Short Stuff: What's the oldest book?

In order to figure out what the oldest book is, one has to define what a book actually is. Listen in as we discuss this debatable topic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry again sitting in for producer
Dave ce. Uh. And this is short stuff. As I've
already said, that's right, and we're talking about books. What
is a book? What isn't a book? That book in
the window, the one with the waggony tail, That's right.

(00:26):
Do we get going? I thought we already had, but yes,
let's keep going. So there's this book in in the
National Museum of History in Bulgaria, and uh, it is
what some people consider the oldest book in the world.
Have you seen pictures of it. It's six pages of
gold sheet, like the pages are gold and not like

(00:49):
they took paper and put gold around it or the
edges are gilded. It is like a sheet of gold
metal and there's six pages like that and they're bound together. Um.
And it's written in a Truscan and uh. The Etruscans
were the direct predecessors to the Romans. They kind of
ran the area. I think that hey days around five

(01:12):
b C. And they're kind of this mysterious group because
we haven't deciphered their their writing yet, but we know
that this is a is in a Truscan book, and
so a lot of people say, there you have it, everybody.
The oldest book in the world is called the gold
Orphism Book, and this is it. Yes, it is actual,
multiple pages, like you said, it is bound. There are illustrations.

(01:35):
There's a mermaid and a harp and some soldiers and
a horse rider. And you know that. They say this
thing is years old. They found it along a river,
the Strauma River in southwestern Bulgaria and a tomb. It
was donated. This is all kind of mysterious. It was
donated by an anonymous person and then authenticated by two

(01:56):
anonymous scientists. Yeah, little sketchy. It sounds like aliens to me.
But the debate then started, well, that's not true. There's
always been debates about what is the oldest this, what's
the oldest that, what's the oldest book? And if you
think about oldest book, it becomes a little bit of
an esoteric question because you have to ask yourself what

(02:18):
is a book? Could it be a clay tablet or
a scroll, or you know, can it be something that
is an exit like doesn't tell a story, it's just
like accounting records. So you really have to sort of
define what a book is first. Yeah, So I mean
a lot of people would define a book by its
physical attributes, right, Like it's a certain shape, Um, it's

(02:40):
bound together. That's a big one for a lot of people. Um.
Some people say it has to be on paper, which
would um discount the gold Orphism book. Um. And then
other people say, well, no, no, no, it's just got
to like tell a story, say, and it can be
on anything and it doesn't have to be bound together.
And this is when everybody goes, oh boy, here we go.

(03:03):
Becomes another debate on what constitutes a book. Yeah, but
it's not an angry debate, is it. No, it's not angry.
But yet I'm angered by it because I think it's
largely unnecessary. And there is a person cited in this
House to Works article who I suspect purposefully obfuskates this

(03:24):
and initiates this debate because they don't want this question
ever to be answered. Are you talking about Laurent Ferry m. Yeah.
This is a curator of rare books and manuscripts at
Cornell and Cornell and they were actually interviewed for this
House stuff Works article about eleven years ago and Cornell
is in possession of these clay tablets that they maintain

(03:47):
the largest in the world. And uh, they're pretty old.
And some people might say, well, those are books, but
most of those, like I said about like tax records,
their financial records, legal proceedings. Uh, they don't espouse any worldview,
so I think they're in that means they are not books. Yeah,
Lauren Ferry says, a book would be something that has

(04:10):
a binding and that espouses a worldview, right, So yeah,
you can discount those um clay tablets there there. They
just don't They don't count as a book, but to
other people they would count as a book. So so
they said, well, okay, Lauren Ferry, what what is the
oldest book then? And Fairy said, either Homer's Iliad or
the Epic of Gilgamesh. The problem is, and this is

(04:33):
where I think Lauren Ferry is purposefully doing this just
to keep this debate going because they like to talk
about this kind of stuff. So the Epic of Gilgamesh
the oldest is a very old book. Um, the British
Museum has one, but it's written on clay tablets from
the seventh century b C. And yeah, it's not bound.

(04:53):
So the very example that this curator gave as the
oldest book doesn't even fall within their own parameter. And
here's where I started getting angry. All right, Well, let's
take a break then for you hulk out and hulk smash,
and we'll be right back to Well, we're not gonna
settle any debate, but we'll just talk about it more
and make you more mad. All right, let's let's get

(05:36):
back to me getting mad. Well, it depends on who
you talk to. If you start bringing religion into it
and all this stuff, then of course you're going to
have people that say you might have Christians that say, well,
the Bible is clearly the oldest book because the world is,
you know, only a few thousand years old, and the
Bible was written right after that, so what's older than that?

