My Name Is...

Robert Krulwich, writing at National Geographic's "Phenomena" blog, wonders about who the first person in history might have been to write his or her name.

He speculates that it would have been a male and probably a person of high rank, such as a king or other official. He thinks the person would have been male because, he says, males tend to be "early adopters" of new things, which is a phrase I don't understand. I mean, I understand what "early adopter" means, but I've never heard of anything that suggests men are more prone to do this than women. In fact, as I understand classic male-female quest partnerships, the female is usually the one to more quickly adopt a new idea, such as using a map or stopping to ask for directions. Males as a group are portrayed as resisting this innovation, usually upon existential grounds: "We are not lost! I know exactly where I'm going!"

I do think the person would have been a male, though, because the earliest cultures we know with writing tended to be heavily patriarchal. Frequently held as second-class citizens, perhaps unable to own property or viewed as less reliable witnesses -- much as they are today in the human-rights backwater of most of the Middle East, for example -- there would have been little reason for a woman's name to be inscribed in a clay tablet or for difficult-to-make writing materials being "wasted" to record one.

As it turns out, Krulwich discovers he is wrong, at least so far as the earliest known recorded name. It turns out to be on a preserved clay tablet from Mesopotamia that dates back about 5,000 years, and the word on it that's probably a name could be the man who recorded a barley transaction: Kushim. Now, there could be older written names that predate Kushim, or it could be that Kushim is not a name at all but some entirely different word that is clear as day to a Bronze-Age scribe but clear as clay to a 21st-century linguist. So we don't really know.

But thinking about it did give me pause. The idea of having a specialized set of sounds that represents an individual is itself a quantum leap forward in perception. From a sort of undifferentiated self to the idea of individual existence is a huge leap, one which very few living creatures seem to have made. Not very many animals seem to understand themselves as selves, to get a little philosophical.

Moving from there to the idea that a particular group of sounds will encode that individual in the conversations and thoughts of others is yet another huge stride. "Oog" becomes more than the sound you make when the woman you are dragging by the hair to your cave discovers the prehistoric version of a kick in the jewels and acts upon it. It now represents you. From now on, when people who know you say, "Oog," they will mean you. Since the name has such unpleasant associations for you, you will probably wish to change it soon, but still, the idea has taken hold.

And then we go to the idea of making marks that represent the sound that is your name, so that from now on, you are denoted not only by a particular set of sounds and an embarrassing story that you wish the guys would stop telling, but also by a particular set of marks either etched on a soft surface or drawn on a flat one. While this is phenomenal, it also means that your embarrassing story will be known by anyone who reads those marks, even long after you are gone. This inspires you to leave for another part of the world where they don't know how to write yet, dwell among them and clonk in the head anybody who likes to draw things.

But having now wound my brain up thinking about the quantum leap in human perception that first spoken and then written language truly are, I will insert the control rods and damp that down, or else it will be dawn before I get to sleep.