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A data table thousands of years old (2020)
For a full list of BASHing data blog posts see the index page. A data table thousands of years old I knew that data tables had been around a long time, but I didn't appreciate how long until I read recently about account-keeping in ancient Mesopotamia.
The cuneiform text was transliterated and translated by Eleanor Robson, who currently heads the History Department at University College London. It's tempting to think that civilisation progresses step-wise, and that you could trace the use of data tables in an unbroken path from clay tablets to today's spreadsheets. I'm pretty confident, though, that in another thousand years there will still be ancient data tables "archived" underground in Iraq, while todays' billions of spreadsheets in digital form and on non-archival paper will have long since disappeared.
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