museum collections

World's Oldest Beer Receipt Discovered in Danish Museum Collection

Researchers from the National Museum of Denmark and University of Copenhagen have identified what may be the world's oldest known beer receipt, a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet recording 16 litres of high-quality beer and 55 litres of ordinary beer delivered by a man named Ayalli for workers in the Sumerian city of Umma. The discovery challenges assumptions that early writing was used mainly for literature or royal monuments, demonstrating instead that practical administrative purposes like tracking trade, labour and resources drove the development of writing systems.