A data table thousands of years old (2020)

https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2020-08-12.html

by rickcarlino • 2 years ago

256 108 2 years ago

datafix.com.au

mcphage2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty confident, though, that in another thousand years there will still be ancient data tables "archived" underground in Iraq, while todays' billions of spreadsheets in digital form and on non-archival paper will have long since disappeared.

Probably, but you never know. The Mesopotamians didn’t intend their tablets to last this long, either—but they often got burned in fires, which hardened them so they lasted. So some of our artifacts might get accidentally preserved as well.

ggm2• 2 years ago

"Memoirs found in a bathtub" by Stanislaw Lem. Printouts preserved in mud deep in a fictitious pentagon basement for thousands of years after nuclear holocaust wipes computer memories.

mcphage2• 2 years ago

That book is wonderfully unsettling. The ending was perfect.

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

The older the stuff you read is, the stronger the selection bias.

There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive.

The success of purposeful creation of monuments is usually attributed to their size, like pyramids. Turns out making it big is a pretty good strategy if you want something to last and (not loose it).

I'm sure in mileniums we will have both purposefully long lasting small and big monuments, as well as unintentional long lasting records.

micromodel• 2 years ago

There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive.

I don't think this part is true. Papyrus wasn't cheap.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

This is what I don't really understand about modern-day rich / famous people; they'll build big houses and yachts, and some governments even build government seats and palaces which might be preserved for the ages. But it doesn't feel like they're building "monuments" per se.

Then again, survivorship / selection bias like you said; we don't yet know what the Wonders of the World built today will be in 2000-4000 years, because we don't know what will remain or what will be considered significant. I mean there's huge skyscrapers, ostentatious buildings built in the richer cities. There's a giant clock in Mecca, the Venetian and Grand Lisboa in Maccau, the New Century Global Complex in China, etc.

But few or none built to just exist, like the pyramids that were sealed off.

After solving world hunger etc, if I were stupidly rich, I'd have a monument built. Sealed off containing the world's knowledge in redundant and multiple mediums. And with a visitor center / museum because people will be curious, of course.

mncharity2• 2 years ago

some of our artifacts might get accidentally preserved as well

IIRC (not likely these decades later), when recovering old MIT AI Lab backups (9-track tape goes slowly by a read head, yielding bits, plastic backing, and a pile of magnetic dust), one lisp machine backup contained a core dump file, which included the screen buffer. A single moment of someone's long-ago day, with assorted windows, including the cause of the dump. And a bit of graphics fun - a critter crawling across the screen - frozen in time.

runevault• 2 years ago

What are the odds any electronic data store, tape or SSD or anything in between, could last that long?

I guess some random store keeps getting moved from one storage device to another by accident, but beyond that I'm not sure if it is reasonably possible.

panstromek2• 2 years ago

Microsoft is has been developing one for quite some time. Glass structure that should last thousands of years.

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

The advantages of tables, are that you can visually or geometrically read the contents easily, whether it is reading a row and only a row, or wether it's reading the contents of a column sequentally.

While we had spreadsheets since the 90s, which visually allow the user to create tables. Relational database take this concept to the very architecture in both the storage format and as in the data retrieval mechanisms.

Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields, and by extension each row has a fixed length. This is equivalent to the horizontal length of a column, but in terms of bytes. This allows for quickly finding the nth row of a table, or the ith field of a column.

Query languages formalize the algorithm for reading a traditional table. Going row by row checking the description of each transaction (Select * from table), comparing it to our searched term (where description = salary), then going to the column with the destination account, and looking for that in another table with a similar process.

Just that, interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different types of accounting software.

gerdesj5• 2 years ago

"While we had spreadsheets since the 90s"

I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.

thristian• 2 years ago

VisiCalc, the first computerised spreadsheet, was released in 1979. Presumably there were non-computerised spreadsheets, actual large sheets of paper, used for calculations before that.

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

My bad. Also lotus 123.

gerdesj5• 2 years ago

"Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields"

What is a varchar or a blob? Even a .csv allows for a variable length field (by default). I think you missed out the word: "can".

Fixed field width is an optimisation strategy not a requirement.

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

Not strong on db internals, but those are 100% the exception, late additions, and not recommended for performance.

The table is stored as a fixed length structure and var length fields are pointers to some other place.

In the same manner that a traditional table might point to some other book for more details.

Csv is also exclusively variable length, and it's nevet fixed length.

Another example of fixed length structures are arrays. I'm not postulating a novel breakthrough.

zitterbewegung• 2 years ago

LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet but was on mainframes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet?wprov=sfti1#

gerdesj5• 2 years ago

"interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different types of accounting software."

