Evolution of Monetary Practice [Part I]
Money in the "cradle of civilisation" (8,000 BCE - 333 BCE)
Mesopotamia is widely regarded as a cradle of civilisation. [1] A system of clay tokens of multiple shapes functioned as an early means of recording in order to keep track of goods leading eventually to early forms of writing, being so the earliest code representing a system of signs transmitting information. [2]
This so-called tokenism has thus been discovered as a method of record-keeping and an early form of accounting technology. [3]
Artifacts, mostly of geometric forms, such as cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, and ovoids, have been recovered from archaeological sites dating 8,000–3,000 BCE from Susa, Iran.
© Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5 / Courtesy Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales
City states in Mesopotamia:
“used tokens to control the levy of dues. When individuals could not pay, the tokens representing the amount of their debts were kept in a round clay envelope. In order to be able to verify the content of the envelope without breaking it, the tokens were impressed on the surface before enclosing them. A cone left a wedge–shaped mark and a disc a circular one.” [4]
Envelope from Susa, Iran, ca. 3,300 BC. The lenticular disks each stand for “a flock” (—10 sheep?). The cones represent small measures of grain.
© Denise Schmandt–Besserat with permission from Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales
What is so special by this Mesopotamian correspondence counting technique is that it was ‘used to keep track of counting lots of different quantities, and could be used both to add and to subtract’. [5] Especially when those ancient accountants became aware of resembling those tokens themselves on clay tablets, in this way the tablets would:
“record the back-and-forth of the tokens, which themselves were recording the back-and-forth of the sheep, the grain, and the jars of honey.” [6]
Around 3,200 BCE the three–dimensional tokens were so being reduced to pictographic two–dimensional signs marking in the same instance the invention of writing. [7]
A pictographic tablet featuring an account of 33 measures of oil, from Godin Tepe, Iran.
© Denise Schmandt–Besserat / Courtesy Dr. T. Cuyler Young, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
The modern Latin alphabet can be traced over more than 10,000 years back to this Mesopotamian cuneiform script. [8] The same can be said for money in its function as a unit of account, as:
“units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement.” [9]
The primary goal of utilising such abstract units of measurement was that of measuring debt. [10] This connection between money and debt is plausible since the Mesopotamian economy functioned as a centralised system of tributes:
“for the palace’s allocations of goods to its subjects as well as subjects’ payments of tribute to the palace were recorded by palace scribes and valued according to a unit of account denominated in the silver shekel (approximately 8.4 grams) or the gur of barlay (306 litres).” [11]
Those silver shekel ‘signalled the power of the central administration (the Palace)’:
“The accounting registers were kept by the top dignitaries in the Palace. They determined the rural communities’s tax contributions and the redistribution carried out in name of the prestige empire. […] [T]he unit of account designates money as a numerical language of value. Legitimated by sovereignty, this language creates shared significations of belonging to society.” [12]
The tokens and clay tablets represented the centralised political sovereignty in Sumer from 3,550—3,000 BCE and manifested itself in the ‘unification and codification of social belonging in both writing and in law’:
“It seems that the principle of a socially valid measurement based on equivalence, as well as the invention of accounting — which was itself linked to the codification of property — were created in the same eras.” [13]
The development of a system of measuring units of account seems to be the historical starting point for the generalised usage of money, since ‘it would be very difficult to buy or sell anything before you have a unit of account to represent and measure value’. [14]
Sources:
[1] Maisels, C. K. (1993) The Near East: Archeology in the ‘Cradle of Civilization’, London: Routledge.
[2] Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2015) [2001] ‘Evolution of Writing’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 25, pp. 761-766.
[3] Michalowski, P. (1993) ‘Tokenism’, in American Anthropologist, pp. 996-999.
[4] Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2015) From Accounting to Writing, [online] available at: <https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/from-accounting-to-writing/> [Last accessed 30th October 2023].
[5] Harfort, T. (2013) ‘How the world's first accountants counted on cuneiform’, BBC World Service: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, [online] available at: <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39870485> [Last accessed 30th October 2023].
[6] Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2015) From Accounting to Writing, [online] available at: <https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/from-accounting-to-writing/> [Last accessed 30th October 2023].
[7] Ibid.
[8] Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2015) [2001] ‘Evolution of Writing’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 25, pp. 761-766.
[9] Graeber, D. (2021) [2011] Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 10th Anniversary Edition, London: Melville House, p. 46.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Peacock, M. (2013) Introducing Money, London: Routledge, p. 51.
[12] Aglietta, M. (2018) [2016] Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power, London: Verso, pp. 86-87.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Di Muzio, T. and Robbins, R. H. (2017) ‘Theory, History and Money’, in An Anthropology of Money, New York, NY: Routledge, p. 59.