Around 1800 BCE, in the palace archives of Mari on the upper Euphrates, when a subject sent the king a dream — the god spoke to me in the night, O my lord — the clay tablet arrived accompanied by two small objects: a lock of the dreamer’s hair, and a snippet from the hem of their garment.
The reason was strictly practical. The king’s diviners would take these identity-tokens and run an independent test — read the entrails, check the omen by a second channel entirely — before the king staked a single soldier on the dream’s content. You cannot verify a dream by its content, because a lying dream reads exactly like a true one. So you verify the dreamer, by an instrument the dream cannot reach. The hair and the hem are provenance, made into objects you could hold in your hand.
The Witness calls this her favourite artefact in the dreams chapter: the whole thesis of the book run as palace paperwork, eighteen centuries before our era. It shows the provenance principle was not a philosophical abstraction invented by later traditions but a practical bureaucratic reflex — someone in Mari understood the detection gap and built a filing procedure around it.
Sources. The Mari palace archives (upper Euphrates, ~1800 BCE): dream-reports sent with the dreamer’s hair and hem (šārtum u sissiktum) so the king’s diviners could cross-check by independent extispicy. Search: Mari dream report hair hem sissiktu extispicy verification.
Appears in: Dreams, the Door That Opens Both Ways