The tablets are tabulated lists which is how anyone might do a shopping list or list of income and expenditure.

Double entry book keeping is only around 600 years old (I'd have to look it up). That method requires an in from somewhere corresponding to an out from somewhere else. It enables or enhances all sorts of funny business and also cross checking and auditing.

Then we move on to the full Nominal/Sales/Purchase ledgers with Cashbook and all the rest. Perhaps we might instead go for the personal version.

Anyway, my point is that accounting does not depend on IT related metaphors.

The tablets in OP are tabulated tallies of works and how they were generated - it is like a spreadsheet where the human is the computer.

Funnily enough, we call them tablets instinctively. Computer originally meant a person who computed things. No need for metaphors at all 8)

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

Not sure how double entry book keeping relates here. Not relevant to tablets, to excel, nor rel dbs.

Is the argument here that single entry bookkeeping is not real accounting?

notorandit3• 2 years ago

DEBK is also tabular. And it's a perfect solution when you cannot (or don't want) delete or update older data. Just like when you write on clay tablets.

I wouldn't be surprised if we recover Sumerians example of DEBK tablets.

niobe• 2 years ago

Excel is in our DNA and will never die

TZubiri8• 2 years ago

Funnily enough our DNA does not use a fixed-length offset mechanism. It uses null termination sequences (and start sequences too, for some reason.)

Which is closer to the storage mechanism of excel (XML), and not to it's visualization interface (tables).

klabb3• 2 years ago

Interesting. Well yeah null termination seems better if (a) you don’t have an integer encoding and (b) you have random ”bit” flips.

jon_richards• 2 years ago

Unfortunately our DNA is also in excel. Several genes had to be renamed because they kept being identified as dates.

smcin• 2 years ago

Excellent

jbkcc• 2 years ago

This is amazing. I’ve been collecting images of tables in an are.na album for a while, trying to get a handle on all the ways they show up in visual culture. This one is by far the oldest I’ve ever seen! If you’re interested in this you might enjoy the album, too. It’s https://www.are.na/joshua-kopin/tabular-presentation

Micoloth• 2 years ago

Ha. What an amazing collection!

It hits so many right sposts. Thanks for sharing it

mvkel• 2 years ago

Projects like this are marvelous.

Without it, we will be re-learning so many things that we should already know.

eieio2• 2 years ago

Is there a good word for "obvious" that doesn't have negative connotations?

When I see something like this it makes me think about how a spreadsheet structure is "obvious" - but I mean it positively! It's a beautiful, intuitive, almost inevitable way to lay out data, and I'm delighted that folks came up with something like this so long ago.

I feel this way about a lot of my favorite posts on HN, whether they're a bit of history, a totally new invention, or something different entirely. And I certainly feel it here.

highwind• 2 years ago

How about self-evident?

hammock2• 2 years ago

Innate, instinctive, intuitive, natural, automatic. I don’t think obvious is a bad word though.

Descartes did not invent x-y coordinates until the 1600s, yet a table of columns and rows is totally natural and emergent given a two-dimensional recordkeeping medium

hammock2• 2 years ago

Column headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to row headers.

notorandit3• 2 years ago

Usually we put "properties" as column headers while rows represent entities whose those properties are assigned or recorded.

It would be interesting to understand why it's not been the other way around or whether Sumerians used both orientations.

65102• 2 years ago

the last col is the header. I see the use of row-span too! Something we are still struggling to figure out.

moffers• 2 years ago

You said it already! “Intuitive”.

zipping1549• 2 years ago

You can both be unintuitive at first and be obvious at the same time. Double entry accounting, for example.

geor9e• 2 years ago

emergent? natural? a 2D surface has two orthogonal directions, so if you're using lines, so your choices are either grid, slanted grid, or godawful mess

noduerme2• 2 years ago

I think once someone wrote a list (a 1D array), it was pretty inevitable it would turn into a 2D array within a week or a month. But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more? And then within a couple centuries we got tensors, and the arrays are too big to check.

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more?

Paper is two-dimensional.

mncharity2• 2 years ago

Hmm, and 2D sort-into-piles is done even in kindergarten. Including one axis being ordered. Especially 2x2 sorts.

Oddly, ordering both axes is very rare - size-vs-color yes, and color-vs-numberOfHoles, but not size-vs-numberOfHoles. Which was a puzzle when considering xkcd-ish discrete Ashby charts for K.

Sort-within-cell is also uncommon.

Hackbraten• 2 years ago

There's a German word "naheliegend" (pronounced nuh-her-lee-guend), whose literal translation would be "lying nearby".

