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
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.
Stemming from the equivalent Dutch “voor de hand liggend”.
And I would not have a negative connotation with it in the right context. (E.g “Een tabel is een voor de hand liggende structuur om data te representeren” - a table is an ‘obvious’ manner to represent data)
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.
This Norwegian word would not have naturally come to mind for me though, if it wasn’t for GP mentioning the German equivalent of it. It is not a word I usually use myself. But I do hear others use it now and then.
A similar English expression might be "low-hanging fruit", but again for some reason we've attached negative connotations to it. I don't know why English keeps doing that. It feels so cynical.
It's not a fault of the language, it's the culture. "Average" and "mediocre" both have negative connotations in vernacular use as well, even though they're normal and should be expected. If we expect excellence and world-shaking performance as the standard, good enough will not be good enough.
Yeah, I think saying "near lying" or "close to lying" would be less confusing. Also that is actually the order in the German word also! Because it consists of 2 words written as 1.
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.
I was just saying that pretty much no one ever did it (that I'm aware of) before a machine came along to read and write that notation. I might be wrong. I'd love to see an example of 3+d arrays written as musical notation or something from the 16th Century.
I'd imagine it's down to our convention of writing left to right, so more-related data points (such as properties of the same item) get arranged left to right.
A quick test to that hypothesis (which I'm too lazy to try to perform but offer to anyone who might be interested in looking or who might already know) would be looking at ancient Chinese table layouts. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!?"
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.
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.
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).
As I started out in a time when you had to coin your own format for everything I passionately hate it when the data has to facilitate to the tool. I'm no db wizard so I feel terrible using the json cell unsure about the level of sin involved. I also adopted comma separated fields. Don't tell anyone
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
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
The star diaries are my favourite, more whimsical. I'm very fond of his robot stories. I've never re-read the Memoirs, they were .. very unsettling. As was the futurological congress. Solaris is too overlayed by the Tarkovsky film for me now, i used to make shredded paper to hang in my office airvents as a homage.
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.
"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)
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.
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.
My Mum's typewriters had a tab key too! You used to start a paragraph off with a tab. Personally I prefer not to.
30 odd years ago I used to teach IT skills - UK govt funded qualifications. For example the RSA Computing level 1 and 2 NVQs. RSA were the really old school based qualifications (the R is for Royal) and by old school, I mean that they were old school 30 years ago! So it was basically a typing exam.
Each folder of "evidence" - 12 units, two or three pieces of evidence each - was allowed something silly like three mistakes. A mistake includes a typo, spacing and other daft things. The units were spreadsheets, word processing, databases, email, fax and more. Each piece of evidence could be quite a lot of text. You might notice that I put two spaces after a full stop (period). That's an old habit and failure to do so is a mistake.
Obviously the world has moved on since. Did you know there are at least four types of tab stop these days? Left, right, centre and decimal. Few people know or even care about decimal tabs. You can avoid them in web dev style and use a table to emulate them, but I will notice!
Anyway the tab key is way older than IT.
(EDIT) It seems HN coalesces multiple spaces into one when displaying.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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
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.
I don't think you need integer encoding to process fixed lengths. They do it just fine at the word level for codons. You would need a specific mechanic processors for each different schema length pattern though.
I think bit flips have no effect on the appropriateness of either fixed length or null termed. But omissions and comissions are probably why anything fixed length doesn't work.
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.
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
Projects like this are marvelous.
Without it, we will be re-learning so many things that we should already know.
Ha. What an amazing collection!
It hits so many right sposts. Thanks for sharing it
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.
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.
In Afrikaans we have the (slightly old fashioned): Voor die hand liggend.
Something like: It is right in front of your hands.
Stemming from the equivalent Dutch “voor de hand liggend”.
And I would not have a negative connotation with it in the right context. (E.g “Een tabel is een voor de hand liggende structuur om data te representeren” - a table is an ‘obvious’ manner to represent data)
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!
We have the same compound word in Norwegian, with same kind of meaning:
Nærliggende
> 2. som naturlig faller en i tanken ; som det er naturlig å gripe til
(Aside from also having a literal meaning of being in physical proximity.)
Translated:
“Which naturally comes to mind; which it is natural to resort to.”
https://naob.no/ordbok/n%C3%A6rliggende
This Norwegian word would not have naturally come to mind for me though, if it wasn’t for GP mentioning the German equivalent of it. It is not a word I usually use myself. But I do hear others use it now and then.
It is a compound word. Nahe (close by) liegend (lying).
That word sounds like you’re saying “near the ground”.
A similar English expression might be "low-hanging fruit", but again for some reason we've attached negative connotations to it. I don't know why English keeps doing that. It feels so cynical.
It's not a fault of the language, it's the culture. "Average" and "mediocre" both have negative connotations in vernacular use as well, even though they're normal and should be expected. If we expect excellence and world-shaking performance as the standard, good enough will not be good enough.
I don't think "low hanging fruit" has negative connotations attached to it.
The only negative sentiment tangentially associated with it is that when it's exhausted, further progress slows down.
Or "right in front of your face". Though that's used with and without negative connotations.
It's more like "nearby, on the ground".
Yeah, I think saying "near lying" or "close to lying" would be less confusing. Also that is actually the order in the German word also! Because it consists of 2 words written as 1.
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.
> But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more?
Paper is two-dimensional.
