The Recorders

Tarvo groaned. He was alone in the Academy archives, and this late at night, nobody was around to shush him; he only had his lantern and his thoughts to keep him company as he worked through the stack of old archaeology reports that was promised the next day. Yes, he had owed Li-ann a favor, but being forced to categorize Recorder logs...
This stack was especially bad, and Tarvo had no envy for the original archaeologist who must have transcribed this journal. An ancient lockbox had uncovered thousands of loose pages, another journal of a long-dead Recorder, but this one was especially mind numbing, as each entry described the food that person ate that day, their bowel and urine movements, and the quality of both. Why would anyone write this down? Tarvo supposed in that era they had nothing better to do.
At least the pages were easy to sort, as the Recorder was kind enough to report each and every day at the start of each entry. "Two hundred and third day of the year of northern flame. I awoke and cleared my bowels to my satisfaction, a rigid and contiguous section appeared in the dirt. Breakfast was lentils in soup with a hearty splash of blood sausage. Urination was immediately afterwards, a light yellow, a sign that I needed to drink more water..."
Tarvo buried his head in his hands. The damned Recorders were going to kill him. This was torture. He had had enough. He shoved the stack of reports to the side and grabbed his lantern. A walk would clear the head. Perhaps the food cart selling beef pasties was still cooking at this time of night. Late night dinner was a meat pasty from the nearest stand, and I moved to exhaust my bowels....Tarvo struck himself lightly on the cheek. No more bowel movements tonight. A pasty and beer was what he needed.

Culture

Major language groups and dialects

The Recorder language (also unnamed, and unimaginatively named after the people by Etoile) is an alphabetical language, distinct from several glyphic languages that other civilizations of the era presented at around the same time. This was an innovation presumably in the pursuit of broader literacy - one can only imagine that alphabetical languages are easier to teach than massive tomes of glyphs. Linguists have noted an overall uniformity of the language and grammar forms of the Recorders, indicating that there was likely some sort of strong centralized state that enforced a language standard, and prevented the dialectic drift that is common as languages evolve.
The Recorder language is arguably a distant forerunner to virtually all known languages throughout history, though there is no recognizable Standard Etoilean in its glyphs or grammar. Many writings from descendant civilizations resemble Recorder language in form, and it is only through careful analysis that one can clearly identify a piece of writing as emerging from a successor civilization.

Culture and cultural heritage

The heritage of the Recorders lies in their habitual logkeeping. The Recorders logged virtually every transaction and interpersonal interaction they had, a society of people who journalled incessently and relentlessly, aided by the easy availability of bark parchment in their native area of Saibh. While this did not help them survive the collapse of their civilization due to conquest, it is telling that the year of that conquest is considered the year 0 - the year that Prehistory transitioned to History. The conquest of the Recorders scattered them across Saibh, as the literate citizens of their society were considered useful by the other civilizations of the era. 
While no other society produced journals and logs to such an extremity, all societies that make use of the written word at all can likely trace their roots to the Recorders.

Shared customary codes and values

The Recorders were a civilization that heralded the end of prehistory, due to their predilection towards writing. The Recorders did not invent writing, but the writing of civilizations prior to them tended towards the mundane and prosaic, and was limited in scope, due to the limited number of literate people in those societies. The Recorders, by contrast, apparently embarked on a society-wide push to spread literacy to a significant percentage of their population, and the amount of writing left behind by the Recorders is three orders of magnitude larger than any other contemporary civilization, a great boon for historiographers and archaeologists.
Other than the emphasis on literacy, the Recorders (a modern Etoilean label, as it is unknown what they called themselves) placed great value on the family unit, flood control for agriculture, journaling, and the upholding of law, which makes sense - the first society to emphasize the written word would be the most likely to create and enforce a written legal code. Apart from the presence of formalized law, they were a relatively ordinary peoples of the late prehistoric period, and their writings are insight into life during the era.

Average technological level

Despite the spread of literacy and writing, the rest of Recorder society was noticably behind that of other civilizations. The Recorders never discovered the secret to iron metallurgy, continuing to use simple bronze implements over their civilization's span, a limitation that likely impacted their ability to defend themselves from iron-armed aggressors. This likely impacted their development of agriculture and limited their crop yields, a major stumbling block towards growth.

Common Etiquette rules

The notion of a contract likely emerged with the Recorders, and an incredible number of contracts have been recovered from Recorder associated digsites. The contracts are quite mundane compared to the modern legal contracts of Etoile, and many of them would be written for things that would pass beneath notice today - small loans of tools, exchanges of food, and so forth. The implication is that this was a society that considered writing things down to simply be polite, in a way that is minimally comprehensible by the modern mind. One researcher likened it to holding the door open for someone by courtesy, a thing most Etoileans do by reflex; the Recorders may have done the same, but then followed by presenting a contract describing the service rendered.
The Recorders themselves did not seem to find this unusual in their own writings, but naturally they likely did not have a significant basis of comparison.

Art & Architecture

The Recorders were likely the first poets of antiquity, though their poetry leaves much to be desired by modern standards. Even through the lens of modern translation, the art of the metaphor seemed to be lost on the Recorders, with example lines comparing a woman's beauty to the curvaceous hind of a donkey. Other than the written word, the Recorders seemed to have had no particular development in visual art or architecture, as there is no mention of their ability to access colored dyes to produce artwork. The closest example is a building wall that was excavated, covered in densely packed text; the entire side of a building was given over to what appears to be a novel. The use of words directly in visual art is avant-garde, even by the standards of Etoile, but only one such example has been found.

Foods & Cuisine

The food of the Recorders is remarkably similar to the ordinary rural foods that modern Etoileans eat today, a fresh vegetable and millet base with chicken and water-ox meat on occasion. The Recorders are the first civilization to put cooking recipes to the written word, and several of their dishes have been cooked in the modern day without any trouble or adaptation. Recorder cuisine is a popular 'fad' diet in the Etoile Capital City, with claims that the food of the 'rustic past' was healthier and better for the vitality than the mass produced foods of the modern Principality.

Birth & Baptismal Rites

One artifact that originated with the Recorders is the nametag, or, to be more specific, the production of a physical artifact bearing a child's name, granted to that child on the day of birth. The Recorders placed great emphasis on this ritual when a new child was born in a village, with the parents each inscribing a clay tablet with the child's written name and stringing it around the baby's neck, not to be removed until the child was able to itself write its own name. Large numbers of these name tags have been recovered from digsites, as they were presumably fragile and required frequent replacement.

Funerary and Memorial customs

An interesting contradiction appears in the writings of the Recorders regarding their funeral rites. Several accounts emphasize the need to destroy a person's personal writings and letters upon their death, as presumably the destruction of these private letters would preserve the privacy of the deceased. It is not obvious, however, that anyone actually did this - while obviously there exists a selection bias exists in the found media towards those who did not destroy their writings, so many writings have been discovered that it is not clear whether this was ever a widely held custom by the Recorders, or if it was simply something done only by a small segment of society.