I think we typically use it as a mixture of "sensible", "seemingly natural" and "obvious" without that confrontational subtone.

eieio2• 2 years ago

I think plenty of other comments have made good suggestions but that this clearly takes the cake for me!

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that German has a great word for this, although I admit when I started reading your comment I expected it to be a compound word.

I quite like the literal translation too!

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

That word sounds like you’re saying “near the ground”.

philipswood• 2 years ago

In Afrikaans we have the (slightly old fashioned): Voor die hand liggend.

Something like: It is right in front of your hands.

jasdi• 2 years ago

An artist once told me some people enjoy Making Contact with Beauty. In the Simplest of things. And that can become a goal or a guiding philosophy.

It's like when you look at a facial expression in a frame of Calvin & Hobbes or Tintin or Miyazaki it is extremely SIMPLE.

The fewest of dots, dashes and squiggles basically. Change them even a little and you get total shit.

It captures Reality in such a fantastic way, exciting the exact same neurons in your head that something real does, that people have to come up with words for it like - Beauty.

begueradj• 2 years ago

It's obvious nowadays in the era of a sofa and Netflix, not 4000 years ago where 9 out of 10 new born kids die and those who survived generally didn't make it until 25 years old, and where the primary issue of people was what to eat the following day and in case no tribe attacks them in the middle of the night if they would survive to the bite of that scorpion.

defrost• 2 years ago

   Almost half of all births ended in death before the age of 5, greatly lowering the average.

  When infant mortality is removed, evidence seem to show averages of life expectancy for 3000 years ago to be around 52, give or take 15 years.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

That's a lot of assumptions about life 4000 years ago when the article provides evidence of someone doing admin work instead of worrying about food, "tribe" attacks and scorpion bites.

noselasd• 2 years ago

When you're cities of 20-40k people 4000 years ago, there's quite a bit of admin work that has to be done - it's not all small farmer villages or hunter-gatherers. Ancient Sumeria was quite advanced.

yard2010• 2 years ago

You make the dystopian world we live in sounds like a disney utopia. Which is very nice.

coldtea3• 2 years ago

and those who survived generally didn't make it until 25 years old

That's a myth.

fifilura• 2 years ago

Having worked a lot with columnar data, I often have to tell the object oriented crowd that "It's the rows and columns, stupid!".

(And that last sentence was a paraphrase. They are far from stupid, just differently wired).

I think managers should be emboldened to do that too. They often work out their solutions in Excel. And then the developers turn those fine rows and columns into an object oriented soup.

CalRobert• 2 years ago

It is indeed! But it fails when you need more dimensionality.

mrkeen• 2 years ago

The problem is my rows typically don't have the same columns.

A 'userCreated' row has 10 columns (for now), but a 'userDeleted' row overlaps on only two of those (let's say 'Datetime' and 'userId').

And userBanned brings in a new column 'reason' which isn't in the schema, so I have to store it in some catch-all json 'data' column which kills my db's size & performance.

I persevere with the format, but always wish we were using the right tool for the job (nosql).

MomsAVoxell• 2 years ago

I had the thought that the columns served different levels of literacy - that there is a hierarchy of competence in the columns themselves, or at least that each column could be assigned to a different person for action.

For example, the purpose of the columns containing sums could be the assignment to an individual (or eventual role) which is responsible exclusively for the paying-out of the sums indicated - whereas the prior columns were to be used by roles responsible for setting the amounts to be paid, and a role perhaps for assaying the land/works.

Each column could be for an individual role, and thus the table indicates not only figures and amounts, but also organizational structure.

If one flows from left to right, one can see different identities involved in filling in the cells, eventually terminating in the actual recipients of the funds being distributed.

DamonHD• 2 years ago

My uncle, who was a top UK lawyer but not really into tech, basically reinvented a spreadsheet on paper spread over his office floor, while working on a hige planning case. Yes, I think that basic structure will pop out of a number of problem types, eg Gaussian elimination.

jiggawatts• 2 years ago

And yet when I got bored during the COVID lockdown and decided to analyse the published data sets against infection spreading models such as SIR, to my horror I discovered that every published data set had something Stupid about it with a capital S. Most commonly it was transposed data, published with each day's data in columns instead of rows.

I remember one official announcement from a state government health department that was investing significant money into developing a "scalable solution" because... they hit the 16K Excel maximum column count. Of course, they could have simply put their data into rows and "scaled" their existing solution to 1M data points, but they'd much rather pay Deloitte, Accenture, or whomever a couple of million dollars for a real enterprise system instead.

Next time I come across idiocy like this, I'm going refer back to this article and point to the four thousand year old tablet and say: "Those people got it! They understood how to do this! Why haven't you caught up to technology that was around before widespread adoption of the wheel!?"

nuancebydefault2• 2 years ago

The problem is mostly that some structure that looks good at start, looks bad after a while of using.

