Clay Accounting Tokens

Clay accounting tokens are small objects of modelled clay, shaped as cones, spheres, discs, cylinders, tetrahedrons and other forms, that farmers and officials in the ancient Near East used to count and record goods. The earliest examples come from village sites in the Fertile Crescent dated to around 8000 BC, and tokens remained in use for several thousand years. Each shape is thought to have stood for a set quantity of a particular commodity, such as a measure of grain or a head of livestock.

The tokens matter to the history of money because they record obligations rather than pay them. They are an early example of ledger money, where value lives in a record of who owes what, and they are distinct from later metal coins, which carry value in themselves. The best-known interpretation of them comes from the archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who argued that they are the direct ancestor of cuneiform writing.

Picture a farmer who lends five sacks of barley to a neighbour. Instead of trusting memory, the two shape five small clay balls, one for each sack, and keep them somewhere safe. When the barley is repaid, the balls are broken or thrown away. The little objects do not hold any barley; they simply stand for it, in the same way a cloakroom ticket stands for a coat.

Now imagine a whole village doing this, with different shapes for different goods: a cone for a small measure of grain, a disc for a sheep, a cylinder for a jar of oil. The pile of shapes becomes a simple record of the community's stores and debts. Over time, people found it easier to press the shapes into wet clay, and then simply to draw them. That drawing step is where many scholars see the beginning of writing.

Plain tokens, with simple geometric forms and no markings, appear at early farming settlements in the Levant, Mesopotamia and Iran around 8000 to 7500 BC. Their spread coincides with the shift from foraging to agriculture, when households first had surpluses of grain and animals to store, share and owe.

In the fourth millennium BC, as towns such as Uruk in southern Mesopotamia grew into cities with large temple institutions, a second group appeared. These complex tokens carry incised lines and dots and take more varied shapes, and they seem to stand for manufactured or processed goods such as textiles, oil, bread and metal. Complex tokens are found in large numbers at Uruk and at Susa in south-western Iran, where they belong to the late fourth millennium BC.

To keep a set of tokens together and stop tampering, officials sealed them inside hollow clay balls, known as bullae or clay envelopes. Many were rolled with a cylinder seal. Because the envelope had to be broken to check the contents, scribes began pressing the tokens onto the wet surface before sealing it, so the outside showed what was inside. More than a hundred such envelopes have been excavated, many at Susa.

Schmandt-Besserat argued that this practice made the tokens themselves redundant. If the impressions told the story, a flat clay tablet with the same marks would do. The sequence she proposed runs as follows:

1. Loose tokens are kept as counters for goods.
2. Tokens are sealed inside bullae, with their shapes impressed on the outside.
3. Solid tablets carry the impressed signs alone, with no tokens inside.
4. Signs are drawn with a stylus, and separate signs for numbers and for goods develop, leading to cuneiform around 3100 BC.

Separating "how many" from "what" was the key abstraction: the number five could be written once and paired with any commodity sign, instead of repeating a token five times.

The tokens point to an account-based view of early money. In the account-based versus token-based debate, Mesopotamia is a strong example of the account side: temples and palaces kept records of deliveries, rations and debt long before coinage. A clay counter worked as a receipt or IOU, and the entries it supported are an ancestor of the modern ledger.

Later Mesopotamian records expressed values in standard weights of silver and barley, such as the shekel and the mina, which acted as a unit of account even when no silver changed hands. This contradicts the textbook story in which barter came first and money was invented to fix the problem of the double coincidence of wants. In the token evidence, record-keeping and credit come first, and physical money comes much later. Other societies built comparable systems from different materials, such as the notched wooden tally stick of medieval England.

Schmandt-Besserat set out her case most fully in the two-volume Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992), building on earlier suggestions by the archaeologists Pierre Amiet and Maurice Lambert that the objects were counters. The theory is widely cited but contested. Critics have questioned whether a given shape could keep the same meaning across so many sites and several thousand years, noting that many tokens were found in houses, graves and rubbish deposits without a clear accounting context. Others accept the link between bullae and early tablets while doubting that tokens explain the whole origin of writing.

The word "token" here should not be confused with its modern uses. A crypto token is a digital asset on a blockchain, and a token in monetary theory is a bearer object such as a coin. A clay accounting token was neither: it was a counter in a record-keeping system, closer in spirit to a ledger entry than to cash.

• Denise Schmandt-Besserat, University of Texas at Austin
• Faisal Khan: Money Before Coins