I like to read in my spare time, and it occured to me that I didn’t know what the oldest written document known to man was. I knew that there were at least two ways I could find out: 1) on the internet; and 2) by asking Cecil Adams. When I was younger I remember reading that the oldest epic was He who Saw the Deep (better known as The Epic of Gilgamesh), and I haven’t found evidence that there is another older epic. But a quick search on Google ( here’s the link oldest written work - Google Search) revealed that it definitely wasn’t the oldest document we know of, and frankly I wasn’t surprised. I checked the some of the sites provided by Google, but it soon became clear to me that I wasn’t finding real answers, just pseudo-answers. Then I checked Wikipedia’s article on the history of writing (link: History of writing - Wikipedia), and while there were some interesting things that seemed to be pointing in the right direction, they never explicitly stated what the oldest document was. I checked another Wikipedia article: ancient literature (link: Ancient literature - Wikipedia). This article was closer to what I wanted, but it was still a sloppy, undefinitive list of ancient works. Now you’re probably wondering why I was using Wikipedia in the first place: I know it’s an informal source, and I’ve seen plenty of mistakes, bullshit, and opinionated edits, but I know the risks when I go there and I never use it as a firsthand source of information. But, back to the point, on Wikipedia I didn’t find anything that said anything definite about one document being older than anyother. So I can’t find anything on the internet, and my first choice is down (I could probably look harder and find something on the internet, but I’m not going through a hundred sites to find this).
So my second option is to ask Cecil Adams. I’ve always wanted to ask him a question, but I’m not just gonna waste his time on a question he might be able to answer in his sleep. So when I clicked on the Ask the Master page, and it said to ask the Message Board first, I took its advice. Here are my questions: what is the oldest extant written document? And while I’m asking, what is the oldest example of writing in general (i.e. not fully extant)?
Note: if a similar thread exists, please point this out to me. I’ll look at the thread and see if it has the information I want. If it does, I will delete this thread, but if it doesn’t, I’ll keep it until I get a satisfactory answer.
Are you asking about the oldest document in terms of the age of the content, or the oldest physical document (in terms of the physical medium?).
I.e., according to your definition of age, which of the following is “older”?
A first edition of a 1950’s bestseller, printed in 1953.
A copy of the Declaration of Independence sold at a tourist shop in DC and printed in 2008.
One of the documents above is physically older, but the other’s content is older.
I think many ancient documents exist today solely from copies that were made hundreds of years after the original document was written (unlike the Declaration of Independence, where you can take your touristy copy and compare it with the copy at the National Archives)
You also need to think about what you mean by document. There were cuneiform tablets approaching 10,000 years ago and extant ones that are 5000 years old or older certainly could be considered documents. But they usually simply record things something like deposits or ownership. They aren’t things you’d read like a story.
Firstly I’d like to thank all of you for commenting.
By oldest I mean oldest in terms of content. It doesn’t matter to me if it was written in say 2600 B.C.E. (just as an example) and published a year later. My definition of which one is older goes back to the original both times (the draft, and the original Constitution).
Thank you for pointing that out - I don’t just mean documents; I’d like to know what the oldest known example of writing is (whether it is, say, written on a cuneiform tablet, a piece of papyrus, or an oracle bone).
I’m referring to any type of document (maybe I shouldn’t use that word considering my last point, but whatever), not just a literary document. If the oldest example of writing is just a record of a transaction than so be it.
If you have any other confusion, I’ll be glad to point it out.
Some very old writings were found in Pakistan dating back to around 3,500 BC. Is it a full blown language though or just a marking to indicate something or other? I think the oldest known full blown written language is Sumerian.
The Epic of Gilgamesh I think is the oldest complete written story we know of dating to around 2,000 BC.
Well, if illustrative works count as a document, then prehistoric cave paintings are probably in the running. If you require symbols, then perhaps tally bones. If you require written letters or pictographs, then probably cuneiform tablets.
I’m not curious about cave paintings, but thanks for bringing it up.
I might take tally bones (assuming someone can prove that they’re the oldest example of writing) as an answer, but I was more thinking about symbols representing ideas (pictographs and words).
In “Calendar” David Ewings Duncan cites a 13,000 year old marked bone from what is now France that is arguably the first calendar. It may be interpreted as counting the days of a lunar month and marking the phases of the moon during the month.
Thanks for posting that. I’ve been busy (didn’t have time to check this thread yesterday), so I didn’t get the chance to search for them. It’s a fairly interesting link.
Shame that we know so little about the Indus Valley civilization, and that we can’t crack their writing system (although who knows if this is actually a true example of Harappan writing or a proto-Harappan experimentation with language). According to my history teachers, we know less about the Indus Valley culture than about any of the other four major civilizations that were coming around at the same time (the three others being the series of Mesopotamian city-states that warred and were eventually united; the Egyptians, who, to the best of my knowledge, united peacefully; and China, which like the others was a set of fiefs, which became an empire, but was still technically a feudal system). Mostly, I believe, this is because they’re writing system remains unbreakable. If this is indeed the oldest example of writing, I would kill to know what it said.
