Interesting info from Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19pgf6/what_is_the_earliest_recorded_date_that_we_can/

hpliferaft 33 punten 3 jaar geleden 

The fortune (or curse) of writing is that it has radically changed how humans understand time, because we can externalize our knowledge.

Since our knowledge isn't bound in stories that we hear around the campfire, we can now understand that there is a past and a future that can be measured in data, as opposed to anecdotal or mythic experience. Before writing, it was difficult for a community to remember a past that was not experienced by its oldest members. After a while, such stories turned to myths. (An obvious example of time in myth is the creation in Genesis, which measures the creation of the world in days, which was a mythical unit that made sense to people at the time of its perpetuation.)

Pre-literary communities also had trouble guessing at the future because technological advances for most of human history have been slow enough to present the future as very similar to the present.

So while I don't have any idea of what the earliest recorded date is, I would look to sometime after the invention of writing.

Good readings for this subject: Walter J. Ong, SJ's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" - pdf hosted on scribd

Dennis Baron's "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology"

Also check out Vilem Flusser's "The Gesture of Writing" if you want to read an unsourced but clever exercise in thinking.

Another more digressive sidenote: Fredric Jameson points out that pre-Enlightenment utopian stories depicted utopia as another space in the same time (i.e. deliverance from evil, etc.), while more modern utopian fantasies frame a belief that the future can bring better living conditions to the same space in a different time.

Here are some other interesting books about literacy and human experience:

David Vincent's The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe - a very well-sourced, data-driven, and readable study on how literacy changed political, scientific, and literary awareness in the cities and countrysides of Europe. He dwells on England more than the rest if I recall correctly.

Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms - this ethnography is about Brice Heath's observations in Trackton, NC in the early 1980s. This book is awesome because it shows how illiteracy forces some people to create very intimate social relationships with friends and strangers alike.

Gwathmey and Stern's Once Upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History - This is *not academically rigorous but it's a very cool pictorial history of how people adapted older social customs when the telephone was democratized.