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):
> 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.
The title of Aczel's book is Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers.
The premise was interesting to me, but it's hard for me to recommend to anyone. I couldn't even finish it. It wasn't hard to read or dry, just not well written or edited in my opinion.
> 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 got published only after the government intervened.
One scholar even sued[2] another over copyright infringement for publishing the words he painstakingly copied off the scrolls; the guy he sued had merely copied his copy of the 2000-year-old words.
- Presumably these clay tablets have to be handled carefully when scanned
- These scans would ideally be high-resolution, requiring specialist equipment (I guess the BM has such equipment, but other institutions?)
- Once scanned, the images have to be stored somewhere (for how long?) with backups, etc
- To serve up the images to interested scholars, there has to be a system in place (over the web; is there authentication?; is it free?)
- Collaborating with other institutions who have done the same...
So lawsuits are only one of the problems with "just" scanning and OCR-ing. Still possible, of course.
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.
> Plus, I don't think parent asks why don't WE scan/ocr/machine learn translate them, but why the archeological community doesn't.
Pure speculation but if it's like any other scientific community the pressure to be the first to publish would take control. Releasing scans, pictures, etc would allow someone else to beat you to the punch which means they'll get the fame and future funding.
Which is fine if you're going to job security or trying to extract funding for the duration of your career, but being first to publicly publish proof of ownership and work done is a pretty surefire way to claim credit.
Ok, how about machine vision plus Mechanical Turk or reCAPTCHA, with the human helping with difficult symbols? Apparently we already have a training set of the translated tablets.
I read about a group doing this recently actually. The specifically avoided teach people the language so that they could just translate what the saw and not read in context that wasn't there.
Just transcribing the tablets into some sort of digital format would probably be a good step (and be a useful corpus for archival purposes if/when they accidentally/deliberately get lost or destroyed, e.g. syria)
It shouldn't be any worse than learning Japanese. May not be as easy as Mayan; I've heard those guys try to teach Mayan to anyone who will stand still long enough.
I've seen textbooks on Babylonian and Assyrian on Amazon, although I have no idea if they're any good. Any university with a Middle Eastern archaeology program might have an occasional class. You might check with /r/askahistorian on Reddit.
And yes, I think I've seen a translation of a largish tablet published by an amateur translator who learned on his own.
Seems like you would first want to translate the oldest tablets. One thing I'm not clear about is how these things are dated, Is radiocarbon dating accurate for clay tablets?
They commonly have bits of organic material in the clay, so yes.
Also, the stratigraphy provides some degree of chronology, although iirc a lot of the tablets come from a single hittite document storage facility which had collapsed on itself, so...
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, estimates for how many customers a shop might get in a day. Writing in the near-east was essentially developed as a more sophisticated accounting tool. So before I even clicked on the link, I was placing all my bets on a shopkeep. However, as a nitpick accounting as an individual profession really didn't develop until the industrial revolution when large corporations requiring high investment costs to leverage economies of scale led to changes in corporations and bankruptcy proceedings, establishing accounting as a specialty and profession in it's own right, rather than a skill that a business person was expected to learn. So Kushim wasn't an accountant, that's a very modern idea of a job. Kushim was a businessman who kept books to keep track of trade.
I don't agree. A vizier [1] is very related to an accountant.
For example: Joseph (book of Genesis) became a vizier and had to account for the supplies in storehouses.
Maybe he didn't do the accounting himself, but I'm sure they had a way to write down what was in stock and what not. They also traded with surrounding countries that were out of stock, so I'm sure this was bigger than the work of a small businessman.
"The vizier's paramount duty was to supervise the running of the country, such as a prime minister, at times even small details of it such as sampling the city's water supply."
That doesn't sound like much of an accountant to me.
It would be even more strange that Kushim could be called an accountant at a time where double-entry bookkeeping hadn't been invented. There were always people who kept records, sure. But a person who went to school to learn specifically about keeping and organizing financial records and, in all likelihood, is licensed by the state to ensure that all records are kept in a consistent manner - that's what's modern. It took a very long time for accounting to be a job instead of a task you did in certain jobs. There were even auditors who worked for the government and were basically tax-collectors. But they would actually go to a business and have the owners read aloud their financial records to ensure that they were being kept and they made sense ("audit" basically means to hear).
"Note from Robert Krulwich: I see that this column has offended a whole bunch of you. Yes, as many of you point out, my viewpoint was white, male (and hung up on fame and power) and many of you have serious, and totally legitimate arguments with my assumptions. Now that I read your comments, I’m a little surprised, and a touch ashamed of myself. But the thing is—those were my assumptions. They were wrong. I say so."