Sounds like a decent answer. I suppose I’d count a calendar among my search for the oldest example of text. I’m going to put that book on my to-read list in any case.
So what I’ve got is this:
*For use of symbols: a 13,000 year-old calendar (although I think there are tally bones that are older, I’ll have to check).
*For actual writing: 5,500 year-old undecipherable Harappan or proto-Harappan fragments. The oldest example of a story is The Epic of Gilgamesh.
I’m going to continue my search for older symbols and writing, and I encourage all of you to continue, but this has all been very informative to me.
Of the top of my head - TLTG (Too Lazy To Google).
The evolution of writing supposedly goes something like this:
For various accounting reasons - sending a herd of XXXX with a caravan, etc.; the bean-counters would create little clay tokens -this shape is a cow, this is a goat, this is a sheep, etc. When doing a long-distance transaction, they would send a set of tokens to the recipient at the other end, entrusted to the caravan manager.
Eventually they figured out to seal the tokens in a hollow clay ball to avoid tampering. Since the ball was soft until fired, it was as easy to press images of the tokens into outside so it did not have to be broken open every time an audit was needed.
From there it was a short step to dropping the tokens and just sending a ball, then a clay tablet with the necessary impressions. The next logical steps happened very fast - adding more symbols, and creating a shorthand (syllabic or phonetic or pictorial) to convey even more meaning.
IIRC an article about this in Scientific American - there are examples of these accounting tokens and balls out there, and the early clay tablets volved from this. As mentioned, generally the earliest documents are lists of accounts from this time - about 3000BC to 4000BC; i.e. “Schlemeel of Ur, 2 bulls, 5 cows, 17 goats”.
As for the oldest story, remember that many of the older stories are oral tradition written when the mood and method reached the relevant tribe. Homer, for example, was a poet from not long after the Trojan War at about 1000BC - but the Illiad and Oddessy were not written on paper until near classical Greek times, about 400BC. The same probably holds true for Genesis and Gilgamesh. In these “need a balckberry to remind me” times we forget that oral traditions can be passed for centuries with almost no change. Human memory can be astounding.
I’ve been looking too and I’ve read the answers here and no luck. What we get is dates referred to in the text, dates based on the context of where the object written on was found or the relationship of what is in the text to what is believed to be known of the historical era mentioned in the text.
As far as actual, tangible sources there ain’t much - maybe the library of Asshurbanipal (sic) from the 8th century BCE. There’s the Tel El Armana letters from the reign of Akhaten (sic) wihch would be (maybe) about 1400 BCE. This stuff is really hard to pin down and none of the sources are really unambiguous.
I probally have absolutely no business posting in this thread as I know knothing of the subject. I do think I possably have something to add. The op asked about the oldest document. I suppose what is really being asked is the oldest document discovered and belived to be a story or text or symbol.
It is my belief that writing started at the dawn of mankind. I watch my children intuitively grab a stick or a chalk or coal like rock and draw something undecipherable . Then they can go on and on for as long as you let them telling a story about what it is they actually drew or wrote. My totally uneducated unasked for guess is that there is much older writings/symbols and such that we have not interpreted as actual writing. Just a few unidentified scratches on a piece of stone or dried clay. We may never hope to translate them. Just about as easy as looking at a 4 year olds writing and being able to recreate their story. It overlaps the oral tradition, they worked only together.
I don’t know if it’s worth responding to a zombie thread like this, but the above isn’t true. There are many examples of stories from Middle Eastern literature that predate Gilgamesh. Most aren’t epics, but short stories. There’s also some ambiguity, because the story of Gilgamesh predates the extant tablets and even the extant versions. The Sumerian story of Ziusudra is older, but is essentially the same story. Is it different, or not? Depends upon the definitions.
In any event, there are several older stories, including the Atrahasis epic. There was a T.H. Gaster book published several years ago collecting many of these early stories entitled, tellingly The Oldest Stories in the World
The Istanbul Archaeology Museum’s “Museum of the Ancient Orient” exhibit – which, by the way, is absolutely mind-blowingly awesome - has a bunch of old Sumerian documents. They’re in no way the oldest, I admit, but they are pretty old, from between 2300 BC - 1800 BC or thereabouts. It also has the oldest known peace treaty, from 1269 BC, or at least what survives of it.
I took some photos of these while I was there, because I found it fascinating. These might be some of the oldest documents you can go and physically see. I tried to get both the document and the little placard with details about its contents in the photos, but that wasn’t very easy with my lens, hopefully you can puzzle out the blurry information on the placards
Probably not a candidate for very “oldest”, but some legal writings of Urakagina King of Lagash (2380 BC–2360 BC) have survived. Fascinating stuff, as he pursued reforms not dissimilar to what was seen in Europe almost 4000 years later.
(Oops! After clicking, reading, clicking I noticed this is zombie thread. :smack: I’ll respond anyhoo.)
