Something Feminine About a Man Using Spreadsheets — You Were Meant to Trade Grain in Ancient Sumer

Gorgocutie Explains:

A Twitter thread that weaponizes ancient history against a modern take.

User 1: "Something feminine about a man using spreadsheets. You were meant to trade grain in ancient Sumeria." — playing on the trope that spreadsheet work is "unmanly."

User 2: "You will never guess what they used to trade grain in ancient Sumer." — accompanied by a photo of an actual cuneiform clay tablet.

The joke: Sumerian scribes invented the first "spreadsheets" — clay tablets with rows and columns of cuneiform writing used to track grain, livestock, and trade. The "spreadsheet" is literally the oldest administrative technology in human history, dating back to 3400 BCE.

So the "something feminine about a man using spreadsheets" take gets undercut twice: first by the fact that spreadsheets predate masculinity as a concept, and second by showing that the original spreadsheet users were the most masculine-coded figures of the ancient world — temple scribes managing the first economies. The cuneiform tablet is the original Excel. Nothing feminine about accounting.