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.
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 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.
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).
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 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.
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.
Readit News
Without it, we will be re-learning so many things that we should already know.
It hits so many right sposts. Thanks for sharing it
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.
I think we typically use it as a mixture of "sensible", "seemingly natural" and "obvious" without that confrontational subtone.
Something like: It is right in front of your hands.
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!
Paper is two-dimensional.
It would be interesting to understand why it's not been the other way around or whether Sumerians used both orientations.
That's a myth.
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.
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.
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!?"
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.
(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.
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).
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
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.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think this part is true. Papyrus wasn't cheap.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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)
I wouldn't be surprised if we recover Sumerians example of DEBK tablets.
Is the argument here that single entry bookkeeping is not real accounting?
I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.
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.
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.
Not sure if the aluminum would last it probably would.
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
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.