Fame Is a Copying Record, Not a Verdict

Fame is not a measure of how much a person mattered, and it is not a measure of how good they were. It is a measure of how many times, and for how long, somebody kept writing their name down. That sounds like a quibble until you follow it back to the first name anyone can read, and forward to the spreadsheets that now claim to rank everyone who ever lived. At both ends you find the same thing: not a verdict on a life, but the paper trail of an institution that had its own reasons to keep copying.

The first name is on a receipt

Start with a clay tablet about the size of a palm, now in the Schøyen Collection in Oslo, catalogued as MS 1717. It is written in proto-cuneiform, the pictographic ancestor of the wedge script, and it belongs to the Uruk III horizon, which the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative dates to roughly 3200–3000 BCE.¹ It is attributed to Uruk, though the specialist catalogue flags that provenance as uncertain, as you would expect of an object that reached us through a private collection rather than an excavation. What it records is a single, enormous quantity of barley, a period of thirty-seven months, and a pair of signs read KU and ŠIM. The specialist gloss is plain: a final account, credited to Kushim, for something on the order of 135,000 litres of grain, apparently connected with brewing at the temple of Inanna.²

Kushim is often called the earliest person in history whose name we know, and that phrase owes most of its circulation to Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which gave the tablet a starring role, and to the magazine coverage that followed.³ Two caveats have to travel with it. The first is that nobody is certain KU.ŠIM is a personal name at all: it could be a title or an office, a word for the kind of official who signs off on barley rather than the particular man who did. The same pair of signs turns up on other tablets of the period, which is usually taken to favour a person, but it is a reading, not a fact. The second is that Kushim is not the only candidate. A small tablet of about 3100 BCE in the collection of what was then Chicago's Oriental Institute lists two slaves held by someone written GAL.SAL, and the Institute's own publications preferred that document as a contender for the oldest recorded names.³

Notice what the two candidates have in common. Whether the prize goes to Kushim or to Gal-Sal and his two slaves, the oldest legible names are entries in administrative records. They survive because a temple economy needed to know who was responsible for grain and who owned whom. An earlier essay on this site makes the case that Mesopotamian writing grew out of bookkeeping.⁴ The first human beings to get their names into the permanent record were not the strongest, the wisest or the most loved people in Uruk. They were the people standing next to the institution that owned the writing.

The first human beings to get their names into the permanent record were not the strongest, the wisest or the most loved people in Uruk. They were the people standing next to the institution that owned the writing.

And then they vanished. No temple sang about Kushim, and no school made boys copy him out. His name lay in the ground until modern Assyriology put it back into circulation, and it became famous only in the twenty-first century, when a bestselling book found a use for it. The oldest name is one of the newest celebrities: a name is exactly as famous as the latest machine that decided to copy it.

The names that kept getting copied

Compare four names from the next thousand years that never really went dark.

Narmer is carved on a ceremonial stone palette found at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where he appears wearing, on its two faces, the white crown and the red crown, the pairing later read as the symbol of a united Egypt.⁵ Dates for the start of the First Dynasty vary between reference works by a century or more; Britannica puts Menes around 2900 BCE. Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in Greek in the third century BCE, called the first king Menes; Herodotus, two centuries earlier, heard from priests of a first king called Min who founded Memphis (Herodotus 2.99); and king lists of the Nineteenth Dynasty write Meni. Modern scholars have tried to match that remembered founder to Narmer, to his successor Aha, or to a king called Scorpion, and the matching remains inconclusive — the unification itself probably took several reigns, which a later tradition compressed into one founder.⁵ So the name the ancient world copied, Menes, has no secure contemporary monument, and the name with the monument, Narmer, had to be dug up. Egypt remembered a founder, and the priests who kept the lists decided what he was called.

Imhotep is better anchored. His name and titles are inscribed on the base of a statue of King Djoser found at Saqqara and now in Cairo, a contemporary piece of evidence that places him high in the court of the king for whom the Step Pyramid was built.⁶ Britannica dates Djoser's reign to about 2592–2566 BCE; other chronologies place it earlier. In the New Kingdom, scribes adopted Imhotep as a patron; after the Persian conquest of 525 BCE he was treated as a full god; his cult peaked in the Late and Greco-Roman periods, and Greeks identified him with their own god of healing, Asclepius.⁶ No contemporary document calls Imhotep a physician. His medical fame was built afterwards, over some two thousand years, by scribes who took him as their patron and priests who served his cult. The architect is real. The god of medicine is what the copying made of him.

