Age· The columns of time

History

3,275 BCE → Today

History begins with writing, about 5,300 years ago: what changes is the documentation, not the societies it describes.

Period defined by the existence of written sources, that is, by a change in the nature of the available documentation and not in that of the societies described. Before this limit, knowledge proceeds exclusively from material remains; after it, part of the past is attested by texts produced by identified persons with interests of their own.

What the evidence shows

The oldest known written documents are clay tablets from Uruk, in lower Mesopotamia, dated to about 3300 BCE and set down in a notation known as proto-cuneiform. Their content is accounting: quantities of grain, beer and livestock, with mention of those responsible. The nature of these texts indicates the initial function of writing, which is administrative. The support moreover conditions what survives. Fired clay is practically unalterable, which explains the preservation of the Mesopotamian archives, whereas papyrus, wood and palm leaf decompose within a few centuries outside arid climates; entire corpora have thus disappeared. The state of a civilisation's documentation therefore depends first on the material used by its scribes.

Bounds and conventions

This is the most localised boundary on the timeline. Writing appears in Mesopotamia about 5,300 years ago and in Egypt almost simultaneously, in China at least fifteen centuries later, in Mesoamerica later still. Most of the world is first documented in writing by outside observers, frequently in a context of conquest.

Opening fixed on writing, the Uruk tablets around 3300 BCE; the boundary is regional by construction, most human societies entering the written record much later.