It is so sad that so may discussions end up in places like this. Absolute bullshit.
1. Didn't know Krulwich maintained a blog. It's awesome.
2. I respect that he took the time to write a thoughtful response. But reading the comments, it just looks like your standard troll BS that you see everywhere. Had very little merit.
3. Agree, it's sad that so many people seem to take pleasure in criticizing when they are anonymous.
He said something stupid, people didn't like it, and he apologized for it. Where is the bullshit in this situation?
There are legitimate historical reasons for assuming the first person who appears in records is a man, but the reason he gave was just dumb: "I’m figuring a he, because writing was a new thing, and males are usually the early adopters."
It's anti-non-personists like you who are ruining the universe. I love how you assume all of those comments are by people, and not by capybara. Can you prove it wasn't capybara? Didn't think so. Huguenot!
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 name. But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters.
Nor is it at all likely that many of the hostile commenters on this author's article have the right idea that women in ancient history were equal contributors to society's evolution. They probably were not. Not because of any intrinsic inferiority of women, but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.
The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed.
That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic.
Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting.
Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.
This is certainly the case here in Zomia where uninterrupted matriarchal societies have continued to exist until today, though they are now rapidly disappearing.
However, writing did tend to evolve only after this shift, so your statement may tend toward observational truth despite being based upon fallacious assumption.
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal
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.
> 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).
There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?
> There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?
Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us.
Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis).
Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.
We have evidence from other mammals and all other cases a strong Y-chromosome bottleneck is the result of harem male behaviour. If I had to bet I would say the bottleneck was driven by powerful males monopolising females, not females all choosing a small number of males.
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 the lines of sex.
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.)
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.
Whether accurate or not, this emphasizes that there are very small and often unintended details in society that give power to one gender or another.
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were primarily matriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.
Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?
You claimed that "most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic". I don't think the current evidence suggests this, unless by "ancient societies" you meant something like "ancient civilizations". I would define the term "ancient societies" as inclusive of pre-agricultural (hunter-gatherer) societies, and then one has to make a distinction. The established view is indeed that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian than ancient agricultural societies. Exactly which features of agriculture led to the development of (more?) patriarchy is surely still being debated, though.
I agree it would've been even more clear if I used "civilization" instead of "society". Fair point, as more precise language is usually preferable.
Are you saying the main point / logic of my post wasn't clear? It wasn't feasible to consider replacing this one word and evaluate the likely intent? This feels like you're being a bit nitpicky and pedantic.
Still, your point stands. I hope you can concede my point here too...
Yes, I was of course nitpicking. The only reason I did so is that others in this thread already seemed to be commenting based on that interpretation of your post, and in the followup comments you all seemed to be talking past each other. I don't disagree with the content of your original post in general.
> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies ...
i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small.
Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions.
There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true.
The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power.
We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.
The problem you are addressing is part of an ideology called "intersectional feminism": the idea that all interactions between two individuals are also interactions between whatever buckets the two individuals fall into -- men and women, whites and blacks, heteros and homos, cis and trans, and so on.
By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege".
And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association.
Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair.
>Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.
I think that is unlikely, especially if the support of the entire social dynamic changing is the introduction of warlike/raiding and higher population densities.
For example, there are ~5,500 species of mammals, and only 3 species of mammals have female dominated social hierarchies, and the theory on those is evolutionary not social. Therefore, your statement would make humans only the 4th mammal having a female dominated society and the only species to change the power dynamic for social reasons. I can't refute there are and have been matriarchal societies as you mention, but like the mammal population that would be the exception not the rule.
Non-patriarchal != matriarchal. (I had originally written matriarchal but changed the comment quickly as I realised had conflated multiple possible prior scenarios)
In any event, humans are a known special case for lots of other stuff, as we have advanced cognitive function and predispositions to social reasoning and inter-generational cultural preservation, so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.
>so to my mind your statistical argument is obtuse at best.
Well I included statistics, but as I note gender domination is evolutionary in mammals. Evolutionary arguments != statistical arguments.
>Non-patriarchal != matriarchal
Correct me if I am wrong, because I did interpret non-patriarchal to mean matriarchal, so I am left assuming what you meant by non-patriarchal is no gender domination pre-agriculture, is that right? If not, what does that mean, I tried googling it and I get the wiki article for matriarchy.
