Curious: Oldest dated artifact known. Book, coin or any item?

[newnan man]

I was wrong about my bottle of Crown. It wasn't 1985, it is 1982. So, definitely ancient.

 

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[Surf_Pirate]

Sharing my oldest artifacts. Here’s some oysters shells from an oyster rock around 10-12’ deep. About 200 yrds inland from a river shoreline. This was a jobsite dig in the 90’s…. We all took some home and called in a biologist who dated around 40,000 yrs old. I recently donated them to the local Marine aquarium.

 

[ConceptualizedNetherlandr]

That's Interesting about the Diamond Sutra Manuscript copy. It's from the Tang Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty was around 600-900AD (CE). The manuscript is still the oldest printed book.

My copy of Kama Sutra is way younger (only thong dynasty) than that, but way more wore out

 

[Red-Coat]

Back to the serious stuff!

The oldest known written language was Sumerian, used in the area of what is now Iraq. As ‘proto-literate’ texts, it dates back to around 3100 BC (archaeologically dated) and perhaps as early as 3500 BC in pictographic form, although there is still dispute about the extent to which the glyphs are a true language and the earliest ones have not been indisputably deciphered in a meaningful way. The early ones that can be deciphered appear mainly to be economic or administrative records and ‘practice’ inscriptions by scribes learning to write. This one, in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, appears to record the transfer of a piece of land:

It dates between 3100 and c.2900 BC but, again, that’s an archaeological date not a physical date. From around 3000 BC, ‘Archaic Sumerian’ first appears and is more easily decipherable as a true language. Although there are no texts which include a definitive date, c.3000 BC or a little before would be the earliest possible physical date on any item since there doesn’t appear to have been any true written language before then.

However, Cambridge University Library in England has a Sumerian tablet said in 2018 as having been archaeologically dated at c.4,200 years old (ie c.2182 BC.) This one:

The text translates as “18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe” and, intriguingly, “4th year 10th month.” So, it’s physically dated, but the problem is that it’s not known exactly what year this related to on their calendar system. All that is known is that they divided the year into 30-day months, with each day divided into 12 periods of two hours, and each period divided into 30 parts of 4 minutes each.

Nevertheless, the ancient Sumerian calendar is believed to have begun around 2100 BC. If the "fourth year" on the tablet relates to that calendar, then the tablet could be physically dated at c.2096 BC, which isn't a million miles from the (estimated) archaeological dating of c.2182 BC.

 

[Limitool]

Back to the serious stuff!

The oldest known written language was Sumerian, used in the area of what is now Iraq. As ‘proto-literate’ texts, it dates back to around 3100 BC (archaeologically dated) and perhaps as early as 3500 BC in pictographic form, although there is still dispute about the extent to which the glyphs are a true language and the earliest ones have not been indisputably deciphered in a meaningful way. The early ones that can be deciphered appear mainly to be economic or administrative records and ‘practice’ inscriptions by scribes learning to write. This one, in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, appears to record the transfer of a piece of land:

View attachment 2188816

It dates between 3100 and c.2900 BC but, again, that’s an archaeological date not a physical date. From around 3000 BC, ‘Archaic Sumerian’ first appears and is more easily decipherable as a true language. Although there are no texts which include a definitive date, c.3000 BC or a little before would be the earliest possible physical date on any item since there doesn’t appear to have been any true written language before then.

However, Cambridge University Library in England has a Sumerian tablet said in 2018 as having been archaeologically dated at c.4,200 years old (ie c.2182 BC.) This one:

View attachment 2188817

The text translates as “18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe” and, intriguingly, “4th year 10th month.” So, it’s physically dated, but the problem is that it’s not known exactly what year this related to on their calendar system. All that is known is that they divided the year into 30-day months, with each day divided into 12 periods of two hours, and each period divided into 30 parts of 4 minutes each.

Nevertheless, the ancient Sumerian calendar is believed to have begun around 2100 BC. If the "fourth year" on the tablet relates to that calendar, then the tablet could be physically dated at c.2096 BC, which isn't a million miles from the (estimated) archaeological dating of c.2182 BC.

Good info sir... Thanks. It's always very interesting to me to read and see this type of info.