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[–] 64 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Script itself wasn't invented for poetry or stories or history but for bookkeeping. Who owns how much and who own whom what amount? Let's write it down.

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  • [–] 28 points 11 months ago

    I like that you can still sorta tell that the universal convention is preserved where the last column is for comments.

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  • [–] 49 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    This is actually a moon mining ROI breakdown from Eve Online. Long story short, you lose one drone and you've wasted an hour.

    But seriously, great share, thanks!

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago

    It has broken edges not because of weathering and age, but because it was thrown to the ground when the self referencing formula kept locking the whole database up.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Genesis 1.0:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the excel.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago

    It's called a ledger

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Wait until this guy learns how people used to send letters instead of emails and that paper was used instead of word.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago

    During the period this tablet was made, letters were also written in clay. My favorite part of this is clay envelopes were also made for documents, and they sometimes contained similar information that we place on envelopes now. Other times they had a condensed version of the document instead

    An Old Assyrian (circa 1800BCE) clay tablet partly encased in a clay envelope

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    I always say "People have been people for as long as there have been people," which means this guy's boss was a dickhead, too.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    How do formulas work on a physical spreadsheet?

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    It's actually kind of interesting, they used wax tablets as scratchpads back then. This practice actually continued well into the early modern era because paper, parchment, and vellum were quite expensive and people wanted something that could easily be erased. So most likely they would have written the calculations in wax and only put the final results in clay. By the way, cuneiform tablets are essentially pottery, not rocks. They were basically clay versions of the wax tablets I linked that got fired in kilns for preservation.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    If you write things down instead of just remembering them, you'll lose your ability to remember anything at all and will eventually start forgetting what you want to write by the time your chisel touches the stone!

    Plus think of all the wasted rocks whenever you make a mistake and need to start over! What if we run out of rocks?? What will we stand on then?

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago
    [–] 6 points 11 months ago*

    That's so sexagesimal

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that people in this community don't recognise that this is a Blood Meridian quote.

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