THOUSANDS Of These Have Been Found Around The Ancient World

hey check this out I want to show you something over here I just got this in the mail and I'm super excited about it have you ever seen one of these before you know what that is you can see it's it's round it's got a got a hole in the middle of it got these funky little characters on it most people today have never seen one of these but back in the Bronze Age these things were everywhere thousands literally thousands of these have been found in archaeological sites around ancient Mesopotamia um this is a replica

it's not a real thing I'm not that much of a big shot they're called cylinder SE cylinder because it's a cylinder as you can see and seals because these funky little characters right here that was somebody's signature they use this to sign off on official transactions documents military orders that kind of thing this was how people identified who they were in documents this was equal parts ID stamps signature and jewelry because in the early days of civilization long before papus Scrolls records were kept with clay tablets information punched into it in uniform and they would

sign those records with this by Rolling it across the clay and leaving an imprint of their seal today we have digital encryption and two-factor authentication back then they had this it's a fascinating bit of History it's a relic of a Tim long past but today I've got one and I've got some clay let's take this thing for a spin shall we signed by me huh [Music] issues of personal identity and authentication are kind of a Hot Topic right now what with all of us being online data breaches scammers spammers and you know all those lovely

people that make living in the 2020s just great but this is not just the 2020s problem issues of identity theft intellectual property theft these go all the way back take this logo for example if you see this logo it means that it's an official document from the the United States publishing office or the GOP it's a federal agency that prints and distributes official documents and it can trace his roots all the way back to Benjamin Franklin way back then 250 years ago it was important to be able to prove that a document was actually from

the GPO and that seal is the best way they had to do that so they still do it to this day of course it's evolved since then if you open a PDF from them electronically like Adobe Reader will show a blue ribbon on assign certified PDF to kind of show that it's certified um there's not Adobe tools obviously clearly authenticity is important to the government I mean how else would the public have complete and total trust in everything they say but authenticity matters to regular people too I mean look whether or not you're Pro or

against cryptocurrencies and nfts and that kind of thing the major problem they're trying to fix is authentication through a distributed Ledger authentication issues are one of the main concerns around Quantum Computing because it's thought that quantum computers could be able to crack any kind of encryption in fact this past August Google actually took some steps to try to um prevent that from happening in the future they released an open source security key algorithm that supposedly will be saved from quantum computer hacking so yeah the battle for authentication is ongoing and uh it probably will be

for um ever for forever in a sense you could make the argument that the entire history of civilization is kind of a authentication arms race yeah down through the years governments and institutions have come up with all kinds of clever authentication schemes and all along there have been bad actors trying to find clever ways to exploit those weaknesses yeah forgery has been a major social problem since at least the first century BC and we know that because the Roman Empire passed a law against it actually a surprising number of surviving ancient texts are just tax

forms I mean taxes suck but you know we we've learned a lot about ancient civilizations because of it death and taxes am I right but those tax forms were super important back in their time and obviously subject to forgery so a clever trick that they employed to prevent that was signant Rings a signant was a small seal a stamp basically usually with a family crest or a personal design and for the sake of convenience they were often put on rings some ancient Egyptians use signant Rings they worked well with clay tablets you just imprint the

seal into the clay but later they'd be used with wax on documents or sometimes just stamped on ink like a rubber stamp today so they remained useful for a long time all the way up through the Middle Ages signate rings are more of a fashion thing these days but once upon a time they were The Cutting Edge of authentication technology but before the Rings especially in ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian cultures you had cylinder seals cylinder seals were carv from stone with a hollow center so a king scribe or whatever could wear it on a necklace

or maybe pinned to their clothing that way it was always on them and if they needed to use them had to sign for something they'd just roll it on the clay or they may have had a little roller pin tool that they could have put in it kind of like a paint roller they've been found all over but they were especially popular in ancient Mesopotamia which is the region around the Tigers and Euphrates rivers now mostly modern day Iraq now what advantage of cylinder seals over say the signant Rings was just the amount of space

they could provide a signant ring can only stamp what a few centimeters at most but a rolling cylinder seal gave you multiple times more space it was a pretty cool 3D solution instead of carrying a giant stamp around you could just roll it out which kind of makes me wonder is has it always been a thing to make your name the biggest name on a document you know like like the whole John Hancock by the way more space means more room for detail and they took advantage of it some of these things get crazy like

here are some from the Spurlock museum at the University of Illinois examples from the Metropolitan Museum in New York show the wide variety of materials used to make cylinder seals Limestone or even carved shell could be used but there were even seals made from semi-precious stones like this translucent shadon seal with a winged horse design is awesome it's one of my favorites so just to give you an idea of what this is supposed to look like um I ordered this from a person on Etsy they sent this little uh sample thing along with it so

