Around 1750 BCE, a guy named Nanni was so pissed that a copper merchant had sent him lousy goods (and, as alleged in his tablet, treated his messenger badly on top of it all) that he carefully carved his grievance into clay. Guinness classifies it as the oldest known written customer complaint.
There’s something gorgeous about being so propelled by fury that you’re willing to hack a bitchy message in a medium that manages to outlive you both by millennia. Touché, Nanni.
The cuneiform kicked off by proclaiming: “Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message.” It bore no signature. Let’s hope the merchant got the memo.
Chisels aside, establishing that you were the person behind a document used to require some sort of defining physical intervention. In ancient Mesopotamia, people turned to personal seals as a kind of proto-signature. These first “signatures” weren’t quite writing; they were a consistent combination of objects and gestures. Later, medieval rulers leveraged unique geometric monograms (referred to as the “signum manus” or “sign of the hand” — a fittingly early precursor to "talk to the hand") as a way to bridge varying levels of literacy with administrative bureaucracy. This was eventually phased out in favour of hand-written signatures and the gooey gloss of wax seals.
For as long as we’ve had writing, signing major documents tended to have some observable ceremony of conveyance.
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