Birthdays have been around since life on Earth evolved, but the practice of marking that day with an annual celebration is comparatively recent. While an idea circulating online suggests birthdays were first celebrated by the ancient Egyptians, obscure cuneiform texts from four millennia ago prove otherwise.
"The first evidence of celebrating birthdays is from economic texts from Lagash," an important city in ancient Sumer, a region of southern Mesopotamia that is considered the site of the earliest known civilization, Vladimir Emelianov, a historian at St. Petersburg University in Russia, told Live Science in an email.
