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What is the first historical record of an explicit and articulated logical argument in the history of humanity?

Is it Xenophanes (presumably around 540 BC)?

But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves. (B15)

Thanks for any scholarly reference.

Speakpigeon
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  • so are they arguing that cattle don't have hands? –  Dec 30 '23 at 07:30
  • https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/jabai –  Dec 30 '23 at 07:36
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    "Explicit", "articulated" and "argument" mean different things to different people at different times, one can find that in the Old Testament or cuneiform clay tablets if one is so inclined. "The hope of finding a 'first' comes to grief because of the historically dynamic character of ideas. If we describe a result with sufficient vagueness, there seems to be an endless sequence of those who had something within the vague specifications", May, Historiographic vices II. Priority chasing. – Conifold Dec 30 '23 at 08:52
  • For philosophical arguments, see SEP, Argumentation in the history of philosophy:"Arguments and argumentation figure prominently in most (if not all) influential philosophical traditions." – Conifold Dec 30 '23 at 08:56
  • "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." – SystemTheory Dec 30 '23 at 17:19

1 Answers1

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There are much older documents from Mesopotamia and Egypt, some of which must have parts that are at least as much of an argument as that. Here is the oldest example I can think of. It's an argument for why the king should send help to a general in the field:

Approximately 2400 BC, quoted in Man and Wound in the Ancient World, p 62

To my lord say this: thus speaks Itur-Asdu, thy servant. There is no physician, no mason. The wall is crumbling, and there is no one to rebuild it. And if a sling-stone wounds a man, there is not a single physician. If it please my lord, may my lord send me a physician and a mason.

There are mathematics tablets and papyri from Egypt and Mesopotamia dating back as far as 3000 BC. Most of them just show mathematical tables or the solutions to problems, but you can probably find an argument or two in there. There are also legal documents and wisdom literature from those places and throughout the Fertile Crescent much older than 600 BC. There have to be examples of arguments in all of that.

David Gudeman
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