Gilgamesh has no monument at all. The Sumerian King List makes him the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk and credits him with a reign of 126 years (ETCSL 2.1.1).⁷ The King List survives in Ur III and Old Babylonian manuscripts, and scholars now read it less as early history than as a political argument about kingship passing from city to city, useful to later dynasties who wanted to look like rightful heirs.⁷ No inscription of Gilgamesh's own has been found. The closest anyone gets is a handful of short vessel inscriptions naming Enmebaragesi, a king of Kish whom the King List places in the dynasty that held kingship before Uruk's, and whom a Sumerian poem makes the father of Gilgamesh's opponent. He is the earliest ruler in the King List attested by inscriptions of his own. Andrew George, the epic's modern editor, is willing to accept a historical Gilgamesh on this basis; Eleanor Robson, reviewing his edition, was not persuaded that the evidence establishes anyone at all.⁸ Sumerian poems about him were drilled into students in the scribal schools of the early second millennium and the oldest manuscripts of the Akkadian epic date from the eighteenth to sixteenth centuries BCE, with the long standard version attributed to an editor named Sîn-lēqi-unninni in the late second millennium.⁸ Gilgamesh is famous because the schools needed texts to teach, and his were the texts.

Enheduanna is the hardest case, and the most instructive. A calcite disc excavated at Ur and now in the Penn Museum carries her image and names her as the daughter of Sargon of Akkad and the wife, that is the high priestess, of the moon god Nanna; it dates to around 2300 BCE.⁹ Poems attributed to her make her the earliest author known by name. But every manuscript of them was written roughly five hundred years after her death, in the Old Babylonian schools, in a Sumerian later than she would have spoken. Some specialists, Robson among them, think later scribes may have attached her name to the texts; others, such as Sidney Babcock and before him William Hallo and J.J.A. van Dijk, accept her authorship.⁹ Present evidence does not settle it, and the argument here doesn't need it settled. On either reading, Enheduanna's fame as an author is the fame the Old Babylonian schools gave her. Around a hundred copies of a single one of her songs survive, every one of them made long after she died.⁹ If the schools had stopped copying, the disc would still tell us a princess served the moon god at Ur. It would not tell us she was a poet.

Adam, and the arithmetic of scripture

Now put a much younger name beside these. When was Adam first written down as the first man? There is no single honest answer, because the composition of Genesis is among the most argued-over questions in biblical scholarship. On the classic documentary reading, the oldest narrative strand, conventionally called the Yahwist, was written in the tenth or ninth century BCE, and some scholars still defend a date around then or earlier.¹⁰ Others, most influentially John Van Seters, argue that the Yahwist is a writer of the Babylonian exile or the early Persian period, in the sixth century BCE or later, and a broad swathe of scholarship holds that the Pentateuch reached its final form only in the Persian period.¹⁰

If Kushim's tablet was written between about 3200 and 3000 BCE, and the Genesis story of Adam was composed somewhere between the tenth century and the Persian period, the name Adam is younger in writing than the name Kushim by something like two thousand to nearly three thousand years.

And there is no contest about which is more famous. Adam's name has been copied in scrolls, codices, printed Bibles, sermons and children's books, in a great many languages, for well over two thousand years. That says nothing about whether the story is true. It says the story entered a text that two religious traditions, and then a third that honours the same figure, treated as sacred and copied with extraordinary care and at extraordinary scale. Scripture is the most powerful copying machine the ancient world built, and a name inside it outruns a name on a receipt however many centuries the receipt had on it.

The same logic explains what happened to the rest of the archive. Most of the half-million excavated cuneiform tablets are still unpublished, because the civilisation that wrote them stopped copying and the script stopped being taught. The great library at Alexandria did not need a single fire to fail; it needed only for the people paying scholars to copy and keep books to stop paying. Texts live as long as an institution renews them. So do names.

