3,400-Year-Old Post-It Found - DayRiffer

3,400-Year-Old Post-It Found - DayRiffer: "3,400-Year-Old Post-It Found
Culture

A fragment of a clay tablet from ancient Greece has been serendipitously discovered - and it 'seems to be a 'page' from a bookkeeper’s note pad. Not meant to be saved as a permanent record, it was not baked in a kiln, but ended up in a refuse dump, where a fire hardened the clay for posterity.'

The tablet is 'one of the oldest known examples of writing in mainland Europe, should cast light on the political structure and bureaucratic practices near the beginning of the renowned Mycenaean period, 1600 to 1100 B.C.'

What does it say on it? 'On one side, the tablet has one readable word, a verb meaning to prepare to manufacture. Along the broken edges are other characters, but not enough for scholars to make out the word or words. On the reverse side, the tablet gives a list of men’s names alongside numbers...'The fact that we have a tablet like this means that this government had scribes, and scribes are a product of bureaucracy,'' said Dr. Michael B. Cosmopoulos, an archaeologist and professor of Greek studies at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and director of the excavations. “'And this suggests some degree of political complexity and a growing need to keep track of commodities, property and taxes, all earlier than we once thought.'”

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