If you meant no gender domination, that would make humans the only mammal to evolve to not have a gender dominate hierarchy. Moreover, since other mammals all evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and since they don't have the fancy cognitive functions we have, wouldn't it be safe to say like all other mammals, we evolved and developed a gender dominate social structure first and then higher brain functions? Moreover, if primates evolved to have gender dominated hierarchies and modern humans have gender dominate hierarchies (even with our superior brains), then why would we not have had a gender dominate hierarchy until the advent of agriculture?
What evidence is there of matriarchy, and how is that defined? I think you're right that today a popular theory among anthropologists is that agriculture led to many inequalities, but like all things ancient, there just isn't much data for anthropologists to draw conclusions from.
Pre-agricultural societies certainly had a clear division of labor between the genders, but could still have had a high degree of equality in the sense that both women and men had roughly equal power in the communal decision-making.
Well, if you think about it from a reductionist perspective, in non-monogamous societies children were by definition primarily socially familiar with their mothers, because they were the only family actually known.
Evidence of matriarchy includes living matriarchal societies (eg. the Mosuo people). I am no expert, though. If you look at Wikipedia's matriarchy page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#Asia I actually live in Yunnan, which is smack bang in the middle of all of the Asian examples.
What do you mean? what makes you think there is any distinction between family and community outside of incest taboos, which may not have even existed in prehistory? What does an identification of a mother as family have to do with matriarchies? You haven't even made an argument.
>Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results
That would make humans the only mammal out of ~5,500 species to not have a social hierarchy and those other species didn't develop hierarchies because they had a surplus of food.
Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better.
Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).
To be fair, you don't have to refer to them as "Indians". Most serious academic anthropologists would refrain from doing so, preferring Native American instead. So to label them as "Indians" yourself and then to state that "it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as 'Indians'" is a bit disingenuous. I'm sure there are misconceptions but I don't take as evidence the fact that you chose to call them "Indians".
I said they're still referred to as Indians because they're still referred to as Indians. The point is the very name shows the nature of the ingrained misconceptions about them - the idea that they're from India for one. Yes, I know they're not from India, you seem to have missed the point.
I just don't understand all the guess work in the article.
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?
well he had to pad it somehow right? he couldn't just write hey I googled first written name and it's 'Kushim' first place or 'Gal-Sal, En-pap X and Sukkalgir' if the first turns out to be a job.
> 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. Many men were slaves, killed in wars, or beaten to death by the rich. Calling a society that treated women poorly "misogynistic" is like calling the USA a "technological" society. Well, it mostly is, but you could also call it an oligarchy, capitalistic, and sometimes democratic. No one sweeping term is accurate.
The Biblical story of Esther shows that women were valued, and had significant "behind the scenes" power.
I would even venture to say that there are no human societies, ever, where women were utterly powerless. Such a society would quickly collapse.
> ... but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.
As opposed to our society, where most politicians and business leaders are male?
Once we take into account incumbent advantage – where more men are incumbent - the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. When we model candidate success measured as the number of preference votes for individual candidates we do not find that women receive fewer votes than men on party ballots either.
Maybe men just prioritize competitiveness more than women do. And for some strange reason, people who are competitive out-compete people who aren't competitive.
> > 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?
> Your logic is unsound to the extreme. Your entire line of reasoning is specious at best and employs reduction to absurdity throughout.
You are reacting emotionally to the first sentence of my comment. And are then ignoring the rest of it. Labeling my argument "specious" is not a counter argument.
> You make these stark, extreme claims and assertions
Such as claiming that the Biblical story of Esther shows that women were not powerless.
Such as claiming that many men also had a terrible life.
Which are both true.
But it's easier to dismiss my argument out of hand, than to address it via facts and logic.
> Are you simply making bombastic statements for the sake of controversy?
Your opening line was incendiary. The first line of logic you used to backup that incendiary claim was completely specious, as I took time and care to explain. With limited time in a day, opening this way leaves little motivation to take the rest point-by-point. And since your entire "ethical" position and the arguments that flowed forth from it depend on that opening foundation, all that's required is to point out the flaws in the foundation.
How about you address, point by point, the obviously flawed logic I called out. If you either demonstrate how my rebuttal is incorrect or accept that maybe you were being illogical and/or unfair there, it might enable a more reasonable discussion of the remainder. If you can't even address the first part of your own statements though, then what is the point?
> > You make these stark, extreme claims and assertions
> Such as claiming that the Biblical story of Esther shows that women were not powerless.
