Accountancy and the origins of cuneiform

[Duncan Head]

The BBC's "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy" series today features an article on the origins of cuneiform writing, as a tool for accountancy developed from counting-tokens. Probably nothing new, but very interesting nonetheless.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39870485

[Patrick Waterson]

Interesting find, which underlines just how sophisticated, or at least bureaucratic, these early civilisations were.

From a disciplinary perspective, one cannot help but reflect that had it been written by an epigrapher rather than an economist, the article would doubtless have ascribed the origin of accountancy to the scribes' use of their newly-developed system of cuneiform signs to supplement and ultimately replace the traders' clumsy system of touchy-feely tokens.

[Imperial Dave]

very fascinating and so implies that writing per se was developed from accountancy or at least accounting 'tools' such as cuneiform 

[Dangun]

From a disciplinary perspective, one cannot help but reflect that had it been written by an epigrapher rather than an economist, the article would doubtless have ascribed the origin of accountancy to the scribes' use of their newly-developed system of cuneiform signs to supplement and ultimately replace the traders' clumsy system of touchy-feely tokens.

I'm not so sure.
One has to posit a demand, that drove the development of writing.
And since the first things that anyone wanted to write down were accountings, then doesn't it seem a pretty good explanation of the demand?

[Patrick Waterson]

And since the first things that anyone wanted to write down were accountings, then doesn't it seem a pretty good explanation of the demand?

Well ... unlikely.  The first thing anyone would want to write down were the promises made by city rulers to each other, and city rulers to those they ruled (and vice versa).  The first thing kings would wish to write down would be a record of their achievements.  We may note that concidentally our oldest significant cuneiform inscription is the Stele of Vultures mentioning Eannatum's victories while the next significant one is the Mantisusu Obelisk, dealing with royal land holdings, or more specifically acquisitions.

Older than either is a semi-cuneiform inscription containing area calculations for six large fields, the Jemdet Nasr tablet shown here.

The impression I get is that land ownership and royal achievements (not always in that order) were the driving forces behind the development of the Mesopotamian system of writing, with traders picking up on it once they saw the benefit of being the person with a written record of a particular transaction.

[Duncan Head]

I'm not quite sure where Patrick gets "traders" from - I can't see that anyone else had mentioned them.

The original BBC article seemed to be speaking of "accountants" as part of city-state administration (whether royal or temple). And as to the Jemdet Nasr land distribution calculation, it's one of a large number of tablets of the period from that site, most of which deal with the collection and redistribution of food and clothing:

The tablets from Jemdet Nasr are primarily administrative accounts; long lists of various objects, foodstuffs and animals that were probably distributed among the population from a centralized authority. Thus, these texts document, among other things, the cultivation, processing and redistribution of grain, the counting of herds of cattle, the distribution of secondary products like beer, fish, fruit and textiles, as well as various objects of undefinable nature. Six tablets deal with the calculation of agricultural field areas from surface measurements, which is the earliest attested occurrence of such calculations.

Indeed that the vast majority of the earliest texts [discovered at Uruk and elsewhere in Mesopotamia] are administrative in nature suggests that the invention of writing was a response to practical social pressures—simply put, writing facilitated complex bureaucracy. It is important to stress in this connection that literature plays no role in the origins of writing in Mesopotamia. Religious texts, historical documents and letters are not included among the archaic text corpus either. Rather, these text genres arise relatively late, beginning in the middle of the third millennium, some seven hundred or more years after the first written evidence.

So what drove the shift from tokens to impressions of tokens to abstract wedge marks was accountancy, in the context of government bureaucracy. Manistusu and the Vultures are centuries later than the Jemdet Nasr accounts. The flimflam of royal conquest and diplomacy is much less important than the day-to-day grind of running and feeding the city, and merely hitches a ride on the bandwagon a bit later on.

[Patrick Waterson]

So what drove the shift from tokens to impressions of tokens to abstract wedge marks was accountancy, in the context of government bureaucracy. Manistusu and the Vultures are centuries later than the Jemdet Nasr accounts. The flimflam of royal conquest and diplomacy is much less important than the day-to-day grind of running and feeding the city, and merely hitches a ride on the bandwagon a bit later on.

As far as we know.  Curiously, in Egypt we have the reverse - inscriptions concerning the deeds of kings are extant long before any recorded accounts of any nature.