The earliest human known by name to historians?
Kushim Tablet, c 3,100–3,400BC. Photo Credit: The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London.
Go back far enough in time and people stop being real. They become mythical. Iry-Hor, who ruled Upper Egypt in the early 32nd Century BCE, is the first pharaoh known by name. Until just a few years ago he was thought to be a legend. Neithhotep, wife of Pharoah Narmer, who united Upper and Lower Egypt a few decades after Iry-Hor’s reign, is the first woman known by name; until recently she was believed to have been male.
It’s their written names that make them real. And before the Egyptians, it was the Sumerians, the first urban civilization, who invented writing. They used reed styluses to mark clay tablets with pictograms representing both numbers and words. Though it’s a partial script, not a language (you couldn’t use it to write poetry), this cuneiform was useful for keeping the humdrum records of city life—who owned what, or, sadly, who owned whom. Some of the earliest Sumerians we know of are slave owner Gal-Sal and his two slaves, Enpap-x and Sukkalgir, named on a tablet dating from about 3100 BCE.
By then Uruk, the Sumerian metropolis on the banks of the Euphrates River, was the world’s largest city, with as many as 80,000 residents living inside a little over two square miles: priests and priestesses, warriors, merchants, craftsmen, laborers, commoners, a king. But we only know one of them by name.
Perhaps 54 centuries ago a scribe (male or female, we don’t know which) in the temple of Inanna, goddess of love and war, inscribed a record on a clay tablet a little over 2½ inches across and ¾-inch thick. The translation is literally 29,086, barley, 37 months, brewery, beer. (Sumerians loved their beer, so thick it had to be sucked through a filter straw.) It’s an invoice, or a receipt, or a promise of delivery; an accounting, depending on the amount of a measure, for a lot of barley beer over three years. And it’s signed for.
Translation by historian Prof. Yuval Noah Harari, Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Schøyen Collection.
The symbol in the lower left is actually two separate symbols, two separate sounds: ku and shim. “Kushim” has no known meaning in Sumerian. It could be a title for the transaction, occupation, or organization. But it’s believed to be the name of a person—and though scholars are divided on this, if it’s from 3,400 BCE, it’s the earliest known written name in history.
The Sumerian civilization lasted 2,500 years. Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 cuneiform tablets have been found. Less than 100,000 have been interpreted. (Including fragments, Kushim left us 77, all written in the same hand.) They include thousands of names, and it’s not unlikely that an earlier name will be discovered. But until then lowly Kushim, who kept accounts of beer, is the first.
