Every year, on the second Sunday in February, American capitalism gathers around a single, electronic campfire to watch the one of the last remaining monocultural events in human history.

We tell ourselves we are tuning in for football, but many of us will happily confess we are strictly there for the commercials.

This Sunday, for Super Bowl LX, brands have paid a record-breaking $8 million for 30 seconds of airtime, roughly $266,000 per second, to interrupt the game. A handful of prime spots are going for up to $10 million for 30 seconds.

To understand how we arrived at a moment where a Pringles spot starring Sabrina Carpenter costs more than the GDP of a small island nation, we have to look backward. Advertising is not just a business; it is the fossil record of human desire. And the first fossil we have was found not on Madison Avenue, but in Thebes, Egypt.

The first recorded advertisement, dated to roughly 3,000 B.C., is believed to be a piece of papyrus written by a fabric merchant named Hapu. According to archaeologists, the notice was about a man named Shem who had escaped slavery. But Hapu pivoted midway through the text. After offering a reward for Shem’s return, he seamlessly transitioned into a pitch along the lines of: "The shop of Hapu the Weaver, where the best cloth is woven to your desires." It was likely the world’s first, albeit evil, bait-and-switch.

In the ancient world, advertising was limited by a simple bottleneck: literacy. In Egypt, Greece, and Rome, messages were painted on walls (the frescoes of Pompeii are littered with........

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