[HN Gopher] A data table thousands of years old (2020)
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A data table thousands of years old (2020)
Author : rickcarlino
Score : 237 points
Date : 2024-12-21 22:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datafix.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datafix.com.au)
| mcphage wrote:
| > 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.
| ggm wrote:
| "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.
| mcphage wrote:
| That book is wonderfully unsettling. The ending was perfect.
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| psd1 wrote:
| Peace On Earth is my favourite Lem by a long way. The
| English translation has aged better than Memoirs, too.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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_ wrote:
| 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.
| mncharity wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| panstromek wrote:
| Microsoft is has been developing one for quite some time.
| Glass structure that should last thousands of years.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "While we had spreadsheets since the 90s"
|
| I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.
| thristian wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| The tab character, along with record separators were
| present in the OG ascii block too, so they were probably
| always there.
| TZubiri wrote:
| My bad. Also lotus 123.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| panstromek wrote:
| Sqlite stores everything as variable length I believe. They
| have their own varint type for storing integers.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet
| but was on mainframes
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet?wprov=sfti1#
| gerdesj wrote:
| "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)
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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?
| notorandit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Excel is in our DNA and will never die
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting. Well yeah null termination seems better if (a)
| you don't have an integer encoding and (b) you have random
| "bit" flips.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| jon_richards wrote:
| Unfortunately our DNA is also in excel. Several genes had to be
| renamed because they kept being identified as dates.
| smcin wrote:
| Excellent
| jbkcc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ha. What an amazing collection!
|
| It hits so many right sposts. Thanks for sharing it
| mvkel wrote:
| Projects like this are marvelous.
|
| Without it, we will be re-learning so many things that we
| should already know.
| eieio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How about self-evident?
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I'm never not going to be gobsmacked that Euclid didn't
| ever try using a coordinate grid as a tool. 8I
| hammock wrote:
| Column headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to
| row headers.
| notorandit wrote:
| 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.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| 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. :)
| 6510 wrote:
| the last col is the header. I see the use of row-span too!
| Something we are still struggling to figure out.
| moffers wrote:
| You said it already! "Intuitive".
| zipping1549 wrote:
| You can both be unintuitive at first and be obvious at the
| same time. Double entry accounting, for example.
| geor9e wrote:
| 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
| noduerme wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start
| writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more?
|
| Paper is two-dimensional.
| d0mine wrote:
| book is 3D
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Trilogy is 4Dnine nineDnine depending where you pick it
| up
| coldtea wrote:
| So? You can write arrays of whatever dimensions on paper,
| it's a matter of notation, not of the substrate.
| mncharity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| eieio wrote:
| 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!
| codetrotter wrote:
| We have the same compound word in Norwegian, with same kind
| of meaning:
|
| Naerliggende
|
| > 2. som naturlig faller en i tanken ; som det er naturlig
| a 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.
| dpassens wrote:
| It is a compound word. Nahe (close by) liegend (lying).
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That word sounds like you're saying "near the ground".
| kijin wrote:
| 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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Or "right in front of your face". Though that's used with
| and without negative connotations.
| coldtea wrote:
| 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.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| RedNifre wrote:
| It's more like "nearby, on the ground".
| gitaarik wrote:
| 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.
| philipswood wrote:
| In Afrikaans we have the (slightly old fashioned): Voor die
| hand liggend.
|
| Something like: It is right in front of your hands.
| Insanity wrote:
| 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)
| jasdi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You make the dystopian world we live in sounds like a disney
| utopia. Which is very nice.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _and those who survived generally didn 't make it until 25
| years old_
|
| That's a myth.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is indeed! But it fails when you need more dimensionality.
| mrkeen wrote:
| 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).
| 6510 wrote:
| 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
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!?_ "
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Natural"
| shalmanese wrote:
| Carcinization. All software inevitably evolves into an Excel
| that can read email given a long enough timeline.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| I'm not a native English speaker, but could "natural" be
| appropriate for this context?
| mmooss wrote:
| Many modern people do not understand spreadsheets.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. Pretty awesome to see how old aspects of
| technology are, especially as relates to clear and concise
| communication.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| That's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data /
| record keeping can lead to great scientific results.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Scientific theories are models, and models are based on
| data.
| numpy-thagoras wrote:
| Sumerian Spreadsheets. This means only one thing: the History
| channel will find a way to attribute the creation of spreadsheets
| to aliens.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or maybe it was a time traveling accountant? Either way, the
| truth is out there...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kijin wrote:
| "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.
| notorandit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Excel -2k
| psd1 wrote:
| Oh god. Debugging macros was horrible before VB.Cuneiform. You
| had to sprinkle your code with because there was no support for
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Still trying to debug those 2 sentences...
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| 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___ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Depends on how thick the metal is. I've seen aluminum cans be
| eaten away by time. Something a few millimeters should
| suffice.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| that's a heavy ass ipad to bring around
| yzydserd wrote:
| Rumor has it the ancient Chinese were using Pandas even earlier.
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