Read carefully. Think logically. Did I say all your claims and assertions were extreme? What statements did I specifically address in my reply? Why would you then point to only your statement about Esther. If that single statement of yours was not extreme, would that somehow necessarily mean no statement of yours was extreme? How is this any kind of logical counterpoint to what I actually, specifucally said? Logic.
But related to your comment on Esther, it is indeed an example of the extreme (eg reducing my statements to absurdity) and flawed logic I was discussing. Nowhere did I say that all women in all ancient civs (or even all women in any particular ancient civ) were powerless. I didn't say women were "powerless" at all. You are creating a straw man and then arguing against it.
I simply said that, in the ancient civs which we're aware of today, it seems many were patriarchal and/or misogynistic. By definition, women are less likely to have official functions/jobs (eg government officials, accountants, merchants, scholars) which involved frequent writing and conferred power in a patriarchal or misogynistic government and civilization.
You are not arguing any of my points. You're making up entirely different points (which are also extreme to the point of absurdity) and then making arguments against those separate, made-up, extremist points.
Stop strawmanning. Read carefully. Use clear logic. It will engender a better discussion.
However, as shown in another comment, the typical "everything is misogynistic" comment is due to intersectional feminism. Which in my experience, largely does claim that men have it very good just for being men, and women have it very bad, just for being women.
A blatant statement of "the culture was misogynistic" is an overly simple classification. The culture was oppressive towards damned near everyone who wasn't of the highest class.
I just don't believe that a rich woman like the Biblical Esther had it worse than a poor free man living in the city at the same time. So her experience with misogyny gave her a better life than 99% of the rest of the population.
> Yoy are creating a straw man and then arguing against it.
No. I'm arguing against the ideas proposed by certain groups of people. People who (in my experience) typically argue that "that culture is misogynistic" means "all men have it better than all women".
I've run into many of these people online and in daily life. If you don't believe this, I'm sorry for insinuating you do. I was reacting to the normal use of that terminology, which, in my experience, does have the meaning I said.
> 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?
However, as shown in another comment, the typical "everything is misogynistic" comment is due to intersectional feminism. Which in my experience, largely does claim that men have it very good just for being men, and women have it very bad, just for being women.
A blatant statement of "the culture was misogynistic" is an overly simple classification. The culture was oppressive towards damned near everyone who wasn't of the highest class.
I just don't believe that a rich woman like the Biblical Esther had it worse than a poor free man living in the city at the same time. So her experience with misogyny gave her a better life than 99% of the rest of the population.
> The culture was oppressive towards damned near everyone who wasn't of the highest class.
Yes, yes, "all lives matter". It doesn't change the fact that given a man and woman of the same class, it was generally more oppressive to the woman, Biblical queen exemptions notwithstanding.
> It doesn't change the fact that given a man and woman of the same class, it was generally more oppressive to the woman,
Please define "oppressive"... using either gender neutral measurements, or measurements which balance comparisons against both genders.
As a case in point, I can cherry-pick the following facts, which are all true:
* women live longer than men
* more money is spent on womens health care than mens health care
* more men die in violence and wars than women
* about 80% of homeless are men
* more men are mentally ill than women
etc. Does that mean that men are "oppressed"?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I'm poking this subject with a sharp stick in order to question our assumptions. Someone says "women are oppressed", and everyone nods in agreement.
OK... what does that mean? Are the stats cherry-picked like I did above? Maybe sometimes women have it better than men, and sometimes they have it worse?
For the majority of women in most of history, oppressed means that your life is just as difficult as a random man of the same class, plus he might rape you.
I'm replying here again as the chain got too long, and as you made a point below which re-frames the entire ensuing discussion.
> [From further down in this chain:] I'm arguing against the ideas proposed by certain groups of people. People who (in my experience) typically argue that "that culture is misogynistic" means "all men have it better than all women".
Ah. Okay. Thank you for explaining and admitting this.
I do NOT subscribe to the line of thinking you are apparently disputing at all. Saying that "culture is misogynistic" means "all men have it better than all women" is absolutely idiotic, in my view. Reference the statements I made regarding patriarchal societies that also had male slavery. Many, many (probably most?) ancient civilizations included class-based socioeconomic systems. In many, the women in higher classes were much better off than the men in lower classes, on average
I'm not making any of the arguments or statements which you are arguing against. Thank you for clarifying that what you were actually reacting to and arguing against was something other than my statements, as I found your leaps in logic very surprising based on what I actually said/claimed/argued.
> I've run into many of these people online and in daily life.
