OXFORD – Researchers have indicated that the world’s oldest undeciphered text could be the first recorded instance of a Term of Service agreement.
The unintelligible writings, which have so far defied attempts to uncover its true meaning, is close to being deciphered according to university academics.
“I think we’re finally on the point of making a breakthrough,” said director of the Ancient World Research Jacob Dahl, who warned it could be a while before his team understood the agreement, and even longer to determine how it applies in the real world.
‘What’s ancient Iranian for “Yes, I Agree”’
From the information gleaned to date, the proto-Elamite text appears to be an agreement for the use of agricultural land, which could go some way to explaining why so many people went hungry.
“When our team started looking at the writings over a decade ago, we believed them to be a log detailing everyday observations of a civilisation previously unknown to us in these modern times.”
“But it was just too bloody difficult to follow without skipping straight to the end and chiseling ‘Agree’ into the stone.”
“That we realised we had uncovered the earliest Term of Service known to man.”
He went on to point out: “Without computers, you would have had to read the entire text and understand the majority of it before agreeing to anything. But that’s how it was in those backwards times.”
Head scratcher
In an attempt to aid the decoding process, fragments of the ancient agreement are being scanned with the most complex equivalents available to researchers: Facebook and iTunes Terms of Service.
Dr Dahl hopes there may be similarities in both old and new unnecessarily complex examples of language that could help them simplify the convoluted Bronze Age contract to “something my mother could understand.”
“It’s as if they don’t want us to know what they’re trying to say,” he suggested.
“Can I use a borrowed sickle to harvest wheat crops on the third Sunday after a full moon or not?! Why can’t these things be clearer?”
“Thank God we can just skip through this stuff now else we’d get nothing done nowadays.”
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