Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
phenomena.nationalgeographic.com
Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
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Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#2Adam & Eve ;-)
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#3Adam & Eve ;-)
Isn't that the point of the article? Can we really read through all the history in that text and discover the original pronunciation?
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#4Evidence for the world's second oldest profession?
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#5Inter stung article. Do yourself a favour and skip the comments.
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#6Adam & Eve ;-)
God brought the world into being in 4004 BC. This article has a tablet from 5000 BC, so it looks like Kushim is indeed older than Adam'n'Eve :)
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#7Two things about this article registered on my bogometer:
1. In the image of the hands on the cave wall, some of the images are positive and some are negative. The negatives were plausibly made by the technique described in the article (put hand on wall, blow dust at wall) but the positive images could not possibly have been made that way.
2. The translations of the tablets seem implausibly precise. How could we possibly know that a particular bit of ancient Sumerian (or whatever it is) translates as the Anglicized name "Gal Sal" or "Sukkalgir" or (most implausibly) "En-pap X"?
Seems just a tad odd.
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#8Other brief discussions about this topic suggesting other candidates:
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question114584.html
http://ask.metafilter.com/103405/Who-was-the-first-person-in...
One Metafilter user ("Riemann") makes the interesting point that a huge number of clay tablets that have been excavated remain untranslated, so it's quite possible that new candidates would turn up over time as scholars examine those artifacts.
In support of this, Wikipedia says (internal references removed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script
> Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 – 100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (c. 130,000), followed by the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, the Yale Babylonian Collection (c.40,000) and Penn Museum. Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published," as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.
Edit: if you become a cuneiformist, maybe you can discover the new earliest known named person! I'm reminded of the exciting time that Amir Aczel had in locating the first-known written numeral zero in history.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-aczel/worlds-first-zero_b...
(He has published a whole book on this if you want to hear a longer and more dramatic version of the story.)
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#9if you're interested in early human history such as this, check out Gobekli Tepe (search youtube), the site of some very early temples. very fascinating.
Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)
#10Two things about this article registered on my bogometer: 1. In the image of the hands on the cave wall, some of the images are positive and some are negative. The negatives were plausibly made by the technique described in the article (put hand on wall, blow dust at wall) but the positive images could not possibly have been made that way. 2. The translations of the tablets seem implausibly precise. How could we poss…
The "positive" handprints are still surrounded by a halo. So, blow dust on wall, put hand on wall, blow different-colored dust over hand on wall? Either that or dip hand in dust, put hand on wall.