thus constitute an autograph.
A fairly unusual circumstance, if true.
Were they written in code?