The earliest examples of proto-writing in Mesopotamia. It says “29086 measures of barely - 37 months - Kushim”. Kushim may be the oldest recorded personal name, although it could be a title; we don’t know for sure.

5,000 years ago, a merchant in Mesopotamia scratched a bet onto a clay tablet. How much grain next season's harvest would bring. Oldest trade ever recorded. Amsterdam, 1602. The Dutch East India Company sells shares to strangers for the first time. People buying a piece of a ship they'd never sail. That's the moment markets became human. Wall Street started under a tree. 24 brokers, one buttonwood, a handshake to stop cutting each other's throats. Bombay's version: a few brokers under a banyan tree, trading on voice and trust, decades before anyone built a building for it. Every market that survived started the same way. Small. Local. Trust first, rules later. India's stock market got 150 years to walk that road. SEBI. Clearing houses. People who answer when it breaks. Crypto never got that runway. Indian traders got the apps early. Never the institution behind them. No banyan tree moment. Just platforms built elsewhere, standing behind nothing. That's the gap @niyamexchange is built into. Can't shortcut 150 years of trust. But we can do what every market did at the start: choose the harder path before anyone's watching. Every backbone of finance began as a few people deciding to do it right first. This is that part of the story. 🇮🇳

The ivory handle of the Predynastic Egyptian Gebel el-Arak knife, 3450 BC features a Mesopotamian-style 'Master of Animals' figure wearing Sumerian clothing and flanked by two lions.

A cylinder seal from ancient Egypt. Mittanian 1,400 BC. The Mitanni were an Indo-European (Hurrian) people whose kingdom in northern Mesopotamia flourished from about 1600 (Second Intermediate Period) until it was conquered by the Hittite King Suppiluliumas during the reign of Akhenaten. Few ever heard of them…

The figurine was created roughly 7,000 years ago by members of the Ubaid culture, a prehistoric society particularly recognized for its distinctive pottery and its influence across parts of Mesopotamia. Comparable elongated-head figurines have been discovered at several other archaeological sites in the region, but finding one in Kuwait was unprecedented. It represents the first example of this particular type to be recovered from the country.

Lending is one of the oldest practices in finance. Our Head of Growth, @MartindRijke, charts how the enforcement behind it has changed era to era across 4,000 years, from Mesopotamian villages to the state and ratings agencies, and argues onchain is the natural next chapter. Full article below ↓

Across the world the soul of Soviet civilization is immortal, from New York City to Moscow. All world history, from Mesopotamia, Persia, Rome, through the Silk Road to the Steam Engine, concludes in Pax Sovietica, which will be ushered in by the next wave of global revolutions.

The elites are obsessed with AI, prolonging their lives and surviving the Geophysical Event. Maybe the ancient stories about vampires and blood have some truth, and perhaps the breakaway civilization has used us as resources for their "Golden Age." In 1489, Marsilio Ficino, a priest at the Medici court, told the old to suck the blood of the young "like leeches." In 2023, Bryan Johnson put a liter of his 17-year-old son's plasma into his own veins. He called him "my blood boy." 534 years apart. Same idea. And the pattern is far older. c. 1700 BC, Mesopotamia: the gods make man from clay and the blood of a slain god. Homer: the dead cannot speak until they drink blood. Leviticus: "The life of the flesh is in the blood." Ovid: Medea drains an old king's blood and refills his veins. He wakes 40 years younger. Rome: epileptics drink warm blood from dying gladiators. 1725: Habsburg officials report "vampires" dug up in Serbia. The Balkan word vampir spreads across Europe. 1926: Lenin's old rival Bogdanov opens the Soviet blood transfusion institute and trades blood with students to stay young. In 1928 it kills him. Then the labs caught up. 2005: Stanford joins old mice to young ones. Old tissue starts healing like young tissue. 2015: Peter Thiel: "I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting." 2018: "On the record, I am not a vampire." 2016: a startup sells plasma from 16-to-25-year-olds for $8,000. Its name: Ambrosia, the food of the immortal gods. Epstein: his emails show he paid to sequence his genome and was pitched edits to his own stem cells "believed to increase longevity." He said he wanted his head frozen. $40M of his money sat in Thiel's Valar Ventures. The Valar are Tolkien's immortals. 2025, hot mic in Beijing. Putin to Xi: "Human organs can be continuously transplanted... and even achieve immortality." A year earlier, his health ministry ordered scientists to rush anti-aging research. In humans, none of it is proven. Johnson quit the plasma: "No benefits detected." Then he flew to a Thiel-backed private city in Honduras for a gene therapy the FDA never approved. The hunt goes on: $3B for Altos Labs, $180M from Sam Altman, $1B a year pledged by Saudi Arabia.

In 1919, archaeologists in Iraq unearthed a 7,000-year-old statue. It depicts a mother nursing her infant—except both share the slitted, elongated faces of lizards. Dating back to the Ubaid period a culture that predates the Sumerians—this piece is part of a larger collection of terracotta figurines featuring unmistakably reptilian traits. The statues boast elongated, tapered snouts, wide slitted eyes, and dome-like skulls made of bitumen. The act of breastfeeding is intimately human, but the fact that the reptilian features are passed down to the infant is what makes the artifact very unusual. It suggests the statuettes do not depict humans wearing ceremonial masks, but rather biological beings possessing these physical traits. The purpose of these figures remains entirely unsolved. Because the Ubaid culture flourished over a millennium before the known invention of writing, there are no recovered texts, myths, or records to provide context. They do not appear to be gods; later Mesopotamian deities were almost exclusively depicted as fully human, and these statuettes lack the traditional markers of divinity. Without written context, the Ubaid lizard figures remain an anomaly. They survive as a silent puzzle that continues to baffle historians.