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

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

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

#101

Post by grkvlt »

coldtea wrote: post #80
computator wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't we scan and use OCR those clay tablets? Possibly for the same reason you can't scan 88-year-old images of Mickey Mouse without being sued by Disney. The academics who control things like that are protective with their finds (even if they didn't find it, but got control). The Dead Sea Scrolls weren't published for decades because the scholars who got to them first wouldn't let anyone else see them[1]; they…

> Possibly for the same reason you can't scan 88-year-old images of Mickey Mouse without being sued by Disney. You mean besides the scientific (or at least practical, at the current level of OCR/machine learning) impossibility of what the parent suggests? Plus, I don't think parent asks why don't WE scan/ocr/machine learn translate them, but why the archeological community doesn't.

> besides the scientific (or at least practical, at the current level of OCR/machine learning) impossibility

I'd hardly say impossible. It's being done, today. See this article:https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/sonstiges/meldungen/detail/a... or these papers: http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_10_digit... and https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/cuneiform/cuneiform-300...

These describe scanning of ancient clay tablets, for archival and information retrieval purposes. Note that the Johns Hopkins research on archiving is from 2003. I suspect the blocker may be money, rather than practicality; these aren't simple flatbed scanners, the tables must be scanned in 3D to recover the full detail required. But, it's an incredibly fascinating area of research to read about.

EDIT - So, I did some more reading, and it seems that the Johns Hopkins work I referenced above is part of The Digital Hammurabi Project which is doing exactly this, archiving cuneiform tablets, described here: http://pages.jh.edu/~dighamm/version2/research/2003_03_Museu... with more information on the projects website: http://www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/

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

#102

Post by raldi »

bhaak wrote: post #94
raldi wrote: post #50

I know that Sumerian numbers were written in a combination of bases 6 and 10 (symbols represented, e.g., 360, 600, etc), but how do they get 29,086 out of those symbols?

Looking at the example image on Wikipedia's page, I still have a hard time recognizing the numbers, even though they are marked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Examples People have always been using short hand and sloppy hand writing, I don't find it surprising that you can't recognize the numbers without some practise.

Recognizing the "digits" isn't the problem; that's already been solved and published:

http://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/sapiensbriefhis...

I can even find references to what many of the units represent:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/su_numbers.gif

For example, the six big circles in the middle seem to represent 6 x 3600. But I can't figure out what to do next.

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

#103

Post by danvoell »

schoen wrote: post #8

Other 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 a…

Seems like an interesting problem for machine learning.

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

#104

Post by erdevs »

jkot wrote: post #74
erdevs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. Right. With all of the slavery. And the emperor/pharaoh totalitarianism. And the state-sponsored religion. Very liberal. > And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I did not say whether Kushim specifically was a male or female name, did I? Show me where. I suggest you read more carefully before jumping to conclusions and certainly befo…

> the odds ... are that the first recorded human's name was a male name. I think you have no evidence for that claim. Lot of ancient societies had equality (Egypt) or were even female dominated (ancient Crete).

Do you have evidence it was more likely a female name?

You think it is exactly 50/50 odds?

You don't think it's possible to reason and make educated estimates?

Of all known ancient societies which are considered contenders for having left the earliest example of writing, how many seem to have been more patriarchal than totally fair or matriarchal? Let's think about it...

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

#105

Post by erdevs »

ars wrote: post #37
erdevs wrote: post #14

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male nam…

> the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions 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 M…

> 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.

So... you're assuming that the earliest example we can find will literally be the first creation. The instance where it was invented.

I'm afraid you have an incredibly unrealistic view of the archaeological record.

The odds are infinitesimally low that we will ever find the actual first example of human writing, or that it has even survived.

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

#106

Post by soundwave106 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #62
duaneb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social hierarchies are thought to be one of the innovations of civilization. There is not any evidence of an inherent matriarchy or patriarchy, and there were civilizations that went either way. In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe. This led to division of labor and social stratification along…

AFAIK, probably all social mammals, including all primates have social hierarchies. There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.

One interesting note on primates is that, of the two closest relatives to humans, the social hierarchy seems to falls on both sides of the spectrum. As in: chimpanzees are considered to be more "patriarchal" (read: the alpha male is at the top of the hierarchy), whereas bonobos are considered to be more "matriarchal" (read: mothers are at the top of the hierarchy, although bonobo society is more egalitarian overall than chimpanzee society).

One cannot obviously conclude that much about human society by studying the great apes. However, just by this I honestly think it's safe to say that the author's statement was made in haste. Without evidence, it's hard to tell what the social structure was 30,000 years ago is without making some (in my opinion) shaky assumptions.

(This does not justify the poison in the comment section of that article though.)

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

#107

Post by duaneb »

BurningFrog wrote: post #62
duaneb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social hierarchies are thought to be one of the innovations of civilization. There is not any evidence of an inherent matriarchy or patriarchy, and there were civilizations that went either way. In fact the strongest theory I've seen argues for a dichotomy of plough vs hoe civilizations: men are better equipped to plough, women are better equipped to hoe. This led to division of labor and social stratification along…

AFAIK, probably all social mammals, including all primates have social hierarchies. There is an alpha male and an alpha female, and the ranking order under them is quite defined.

I don't know if this applies to humans. Do you have a source for your claims, or for a similar claim about humanity?

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

#108

Post by mjmsmith »

adekok wrote: post #95
erdevs wrote: post #14

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male nam…

> That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. I have serious ethical concerns with such a claim. It gives a simplistic view of history, to the point of severe distortion. It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true. What is true is that the Mesopotamian civilizations were violent, hierarchical, racist, genocidal, poor, etc…

> It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure.

No, it doesn't. It says nothing about "all men" other than their status relative to women. If I said "Alabama society in the 1950s was blatantly racist," why would you conclude that every white person in Alabama lived like a king?

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

#109

Post by erdevs »

adekok wrote: post #95
erdevs wrote: post #14

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male nam…

> That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. I have serious ethical concerns with such a claim. It gives a simplistic view of history, to the point of severe distortion. It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true. What is true is that the Mesopotamian civilizations were violent, hierarchical, racist, genocidal, poor, etc…

> > That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic.

> ...[This] implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true.

No. The preceding statement does not imply either of those things. At all.

Let's take patriarchal societies which also had male slavery of hard labor, since hard labor slavery is nearly the antithesis of a "life of unrelenting leisure". Do you think that US society in the 1700s was at all patriarchal or misogynistic? Yes? So then would you deny that US society had male slaves at that time, or claim somehow that being a slave then implied a "life of unrelenting leisure"? Does having slavery including male slavery somehow make a society non-misogynistic or non-patriarchal? Do you think perhaps these are different dimensions and you are making wholly faulty logical leaps?

Or, let's be less extreme. Would you say that US society in, say, the 1920s or 1950s was at all patriarchal? Would you then claim that in the US in either decade "all men had lives of unrelenting leisure?"

Your logic is unsound to the extreme. Your entire line of reasoning is specious at best and employs reduction to absurdity throughout. You make these stark, extreme claims and assertions (like the quoted text above) with no logic justifying them whatsoever. Are you simply making bombastic statements for the sake of controversy?

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

#110

Post by alanwatts »

c3534l wrote: post #51

Traditionally history is said to start where we have written records, the time before the being relegated to anthropology and archeology. But they say that the scope of economic history is larger because we have accounting records before we have written records. Before we had any clay tablets telling legends and recording the events of kings, we have the exchange rate between fish and barley, records of indebtedness,…

>Writing in the near-east was essentially developed as a more sophisticated accounting tool.

The ancient Greeks also developed their alphabet and coinage systems around roughly the same time.

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