This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.
{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.
We’ve uncovered less than 1% of the Assyrian/Babylonian tablets that are thought to exist. Theres a lot of stuff out there that’s well preserved thankfully even if we haven’t uncovered it yet.
Whats cool is cuneiform could be written phonetically so a Babylonian scribe could write down any language even if they don’t understand it. They apparently could also write at the speed a person speaks so they acted like stenographers in court or executive assistants for rich merchants or elites.
People probably used a lot of slate+chalk or wax tablets for regular note-taking.
Similarly, archival grade paper and printing is STILL really expensive and folks STILL aren’t doing that for their grocery lists and honey-dos. Not to mention that nearly all of our digital writings are extremely ephemeral. Wont somebody think about the future historians!!!
I keep a paper diary which I just assumed would rot away as a write-only set of documents, but then I think of all the digital work from 10+ years ago I’ve lost to plain bit rot, and I wonder if these chickenscratch braindumps on graphite and cheap recycled paper aren’t the more durable medium.
Yeah you have to be careful what you write in there for legal reasons, but you could just omit some stuff or use coded phrases only you know the meaning to (eg. Got to the milk just before it expired = had hot homo sex in the park).
This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.
And then you get someone like Thomas Thistlewood. Just an average slave owner.
This mofo sold me shitty copper. Ea-Nasir, you’re on my shitlist for eternity, you hear me!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
If we actually had lots of surviving material like that it would be amazing.
Before the early modern period it was rare for people to write down boring or mundane shit because writing was hard and expensive.
We’ve uncovered less than 1% of the Assyrian/Babylonian tablets that are thought to exist. Theres a lot of stuff out there that’s well preserved thankfully even if we haven’t uncovered it yet.
Whats cool is cuneiform could be written phonetically so a Babylonian scribe could write down any language even if they don’t understand it. They apparently could also write at the speed a person speaks so they acted like stenographers in court or executive assistants for rich merchants or elites.
People probably used a lot of slate+chalk or wax tablets for regular note-taking.
Similarly, archival grade paper and printing is STILL really expensive and folks STILL aren’t doing that for their grocery lists and honey-dos. Not to mention that nearly all of our digital writings are extremely ephemeral. Wont somebody think about the future historians!!!
Now writing is very easy, though I’m somewhat glad the whole bullshit going on on social media is rather easily lost as well. 🫠
I keep a paper diary which I just assumed would rot away as a write-only set of documents, but then I think of all the digital work from 10+ years ago I’ve lost to plain bit rot, and I wonder if these chickenscratch braindumps on graphite and cheap recycled paper aren’t the more durable medium.
I’ve thought about keeping a journal but I don’t think having a copy of a lot of my thoughts laying around for someone to find is a good idea.
Yeah you have to be careful what you write in there for legal reasons, but you could just omit some stuff or use coded phrases only you know the meaning to (eg. Got to the milk just before it expired = had hot homo sex in the park).
Wait, is this someone’s actual ancient journal??? How incredibly exciting? And what was that slightly different recipe?
Highly suggest Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror for all of you who like this stuff. All her work is great.
The Spectrum Through The Ages.
“autism was invented by modern liberals to fake a diagnosis”
Journal from ancient mesopotamia: