First autograph
Who
A-du
Where
Iraq ()
When
2600

The earliest surviving examples of autographs are those made by scribes on cuneiform clay tablets from Tell Abu Salãbikh, Iraq, dated to the early Dynastic III A period c. 2600 BC. A scribe named ‘a-du’ has added ‘dub-sar’ after his name, thus translating to ‘Adu, scribe’. The earliest surviving signature on a papyrus is that of the scribe Amen’aa, held in the Leningrad (St Petersburg) Museum, Russia and dated to the Egyptian middle kingdom, which began c. 2130 BC.

Information taken from Archives (e.g. 1994).
Submitted for use in Scholastic's Modern Marvels.