I understand. Unfortunately, extremism and poor logic are all too common in discussions of important matters today. It's disappointing and frustrating.
I hope you can reflect here, though, and realize you are adding to this problem, in this example. You made an assumption about my worldview which wasn't based on any particular statement I made, and which absolutely does not represent my thoughts whatsoever. You then argued, and were even incendiary, based on that flawed presumption. This is the sort of thing that spins debates online and offline into bad places, which partially happened here as well.
> If you don't believe this, I'm sorry for insinuating you do.
Thank you, truly, very much for saying this. I feel a lot better now knowing what was actually happening here, as it made no sense to me previously. I think it's big of you to step back and reflect here.
> I was reacting to the normal use of that terminology, which, in my experience, does have the meaning I said.
I can see what you're saying, but again note that this doesn't apply to any argument I made. Thank you for clearing this up.
> the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions
Even in a patriarchy, could it not be that one or more of these professions would be seen in some early societies as "women's work"—i.e. work at first done by women because it was low-status (it was the work that was "left over") and then later because those women became skilled in said work and it became their comparative advantage?
This is, after all, what happened with typing-cum-programming in the 1950s.
Besides which, at least one of the above professions—teaching—is usually heavily connected with childrearing, and thereby usually ends up female-dominated-by-default until large-scale market forces come into play.
Yes, of course, these roles could be viewed as low-status in a patriarchy. And they might have been held by women even in a patriarchy regardless of whether they were considered low-class.
But we should consider the logic and likelihoods here.
Take the monastic/priest role or class. Does it seem more likely this role or class would be considered low-class and hold little power in most ancient civilizations, or that it would hold considerable power? Well, we can reason about this. Consider, based on what we know today, did religion seem to intermingle with government quite frequently in early civilizations? It seems so. Then the monastic/religious class likely held considerable power. Then by definition, in a patriarchy, it is more likely men held these roles more often than women. It sucks, but it stands to reason that it's likely that in most early civilizations, men more frequently held these power roles than women.
Now, consider scholars. Ask: was the ability to write widespread in most early civs? If not, would knowing how to write be a form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex more often holds roles of power? We have an educated guess for scholars, scribes, etc now too.
Follow similar logic for government officials. Would participating in government, and especially being responsible for written records in government likely confer power? It would seem so.
Follow similar logic for finance roles. Were accounts and records important? Likely yes, else why were they meticulously kept in early civilization examples? If they were important, does being an official financial record keeper likely confer some form of power? In a patriarchy, which sex likely has those power roles?
We obviously can't say for sure. But we can reason and apply what knowledge we do have.
Yes. Could have been phrased better, but it's true. For anyone who's read/heard any of his work, it's clear he's not sexist. Think the meaning he had in mind is different from how it comes off.
That's actually not true. There's great evidence for the fact that hunter-gatherer societies had a fairly good distribution of gender power. It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women.
I add that your indignation seems rather misguided. If "male-oriented power dynamics" could so easily take charge, how on earth can be conclude that women were not "intrinsically inferior"?
> It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women.
And it is only with the advent of "civilization"/agriculture that we find writing. Note that the writing discussed in this article is about someone owing some barley to someone else.
> It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women
That is exactly what I'm saying. Do you somehow contend that hunter-gatherers societies are more likely to have left written records that have survived to today?
You're trying to make some kind of argument about what is likely to happen for a single data point defined only by the exceptional circumstances that surround it. More importantly, it doesn't matter what you think is more likely, because there's no way for you to use that information to make a meaningful decision.
Not a single data point. First principles and logical analysis.
Let me put it more simply:
Did hunter-gatherer societies invent more artifacts that survived until today or did agricultural societies? This is an objectively quantifiable actuality we could check.
Which societies that we know about today had developed writing surfaces that persist until today? This is something we can check.
Be reasonable. Clearly, based on everything we know today, we're talking about agricultural societies here, not hunter-gatherer societies.
First principles and logical analysis do not tell you anything about circumstantial facts of human culture like "who was the first person to knit a sweater" or "was it a male or female name that happened to be found on the earliest artifact found by 2016."
Now, a male name might be more likely, but that tells you nothing about what it actually was. That kind of analysis is not appropriate for answering such a question. It answers some completely different question.
> most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic
Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.
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 before making inflammatory and insulting accusations to someone.
> I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.
Since I made no such assumption nor such comment, I have no idea why you wrote this. I didn't even weigh in on whether "Kushim" is likely to be a name at all. (It could be a title or a number of other possible monikers.)