So? You can write arrays of whatever dimensions on paper, it's a matter of notation, not of the substrate.
This is the right answer.
I was just saying that pretty much no one ever did it (that I'm aware of) before a machine came along to read and write that notation. I might be wrong. I'd love to see an example of 3+d arrays written as musical notation or something from the 16th Century.
book is 3D
Trilogy is 4Dnine nineDnine depending where you pick it up
Column headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to row headers.
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.
I'd imagine it's down to our convention of writing left to right, so more-related data points (such as properties of the same item) get arranged left to right.
A quick test to that hypothesis (which I'm too lazy to try to perform but offer to anyone who might be interested in looking or who might already know) would be looking at ancient Chinese table layouts. :)
the last col is the header. I see the use of row-span too! Something we are still struggling to figure out.
You said it already! “Intuitive”.
You can both be unintuitive at first and be obvious at the same time. Double entry accounting, for example.
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.
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.
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.
>and those who survived generally didn't make it until 25 years old
That's a myth.
You make the dystopian world we live in sounds like a disney utopia. Which is very nice.
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.
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.
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.
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!?"
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.
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.
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).
As I started out in a time when you had to coin your own format for everything I passionately hate it when the data has to facilitate to the tool. I'm no db wizard so I feel terrible using the json cell unsure about the level of sin involved. I also adopted comma separated fields. Don't tell anyone
It is indeed! But it fails when you need more dimensionality.
I'm not a native English speaker, but could "natural" be appropriate for this context?
How about self-evident?
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
I'm never not going to be gobsmacked that Euclid didn't ever try using a coordinate grid as a tool. 8I
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
Carcinization. All software inevitably evolves into an Excel that can read email given a long enough timeline.
Many modern people do not understand spreadsheets.
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.
“Natural”
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Sumerian Spreadsheets. This means only one thing: the History channel will find a way to attribute the creation of spreadsheets to aliens.
Or maybe it was a time traveling accountant? Either way, the truth is out there...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Microsoft is has been developing one for quite some time. Glass structure that should last thousands of years.
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"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.
That book is wonderfully unsettling. The ending was perfect.
The star diaries are my favourite, more whimsical. I'm very fond of his robot stories. I've never re-read the Memoirs, they were .. very unsettling. As was the futurological congress. Solaris is too overlayed by the Tarkovsky film for me now, i used to make shredded paper to hang in my office airvents as a homage.
Peace On Earth is my favourite Lem by a long way. The English translation has aged better than Memoirs, too.
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.
"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)
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.
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?
"Anyway, my point is that accounting does not depend on IT related metaphors."
LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet but was on mainframes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet?wprov=sfti1#
"While we had spreadsheets since the 90s"
I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.
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.
The tab character, along with record separators were present in the OG ascii block too, so they were probably always there.
My Mum's typewriters had a tab key too! You used to start a paragraph off with a tab. Personally I prefer not to.
30 odd years ago I used to teach IT skills - UK govt funded qualifications. For example the RSA Computing level 1 and 2 NVQs. RSA were the really old school based qualifications (the R is for Royal) and by old school, I mean that they were old school 30 years ago! So it was basically a typing exam.
Each folder of "evidence" - 12 units, two or three pieces of evidence each - was allowed something silly like three mistakes. A mistake includes a typo, spacing and other daft things. The units were spreadsheets, word processing, databases, email, fax and more. Each piece of evidence could be quite a lot of text. You might notice that I put two spaces after a full stop (period). That's an old habit and failure to do so is a mistake.
Obviously the world has moved on since. Did you know there are at least four types of tab stop these days? Left, right, centre and decimal. Few people know or even care about decimal tabs. You can avoid them in web dev style and use a table to emulate them, but I will notice!
Anyway the tab key is way older than IT.
(EDIT) It seems HN coalesces multiple spaces into one when displaying.
My bad. Also lotus 123.
"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.
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.
Sqlite stores everything as variable length I believe. They have their own varint type for storing integers.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on how thick the metal is. I’ve seen aluminum cans be eaten away by time. Something a few millimeters should suffice.
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
"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.
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.
Rumor has it the ancient Chinese were using Pandas even earlier.
If you like history and you like tables, these are some of the most historically relevant tables:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables
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."
That's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data / record keeping can lead to great scientific results.
Scientific theories are models, and models are based on data.
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
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.
Excel is in our DNA and will never die
Unfortunately our DNA is also in excel. Several genes had to be renamed because they kept being identified as dates.
Excellent
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).
Interesting. Well yeah null termination seems better if (a) you don’t have an integer encoding and (b) you have random ”bit” flips.
I don't think you need integer encoding to process fixed lengths. They do it just fine at the word level for codons. You would need a specific mechanic processors for each different schema length pattern though.
I think bit flips have no effect on the appropriateness of either fixed length or null termed. But omissions and comissions are probably why anything fixed length doesn't work.
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.
Thanks for sharing this. Pretty awesome to see how old aspects of technology are, especially as relates to clear and concise communication.
Excel -2k
Oh god. Debugging macros was horrible before VB.Cuneiform. You had to sprinkle your code with because there was no support for
Still trying to debug those 2 sentences...
My heiroglyph emojis seem not to render in my client. That ruins the comment. Don't worry, you didn't miss much...
Amazing. I wonder what their generations "AI" was.
that's a heavy ass ipad to bring around