The Instructions of Shuruppak, from the city of the flood survivor Ziusudra, dates to the 2500s BCE and survives in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian versions, one of the most copied texts of the ancient world. Its counsel: do not boast, or your words will not be trusted; do not speak improperly, later it will lay a trap for you; do not work using only your eyes, you will not multiply possessions using only your mouth; do not vouch for someone, that man will have a hold on you. The scribal schools of Nippur taught from proverb collections for two thousand years.
Lay Shuruppak beside the Akkadian Counsels of Wisdom a millennium later, the biblical Proverbs a millennium after that, and a modern self-help list: hold your tongue, avoid quarrels, feed the poor, neither borrower nor lender be, respect the gods, mind your mother. The genre ran a stable formula for four and a half thousand years, my son, listen, and the advice barely mutates. Wisdom literature is the longest-running syndicated column in human history.
The claim: the genre's four-millennia stability proves it never described how to live but who reads it, wealthy men with households, slaves, and reputations to lose, the durable reader, and its constancy is the constancy of that class, not of truth. Verdict: the texts' own assumptions support it, the listener is always male, propertied, and anxious about status. The wisdom is real. So is the census. The archive's rule: the oldest advice is the oldest surviving demographic.
If the oldest advice is identical to the newest, has wisdom ever actually updated?