The First Recorded Human and His Accounting Mistake

(Image credit: Poulpy/Wikimedia Commons)

It's very rare for us to find any documents dating back to the more ancient civilizations. And even if there were, we generally won't see any signatures or names of individuals. Except for this one Sumerian clay tablet which apparently shows the world's first signature, the first recording of a human, and what exactly this person did.

From this tablet, we can glean a few things. The one who wrote it was a guy named Kushim, and he was an administrator. What the document had been recording was the number of barley in a silo, and apparently, Kushim made a mistake in counting his shipments.

This is Kushim, the first recorded human in the world along with his accounting mistake.