What was the first "office" ?

I’m thinking of a place where no one lives, but where multiple people, all of whom live seperately elsewhere, come daily to perform some non-machine-related task (I’m ruling out mills, smithies and the like) I assume it would belong to some kind of bank or trading organization.

My guess would be some sort of temple or other religious place.

Does a market count? If not, maybe a Sumerian temple where the priest class went about their priesting.

The first writings, in fact, were records from an “office”.

Sumerian farmers brought grain to city storehouses and bureaucrat-priests parceled out food to citizens while keeping track of what was going in and out of the state storehouses. The priests-government officials didn’t live there but showed up and kept track of stuff

I’ve seen some examples of the records they kept. They look exactly like Excel spreadsheets, just on clay tablets instead of a screen - even though I don’t understand the script, I could still see what was column and row headings, and calculated totals.

Ahhh… VisiCalc.

That’s right. The early cuneiform version.

I wonder whether anyone tried to patent the spreadsheet, and was refused with a letter, “Sorry. We have prior art dating to 2200 BC.”? :slight_smile:

I think that was Lotus’s argument in the litigation over whether they could rip the idea off of VisiCalc. :wink:

As the subtitle suggests, this parallel is one of themes in The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets.

That said, Eleanor Robson’s chapter in it on tabulation in cuneform records - which is online (a pdf) - emphasises that the history appears somewhat haphazard. The basic tabular format that now looks overwhelming natural to us even fell out of favour with the Sumerians for a while and seems to have had to be reinvented.