Oldest recorded transaction

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Beer, fermentation, and early civilization

  • Discussion notes that beer and bread co-evolved: old bread as beer starter, live beer used in bread dough for flavor.
  • Evidence of grain soaking/light fermentation thousands of years before the tablet suggests nutrition and palatability were key drivers long before “beer as leisure.”
  • Some argue that large-scale grain agriculture and even semi-permanent settlements may have been motivated primarily by fermentation/beer; others treat this as speculative.
  • Debate on why even children historically drank weak beer: one view is pathogen-killing alcohol; another says that “unsafe water” is overstated and that dense, portable calories were the bigger factor.

Receipts, complaints, and what early writing recorded

  • Commenters highlight how striking it is that one of the very oldest texts is a receipt, not a story or prayer.
  • The ubiquity and forgettability of numbers is suggested as a reason writing started with accounting: we remember stories; we don’t remember quantities or debts.
  • Links to the famous ancient customer-complaint tablet show that transactional records and disputes are among the earliest preserved genres.

How writing emerged and evolved

  • Several posts discuss early Mesopotamian writing as logographic/semasiographic: symbols for commodities and quantities without grammar, possibly readable across languages.
  • There’s extended debate over how quickly phonetic use emerged (via the rebus principle) and how to classify modern Chinese characters:
    • One side stresses that modern usage is fundamentally phonetic (characters represent syllables), with historical semantics in the background.
    • Another emphasizes the mixed, messy legacy of logographs, phono-semantic compounds, and bound morphemes, and that Japanese kanji are often less phonetic in practice.
  • More speculative side-thread: language constraining thought vs ideas too complex for speech, and other media (like Dynamicland) as ways to express such ideas.

Durability, survivor bias, and “rock solid” storage

  • The article’s joke about 5000-year durability prompts pushback: tablets survived partly by accident (burning cities firing clay); most are lost.
  • Still, some argue that no modern digital record is realistically likely to survive 5000 years without highly active migration, whereas clay can passively persist.
  • Others note that survival of tablets is contingent (e.g., lost archives where cities didn’t burn or sank below the water table).

Storing ancient dates in modern databases

  • Multiple commenters say museums effectively store ancient dates as text (“circa 2000 BC”, ranges, qualifiers) and keep separate numeric ranges for sorting.
  • One practitioner describes mapping free-form date strings to year ranges in a side table; another links a library built and tested on the Met’s ~470k-object dataset.
  • PostgreSQL’s date range (4713 BCE to far future) is discussed; people are surprised by the asymmetric range and how it fits into 31-bit day counts.
  • ISO 8601’s treatment of year 0000 as 1 BCE (with negative years for earlier dates) is criticized as baking in an off‑by‑one for human-readable BCE.
  • Some suggest richer types for imprecise dates (value + margin, ranges), and note that historical calendars (“year of King X”, consular years, religious calendars) vastly complicate a simple “integer year” model.
  • A few muse about extreme solutions like overloading comparison operators to call an LLM for fuzzy date reasoning, though this is clearly speculative/playful.

Politics, museums, and ownership

  • The blog’s quip about a British Museum manager wanting to store “theft inventory” draws mixed reactions:
    • Some say it’s inappropriate “politics” that undermines neutrality.
    • Others counter that recent thefts and colonial acquisition histories are factual, and that a lighthearted blog can acknowledge them.
  • Related tangent on Tintin: stories where artifacts are “rescued” from non‑European locales and placed in European museums now read as uncomfortably colonial.
  • Another thread notes that as ancient DNA reveals dramatic population replacements, claims that artifacts “belong” to whoever lives on the land today will grow more contentious.

“Oldest” versus “oldest known”

  • One commenter is persistently annoyed by phrases like “oldest recorded transaction” without qualifiers like “known” or “surviving.”
  • Others reply that language is typically understood to mean “oldest surviving example we know of,” though some agree that explicitly saying “oldest surviving/known” would be more precise.