The token system of the ancient Near East: Its role in counting, writing, the economy and cognition

Abstract

This chapter deals with a system of counters – clay tokens – used for over 4,000 years in the prehistoric Near East (7500–3100 BC). Relying on a database of some 8,000 tokens from Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Iran (Schmandt-Besserat 1992, I & II), I discuss the evolution of the token system, the method of counting it implies and how it led to writing and abstract numbers (Butterworth 1999, 29–32; Rogers 2005, 81–84). Lastly, in the light of the token system, I address the relation of counting and measurements to the economy and to cognition. Tokens and pictographic writing Before starting my discussion I explain how the Mesopotamian pictographic and cuneiform scripts are critical to understanding the token system (Schmandt-Besserat 1996). During the first 500 years following its invention about 3200 BC, writing in Mesopotamia was used exclusively for accounting (Cooper 2004, 72). The tablets served a city state administration scrupulously to record entries and expenditures of goods in the temple and palace. The first Mesopotamian script featured two kinds of signs: impressed signs stood for numerals and signs traced with a stylus represented the goods accounted (Figure 3.1). As is explained later, both of these types of signs, impressed and traced, were images or ‘pictographs’ of small counters, that is, tokens previously used for record keeping. Some of the pictographs can be understood by matching them to the cuneiform signs that derived from them. The pictographs therefore constitute a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to decipher the age-old token system.

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