Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

Based on the historical record to date, the first written records appeared in Mesopotamia, and it has long been understood writing developed out of economic need.

Further, we have a vast records on the people and culture of ancient Mesopotamia. We know it was a patriarchal society. Their religious texts specifically define the stages of a women's life as: "I am daughter, I am bride, I am spouse, I am housekeeper". Therefore, I don't think it makes one sexist to look at this particular society through a sexist lens.

That said, the historical record includes literary works written by women in ancient Mesopotamia, though to my knowledge none of these women were merchants or traders, but royalty and high priestesses. Further, there is no shortage of women authors from other ancient societies either, but we know they came later.

Since looking beyond the historical record is all guess work anyway, because the record points to the first writings being for contracts/receipts/economic necessity, it could be that marriages may have likely been the first "transactions" to be recorded (this would include probably both the bride and grooms names, as well as the brides price and the bride-groom price). My thought is these transactions simply would have been considered the most important in that society and applied to the greatest number of people. Going full circle to the sexist thing, many of the marriage contracts we do have from Mesopotamia include clauses guaranteeing the bride was a virgin and we know if that was question the women had to appear before the courts (though these are later in time too, after Hammurabi's Law was written).

And although humor is frowned upon here, since everyone is taking a jab at the historical inaccuracies of the cartoons, why has no one questioned why our good friend Kushim is looking at an iPhone in the last picture?

Isn't the better question who invented those things?

I mean we are looking for the first one, which is likely to be the person who invented it. Males and Females have an equal opportunity here.

> But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters.

Do Males invent things more often than Females or not? That's the question.

> because of the male-oriented power dynamics

Who created those dynamics? Why was it a male and not a female?

You are arguing about a world where men already "won" and prevent females from doing things.

But the question you should be addressing is an earlier one: Why did men "win" in the first place?

We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them.

Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor).

It's also very possible that there isn't a single truth. Hunter-gatherers existed for a long time across a great many locations. They may have had a large variety of cultures.

In support of that, we do have evidence of the opposite of your claim, too: hunter-gatherers that fight wars to capture women, for example.