First surviving personal name

The earliest individual whose name was recorded in a surviving document is "Kushim", an accountant or administrator active in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk (near present day Samawah, Iraq) around 5,000 years ago. The pair of cuneiform characters "Ku" (a horizontal stroke) and "Šim" (a downward-pointing arrow) appear on 18 clay tablets recording transactions at the Temple of Inanna from the 31st century BCE. The usage is consistent with it being the name of an individual vouching for the source or validity of information ("signing off" on it).

The idea that the earliest known individual was an accountant is consistent with what we know about the early development of written language. As the societies of the Ancient Near East grew in economic complexity – with trade between cities and the complex resource flows associated with manufacturing – some means of recording transactions and balances become essential.

It is thought that writing probably began with something like simple tally marks to record counts of objects. It then expanded to include symbols to denote what the count referred to, and then symbols to explain what actions might be associated with them. So from "three", to "three bushels of wheat", to "three bushels of wheat received". A person who could write was, in this period, someone who had mastered an unusual and marketable skill, but not one that was useful outside of a specific context – akin to a court stenographer today.

An example of a document that Kushim signed off on is a tablet now known as MS 1717, held in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo, Sweden. It consists of only a few symbols (two sets of numbers, Kushim's mark, and symbols for a container of barley and a brewery) but from the context in which it was found it can be translated as "134,813 litres of barley to be delivered over 37 months to the government official kushim responsible for the brewery at the Inanna Temple in Uruk".

It is possible that "Kushim" may have been an official title, rather than a personal name, but the identification with a specific person is the more commonly accepted view. This is backed by the fact that in a few tablets his name is preceded by the word "Sanga", which is known to have been a job title (an administrator of a temple or palace).