The machine, measured

In 2013 Steven Skiena, a computer scientist, and Charles B. Ward, an engineer, published Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank with Cambridge University Press. They took everyone with an article in the English-language Wikipedia and combined several signals: two versions of PageRank (how much, and by whom, an article is linked), readership, edits, article length and mentions in the news. A factor analysis split those signals into gravitas, roughly lasting achievement, and celebrity, roughly current attention; the two were combined and then corrected for the way reputations decay, using Google's n-gram counts of names in printed books.¹¹ The published top ten, as it appeared with the book and in Time, runs: Jesus, Napoleon, Muhammad, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Adolf Hitler, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Thomas Jefferson.¹¹ (The project's own website, which is still online, lists Shakespeare third and Muhammad fourth.)

The Pantheon project, begun at the MIT Media Lab under César Hidalgo, went about it differently. Its Historical Popularity Index counts how many language editions of Wikipedia carry a person's biography, adjusts that for how concentrated their readership is in a few languages, rewards pageviews outside English, penalises attention that spikes and fades, adds a dampened term for how long ago the person was born, and marks down anyone known for less than seventy years.¹² The live site counts biographies in more than fifteen language editions, living and dead.¹³ Retrieved in September 2026, its all-time top ten were: Muhammad, the Buddha, Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, Mahatma Gandhi, Pope Francis, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Ludwig van Beethoven.¹³

These two lists disagree about a great deal. Jesus is first on one and twenty-eighth on the other. But look at what the names are attached to: founders and central figures of religions whose scriptures and liturgies have copied them for more than a thousand years; heads of states whose archives, textbooks, monuments and currencies keep printing them; a philosopher whose works teachers in Greek, Arabic and Latin copied and commented on for centuries; a playwright kept by schools and theatres; a composer kept by conservatories and concert halls. Almost all of them are famous because an institution, sometimes several in relay, made copying them part of its daily work.

Almost all of them are famous because an institution, sometimes several in relay, made copying them part of its daily work.

Then there are the names nobody would call good. Hitler is seventh in Who's Bigger?, with Stalin eighteenth; Genghis Khan is fifth on Pantheon's live list. That is not a scandal about the data but the same machine running in another direction: evil is copied too, and for serious reasons. Survivors, historians, courts and schools all have reason to keep the perpetrator's name in circulation, precisely so that no one can pretend it did not happen. A name can be copied as a warning as faithfully as a blessing, and a method that counts copying cannot tell the two apart. That is not a flaw in the rankings; it is the most honest thing they reveal.

The rankings' limits are part of the argument, not a footnote to it. Both rest on Wikipedia, and the Pantheon team says plainly that Wikipedia's editors skew English-speaking, Western, male and highly educated, and that the encyclopaedia has a recency bias.¹² Skiena and Ward acknowledged that analysing the English Wikipedia measured, in effect, the judgments of a Western, English-speaking readership; the computer scientist Ernest Davis, reviewing the book, found biases toward English speakers, the West and men.¹¹ There is not one woman in the Who's Bigger? top ten, and Pantheon's corrections for language and age still leave two people alive in this decade in its own. Wikipedia is itself a copying institution, with its own editors, notability rules and readers, and a list built on it measures what that institution copies. Every fame ranking is a portrait of its own machine.

Five names, and what got copied

Now some views of my own, kept clearly apart from the published lists. I considered Napoleon, second in Who's Bigger?, for my own list, and then I asked what he really accomplished besides marching into Russia with about 700,000 men and coming out with about 20,000. I see him as just another well-known person.

The record beside that view makes the essay's point. Estimates of the force that crossed the Niemen in June 1812 vary; one recent account gives 615,000, fewer than half of them French, the rest Polish, German, Italian and other allied contingents. Charles Minard's famous chart of 1869 shows the main column shrinking from 422,000 men to about 10,000. Not all the missing died: many deserted, and many were taken prisoner.¹⁴ The thing Napoleon is best remembered for is a catastrophe. The thing that has arguably shaped far more lives is the Civil Code of 1804. It standardised French civil law, was adopted through conquest or export in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy and German territories, later served as a model for codes in Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, and influenced the law of Quebec and Louisiana.¹⁵ What got copied into popular memory was the drama, not the achievement.

I agree that Jesus belongs at number one in Who's Bigger?, but I don't think he would accept the title. The Gospels give that view its footing. In Matthew's account he turns down the kingdoms of the world when they are offered to him (Matthew 4:8–10); he tells his followers to give and to pray in secret rather than to be seen doing it (Matthew 6:1–6); and he says the last will be first and the first last (Matthew 20:16). Beside that, whatever one believes, sits the copying point. The Gospels were written by others, the first some forty years after his death, from stories passed on by word of mouth,¹⁶ and his name was then carried by what became one of the largest copying traditions in history: scribes, monasteries, churches and translators, none of which existed as institutions in his lifetime.