Maybe the first data was on postit notes. As the pandamic kept returning in waves, they thought they could use data in excel with new dates per row. Then new beta, delta,... variants emerged and they ran out of horizontal screen real estate.

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

“Natural”

shalmanese• 2 years ago

Carcinization. All software inevitably evolves into an Excel that can read email given a long enough timeline.

ziotom78• 2 years ago

I'm not a native English speaker, but could "natural" be appropriate for this context?

mmooss• 2 years ago

Many modern people do not understand spreadsheets.

BeefWellington• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing this. Pretty awesome to see how old aspects of technology are, especially as relates to clear and concise communication.

29athrowaway2• 2 years ago

If you like history and you like tables, these are some of the most historically relevant tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables

ecocentrik• 2 years ago

Not quite as ancient but still very cool. "Nicolaus Copernicus bought a copy while at the University of Cracow, and cared about it enough to have it professionally bound with pieces of wood and leather.[9] Alexander Bogdanov maintained that these tables formed the basis for Copernicus's development of a heliocentric understanding in astronomy."

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

That's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data / record keeping can lead to great scientific results.

numpy-thagoras• 2 years ago

Sumerian Spreadsheets. This means only one thing: the History channel will find a way to attribute the creation of spreadsheets to aliens.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

Or maybe it was a time traveling accountant? Either way, the truth is out there...

OrvalWintermute• 2 years ago

Notice how it includes the Igigi (lesser gods of their pantheon) and mention great weapons of An[u], Enlil & Enki, the Ruling gods of their pantheon, associated with city destruction

closed• 2 years ago

It's neat to see tablets discussed in the context of modern tools. I recently helped edit an article for Great Tables[1] that discusses the history of tables like this, and recently Hannes mentioned a protocuniform tablet in his duckdb keynote at posit::conf()[2].

There's something really inspiring from realizing how far back tables go.

[1] https://posit-dev.github.io/great-tables/blog/design-philoso...

[2] https://youtu.be/GELhdezYmP0?si=bSISmFjeRpKxfLWq

kijin2• 2 years ago

"Table" and "tablet" literally have the same root. It's flat surface, a two-dimensional blank space that is perfect for laying out data, dinner, or anything else you'd like to display.

notorandit3• 2 years ago

What it's not obvious it the amount of technical and cultural advancements Sumerians did. We don't know enough about them as their history has been mostly lost and only crumbles and leftovers can be recovered from the dust of the millennia. Besides a bunch of words still in use, in some form, in modern languages, the writing itself seems not to be the greatest invention, while bringing humanity from prehistory silence to history chatter.

I wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence of more technical and social advancements we have given for granted in the past thousand years.

rezmason• 2 years ago

For years I've wondered what the first, earliest color lookup table was.

Like any mapping from an index to a color value. Like a design for a Roman mosaic that indexes tesserae, or a declaration of which parts of a statue or mural would receive which color paint. Or even the inventory of someone who traded in pigments.

smpx7• 2 years ago

Excel -2k

psd13• 2 years ago

Oh god. Debugging macros was horrible before VB.Cuneiform. You had to sprinkle your code with because there was no support for

nuancebydefault2• 2 years ago

Still trying to debug those 2 sentences...

GnarfGnarf2• 2 years ago

I'm working on a project to 3D-print tablets of text, press them onto clay slabs, and fire the latter in a kiln. Should preserve the information, such as biographies, for as long as Babylonian tablets.

jvm___• 2 years ago

I've wondered if you could stamp them into an aluminum can. Like with a typewriter (obviously too weak) or some vintage typesetting press device.

Not sure if the aluminum would last it probably would.

yurishimo• 2 years ago

Depends on how thick the metal is. I’ve seen aluminum cans be eaten away by time. Something a few millimeters should suffice.

GnarfGnarf2• 2 years ago

I did this for a while. I found a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil (not quite pie-plate thick), and scavenged some old dot-matrix printers. Removing the ribbon, I printed text and low-res images on the foil. I inserted a roll containing my father's biography in the ashes of his funeral urn. Should be readable by archaeologists centuries from now.

uncomplexity_• 2 years ago

that's a heavy ass ipad to bring around

yzydserd• 2 years ago

Rumor has it the ancient Chinese were using Pandas even earlier.

jcarrano• 2 years ago

I wonder what would happen if we had a time machine and could bring one of those ancient accountants to the modern age. Maybe in just a couple of weeks they would be able to fill in Excel sheets with ease.

nunez• 2 years ago

Amazing. I wonder what their generations "AI" was.

A data table thousands of years old (2020)

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