I'll put this right here and you can see what it's supposed to look like now I can tell you right now from playing with it um it's it's not quite as deep as what this looks like I also noticed a small problem which is that these little indentions meet me over here these little indentions get filled up with the clay at least the clay that I have it gets filled up with so what I have to do in between these is go I got a little toothbrush over there so I'm cleaning these off as I

go okay so I'm going to start with this one cuz I've used this one before and I should point out I really don't know what I'm doing here highlighter I can use to flatten it out feel like I'm baking a cookie or something I'll try it once just using my fingers and then once with my little makeshift tool here so you can you can kind of see the design it's not great let's flip it over and try it with a tool that's better okay that definitely works better they definitely use some kind of tool back

in the day when they used this that was a thousand times better now considering how detailed these things could be and how important they were to Mesopotamian Society the the makers of these seals became very important people like it took a lot of skill to make designs into these things that would actually make Impressions that work like this one I mean in addition to the you know artistic challenge all the readable elements the letters and the numbers they all had to be carved backwards this would kind of be like copying a photograph by engraving the

negative I mean not to mention these seal makers would have been entrusted with people's very identities they had to be somebody with a lot of Integrity you know somebody who wouldn't Forge things and fake them for money and yet thousands of cylinder seals have been found um estimates suggest that there may be hundreds of thousands that are still buried out there so it wasn't just the rich and privileged that had these they must have been fairly ubiquitous so clearly ancient seal Cutters were in high demand but it seems like the nature of that demand changed

over time because cylinder seals kind of went from a practical tool to status symbol and the methods and materials that were used to make them change as well early examples were almost exclusively made of soft stone that were you know easier to carve but maybe rougher to handle U these were mostly found in the Ren gemit Nasser periods of Mesopotamian history but later examples from the period starting about 4,000 years ago were almost exclusively made out of smoother more visually appealing hard Stone and various decorations started showing up on the seals as well like ornamental

caps and other flourishes so they had clearly become Mesopotamian bling at that point there's also one archaeological site where several seals were found that had apparently never been rolled um at least none of the Impressions from those seals were ever found which seems like a shame you know given how sophisticated the seal Impressions could be cuz you know some of them indicated that they were unique to a specific family some showed not only who participated in a transaction but what was actually traded like where it came from and how it was supposed to be used

like I guess if you're somebody that does a type of transaction regularly you would get a seal made specifically for that transaction because you were doing it all the time cylinder seals finally fell out of fashion sometime after 1,000 BCE when papus took over as a material of choice for official documents this is way before it became the Avatar font I know what you dead which is actually kind of funny when you think about it CU you would think that maybe a clay tablet with a unique seal impression would be harder to fake than just

you know ink on a page and I'm sure there were arguments like that when people were switching over like a bunch of old people complaining about how things were better back in the old days with clay tablets I mean like think about just how resistant people are to new technology today they've been using these for 3,000 years I mentioned briefly earlier that cylinder seals have been found all over and it's true um Egypt had their own tradition of cylinder seals that were different from those in Mesopotamia of course they're fairly close by so they probably

got it from their neighbors to the north and made it their own but far more interesting is that cylinder seals have been found in meso America one is the San Andre cylinder that clearly shows a bird in an omeg name three a jaw uh the Wikipedia caption for this picture says the bird is possibly speaking the name is it just me or just three a jaw sound like the name of a Mesoamerican rapper maybe this was an ad for a show now experts seem to believe that the Mesoamerican cylinder seals were used to Mark cloth

not clay but thech and Mesopotamian artifacts are similar I'm not saying those two civilizations had contact 2700 years ago but I'm not not saying it but really though that just might be a case of parallel thinking because if there is a point to this video is that the issue of authentication is universal so whether they use the cylinder seals or not they had a way of dealing with authentication in ancient meso Amica and again you could say that that's what cryptocurrency is all about uh or it's what it's supposed to be all about anyway that's

how we deal with authentication today so you know regardless of what you think of crypto as an asset the whole technology of blockchains and distributed ledgers is clearly just the next thing in a struggle that has gone back since the beginning of recorded history and when I talk about distributed ledgers and blockchains and whatnot and you don't really know what I mean by all that you might want to check out the cryptocurrency course on brilliant who is kindly sponsoring this episode much obliged the cryptocurrency class starts with a brief history of currency throughout the ages

where you get a baseline of how currencies work and what problems they have and then how cryptocurrencies solve those problems getting into hash functions The blockchain Ledger proof of work and even smart contracts and if all that feels a little high level to you to start off with you can back up and start with a computer science and programming path that'll start you at the basics of computers and you work your way forward all the way to neural networks and quantum computers if you haven't tried brilliant it's kind of like playing games or doing daily

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Graphics heavy in ways that you probably didn't have when you were a kid see it wasn't your fault you were just learning the wrong way if if you'd like to try this new way of learning you can get 30 days for free when you sign up at brilliant.org aners withth Joe and the first 200 people to sign up will get 20% off the annual subscription but seriously they've got an app you can download the puzzles to your phone so even when you're offline you can check in once a day and and just make it a

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maybe I'll put the one for Keo up that was last week's video that was about like this ancient code that the Incans had uh where they did it on string I actually made one it's right here you can see it how it works in the old video or you can look at any of the others that are down the side if you're watching on your web browser uh give them a click and if you enjoy any of those videos I invite you to subscribe I do come back with videos every Monday but that's it for

now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and as I always say I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care