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...
> And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name?
Most Indoeuropean languages have a vovel (most often "a") at the end of female names, and a consonant at the end of male names. It's just a consequence of the gender system and postfixes.
I'm not sure how old is this distinction, and I don't know if this writing system even preserved the vovels, if yes - it is indeed partial evidence that it was a male name.
But Sumerian was not Indo-european. It's considered a language isolate. And even if the name was from a different language that co-existed with Sumerian (like Akkadian), it was likely an Afro-Asiatic one.
Two 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"?
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.
I thought of both of those possibilities, but I don't think they can explain these images.
1. For the dark colored positives I don't see any evidence of the dark color bleeding through the light halo. Also, some of the positives have fingers that are faded, and some are overlaid by negatives. A light halo overlaying a dark base layer can't account for those.
2. The positives are too solid to simply be handprints. If you just make a handprint, it will have gaps in the center of the palm and between the palm and fingers (among other places). But all the images are solid silhouettes.
"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"?"
(The fourth drawing is of the two (!) cylinder seals "signing" the tablet.)
Weirdly, the best diagram of the writing I can find is on the cover of The Oriental Institute 2010-2011 Annual Report (http://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/s...). (Yeah, just the front page. There's probably an article in there somewhere.)
This version of proto-cuneiform is a syllabary with glyphs representing "KUR", "SAL", "EN", "PAP", etc. (The "X" indicates a missing glyph; there's a chip off the tablet.)
For translation, Sumerian and Akkadian, both in cuneiform, were used for record keeping and official inscriptions for a very long time, at least through the Persian empire. Sumerian, I think, was used as the language of record for a good while even after Aramaic became the lingua franca of the region. (Sumer was a leading producer of skilled information workers, a.k.a. scribes, through the period of the Persian Empire, at least.) I don't remember the whole story of decoding the languages, but there are many multi-lingual inscriptions and literally tons of these tablets, including a lot of student work, word lists, and other textbook things, and letters to people who spoke other languages (see, for example, the Amarna letters).
As for pronunciation, you've got me there. I assume it's by correspondence with other languages that we do know how to pronounce, or possibly by weaker relationships; Sumerian is (AFAIK) unrelated to other languages, but Akkadian is Semitic and Aramaic (and some other languages) are Indo-European.
Whoo, hey! Just found this note from the copyright page of the Annual Report:
"Overleaf: This text appears to identify two named slaves in the possession of a third individual. The sign for “slaves” in fact derives
from two distinct signs, one for male (
) and one for female (
) slave. Typical of proto-cuneiform texts, the inscription does not
include a preposition or verb, which would clarify the roles of the participants. This ambiguity is, in part, resolved by tablet format
and the organization of information into cases. OIM A2513. Clay. Purchased (Jemdet Nasr?). Ca. 3100
bc. 4.6 x 4.6 x 2.4 cm.
After Christopher Woods, “The Earliest Mesopotamian Writing,” in
Visible Language: inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East
and beyond
, edited by Christopher Woods, p. 39, fig. 2.6 (Oriental Institute Museum Publications 32; Chicago: The Oriental Institute,
2010). Photo by Jean Grant"
Pity the glyphs didn't make it through cut-n-paste.
> some of the images are positive and some are negative
It depends on the color of the rock underneath. When white dust is blown on a dark surface one might get the impression of a handprint rather than the outline.
Doesn't seem plausible. Some of the positives are the same dark color as the halo on some of the negatives. The rock looks to me like its all the same tan color underneath.
I am surprised that Lucy is not mentioned, or her affectionate nickname AL 288-1. Her time of 3.2 million years ago dwarfs the 3200 B.C. mentioned in the article!
if 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.
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?
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.
Probably because it's not as simple as it looks. According to a handy copy of A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC, by Marc Van de Mieroop,
"The Uruk IV notations seem complicated to us because seven different systems were used, each of which varied the physical shape of the numeral according to what was measured. For example, a sexagesimal system, relying on units with increments of ten and six, was used to account for animals, humans, and dried fish, among other things. A bisexagesimal system, which diverges from the previous one as its units also show increments of two, was used for processed grain products, cheese, and fresh fish. Volumes of grain or surfaces of fields were measured differently. [...] Although the shape of the number signs could differ between systems, the same shapes are found in various systems but sometimes with different values."
Wikipedia, citing Archaic Bookkeeping
Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East by Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund (gonna have to get a copy of that one), claims more than a dozen different numeric systems.
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.)