Alfred Nobel would have to be on my own list, and I have weighed Alexander the Great against Nikola Tesla for a place beside him. I don't think modern life would be anything like as advanced without pioneers such as Tesla and Henry Ford, and Tesla gave it alternating current. That is my judgment, not a ranking. The rankings put Nobel 159th on Pantheon's live list; his place in Who's Bigger? could not be verified beyond the fact that he is not in its published top hundred. Alexander is ninth and sixteenth, Tesla ninety-third and sixty-first.¹¹¹³

Nobel, a Swedish chemist and industrialist who lived from 1833 to 1896, patented dynamite in 1867, then blasting gelatine and, in 1887, ballistite, a substitute for black gunpowder; in 1894 he bought the Bofors works in Sweden.¹⁷ His explosives blasted railway tunnels, canals and mines on a scale never before possible, and his propellants served armies. By his will of 27 November 1895 he left most of that fortune, made from both, to endow prizes first awarded in 1901. A famous story says a French paper mistook his brother Ludvig's death in 1888 for his own and called him a merchant of death, shaming him into the prizes; no one has produced a copy of that headline, and historians now treat the story as disputed at best.¹⁷ The prize recites his name every December. Yet the man ranks far below Tesla, because the copying attaches to the award rather than the life: the institution became famous, and Nobel became its label. Being copied is not enough. What matters is what gets copied, a person's story or a brand.

Alexander died in 323 BCE, and almost nothing written by people who knew him survives. His campaign historian Callisthenes wrote what amounted to propaganda, now lost, as are the memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus and the popular history by Cleitarchus. We read later authors instead: Diodorus of Sicily in the first century BCE, Curtius Rufus most likely in the first century CE, Plutarch, and Arrian, more than four hundred years after Alexander's death.¹⁸ His successors borrowed his authority, Lysimachus putting Alexander's portrait on his silver coins, and from about the third century CE the fantastic Alexander Romance, falsely ascribed to Callisthenes, was translated across Europe, Asia and Africa.¹⁸ For twenty-three centuries his story, not just his name, has had one copying institution after another.

Tesla's fame was built in reverse. He worked briefly for Thomas Edison's company in 1884. In July 1888 George Westinghouse licensed his polyphase alternating-current motor patents; Westinghouse's current powered the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and on 16 November 1896 Buffalo was lit by power from Niagara Falls.¹⁹ But Tesla did not invent alternating current alone, and the view stated above needs the record beside it. The practical transformer came from Zipernowsky, Bláthy and Déri around 1885, and William Stanley built a transformer system for Westinghouse in 1886; Galileo Ferraris worked out the rotating magnetic field independently between 1885 and 1888; Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky built a three-phase motor in 1889 and helped send three-phase power from Lauffen to Frankfurt in 1891.¹⁹ Like the wheel, it was the work of many people at once.

Tesla died in January 1943 in a New York hotel, by his biographer W. Bernard Carlson's account essentially impoverished. Carlson's explanation for his disappearance from the history books is this essay's thesis: Edison's and Marconi's names were carried by companies that kept telling their stories, and no major company carried Tesla's until a car company, founded in 2003, took it. By 2010 The Wall Street Journal reported that among technophiles Tesla was in and Edison out.²⁰ Edison was lionised for generations; Tesla is lionised now. Neither swing is a correction toward the truth; each is what the dominant copying machine of its moment chose to copy.

So here is what fame is good for, once you stop mistaking it for a verdict: it is a reading on the machinery behind a name. When a name is enormous, the useful question is not how great the person was but who kept the record, for how long, and why — a temple, a school, a scripture, a state, a mint, a survivor's promise, a company, a prize committee, an encyclopaedia edited by a particular slice of humanity. When a name is tiny, ask what machine stopped. Kushim was forgotten for some five thousand years and is famous now because a book needed him; Alexander has never stopped being copied; Tesla nearly vanished and was rebuilt in a few decades; Nobel is spoken every year and barely known. Homer and Hesiod both survived because the same new alphabet carried them. None of this tells you who deserved to be remembered. It tells you who had someone remembering for them, and that is worth knowing before you let a list tell you who mattered.