"Sold: One of the world’s oldest names" Topic

"A clay tablet inscribed with one of the first known proper names in history sold at auction last month for £175,000.00 GBP ($229,000). The 3×3-inch baked clay tablet dates to around 3100 B.C. and is engraved in the archaic Sumerian pictographic script dubbed Uruk III. It was kept in the archive of the Temple of Inanna in Uruk in what is now southern Iraq, one of 77 pictographic tablets found there that were written by the same hand.

The topic of this administrative record is beer production. The pictograms take the reader through the process, starting with a sheaf of barley on the center bottom of the tablet. To its left is a brick building with a chimney (the brewery). To its left is a sheaf again now inside a vessel. The dots and lines are numbers which reveal the impressive scale of this business: 29,086 measures barley over 37 months were to be delivered to the temple. Taking receipt of the beer was one Kushim, represented by the symbols "KU" and "SIM" written in the upper left above the vessel with the barley sheaf.

There has been some scholarly debate over whether Kushim was a title rather than a proper name, but Kushim's name appears on 17 other tablets, and some of those instances include the title "Sanga," meaning temple administrator. So not only is Kushim one of the world's first personal names written more than 5,000 years ago, but it might even be a signature as Kushim recorded his duties as administrator at the Temple of Inanna…"

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