(05:57):
Bub and boobal scholars will say in scientists will say, actually,
the Bible has written over many, many hundreds of years,
and a lot of these stories that were written were
hundreds of years after the events that they're talking about, even, right,
But they don't say that to the people who say
the world's a few thousand years old and the Bible
was written right after they the scholars turned to the

(06:18):
rest of us and say, well, obviously these things were
written over centuries after these events. So um, here's the thing.
That's another thing that Lauren Ferry does is what about religion?
Why would you bring that part into it? That's not fair.
They're just trying to do this. And then there was
another one too that they said too, is well, you know,

(06:39):
some books are not It's not like the stories were
created out of whole cloth right when the books are written,
a lot of them are based on oral traditions. And
these oral traditions far predate any of the books that
are these oldest books that are written. And it does
not matter. It does not matter if the book is
a brand new story, but it's still older than any

(07:01):
other book than a book that was published in the
fifties based on an oral tradition from five thousand years ago.
That older book is going to be the older book.
This Lauren Ferry person is really getting under my skin. Yeah,
it can't be a book. Isn't a story. A book
is a story that has been bound and written, And
I'm you know what, I'm in my definition, it doesn't

(07:23):
have to be bound. If you'd give me a scroll
that's got a that's got a good beginning, middle, and
end to it, then that's a book. So there's papyri
that are years old that would that would qualify them,
because I mean, it's a book, but it's just one
long page, all right, that's a book. Okay, alright to me.
So we're hot on the trail here, at least as

(07:43):
far as what you consider a book. I mean, Caroac
wrote on rolls of toilet paper, right, he wrote on
was the roles of toilet paper. I know it was
a very long roll of paper over like forty eight
or seventy two hours or something like that, and like
that was the story in the book. But you can't
sell stuff like that, so you have to bind them

(08:04):
in the traditional form so you can put them on
yourself exactly. But yet, was it not a book before
when it was just on one long scroll. It's a
really great point. Now I'm just getting mad at us, No,
not us, fairy Fairy Lauren Faery, be mad at them.
All right. There's another question is what constitutes a book?
What kind of book are you talking about if you're

(08:25):
talking about a printed book in the in the understanding
of printing that we have here in the modern world. Well,
then that's easy to settle the Gutenberg Bible or the
book printed right before the Gutenberg Bible. Man, I wish
I would have looked it up. I just I forgot
about it the whole episode on I know, but whatever
book Guttenberg put out first, that would that would qualify.

(08:49):
But then you remember in that episode we talked about
China had printers that they didn't use um movable type.
They used woodblock printing, but they were still printing book books,
so you know, okay, but then other people say, well
before printing, before automatic printing, there was handwriting, but they

(09:09):
were still writing books. Okay. Well then now you're talking
about manuscripts. So so actually you come back to the
Biblical people and say, well what you got and they say, well,
we have manuscripts that were written in the fourth century.
That's pretty old, isn't it. And you say, yeah, that's
pretty old. But is it is is it any more
of a book than the gold Orphism Book? Right? I

(09:32):
don't even know where we are now in this debate,
to be honest, because I I think I'm becking myself
into a corner that I painted myself into. You can
just walk right out of it, just say this is
what I now think. I think it can be handwritten, okay,
because Jack Carowack was writing with his hand. I think
it can be on a scroll. I can't be an

(09:54):
oral story. Okay. Agree, I'm gonna say it doesn't have
to be bound. If you want to out, it might
have to be bound. But then you're getting into consumerism
and like, you know that whole argument. But I think
it has to be connected in some way. So like
if it's one long scroll, those pages are still connected. Yeah,

(10:15):
so what are you are you saying? If they slice
that scroll up into a hundred sheets and just stacked them,
that's not a book because there's a truscan um gold
sheets that are not connected, that that would not really
qualify as a book like the gold Orphism book that
are actually older than the gold Orphism book. But they
wouldn't count their just pages. You got pages, not a book.

(10:37):
Pages are part of a book, all right. I guess
it's here point I should reveal to the world that
I am Laurence Ferry. Oh my gosh, he just ripped
off his mask and first he was bob Yucker and
then he was Laurence Ferry. Bob, what is that from?
I think that was where those Budlight or the Miller commercials, right,

(11:00):
I thought it was like a cricket gun or something.
Go back and watch some of this sometime on YouTube.
Those are fantastic. Yeah they really It was Millard, wasn't it. Yeah?
Miller had great bits of nostalgia. Wow, we were raised
on TV, weren't we? Dang straight? Well, I'll tell you
who was raised on books, Laurence Ferry, and you know

(11:20):
who was raised on radio? Journey And how could you
get any better as far as endings go than that chunk? Agreed? Well, everybody, short,
stuff is apt. Stuff you should know is a production
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(11:43):
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