One of world’s oldest names found on clay tablets

Also, directions on making beer 5,000 years ago

“A clay tablet inscribed with one of the first known proper names in history sold at auction last month for £175,000 ($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. … 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.

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/59374