One archaeologist quipped they looked like suppositories.

June 14, 2017 2:58 PM

How the world's first accountants counted on cuneiform
posted by bq (10 comments total)

A set of cuneiform signs being representations of the physical impressions left on clay of some other object is about standard for what little I know about cuneiform. It's supposed to be an unbelievably hard script to decipher, probably because it developed over 3000 years and was used for a bunch of unrelated languages, although the fact that to the untrained eye all of the little wedges look exactly the same doesn't help.
posted by Copronymus at 4:24 PM on June 14, 2017

I was just reading about this in the book Sapiens last weekend! The author referred to early cuneiform as a partial script, because it only allowed for simple descriptions of mathematical concepts mapped to tangible items. Apparently, written language only formed spontaneously in 4 or 5 different locations, and all other scripts developed from those.
posted by KGMoney at 4:38 PM on June 14, 2017

As I tell young people starting college - there will always be a need for accountants. ALWAYS.
posted by double bubble at 7:23 PM on June 14, 2017 [3 favorites]

Fascinating stuff. Exactly the questions my son was asking me yesterday!
posted by wilful at 8:22 PM on June 14, 2017

They talk about using the little clay objects as counters, but that they needed different shapes to represent each commodity, makes me imagine it like a commodity exchange or barter system. Like a bunch of people sit in a circle and go "Wood for sheep! Can anyone trade wood for sheep?" and trade tokens until they get whatever they were looking for and then go cash in the tokens for the actual goods.
posted by RobotHero at 8:41 PM on June 14, 2017 [4 favorites]

Fascinating article! It's about proto-cuneiform, of course, but here's an online calculator I came across recently oriented towards performing the sorts of mathematics found on cuneiform tablets:

MesoCalc—A Mesopotamian Calculator

Like a bunch of people sit in a circle and go "Wood for sheep! Can anyone trade wood for sheep?" and trade tokens until they get whatever they were looking for and then go cash in the tokens for the actual goods.

I read an article which someone linked to from MeFi, which I've never been able to find again, in which the author claimed that Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia actually had quite sophisticated trade contracts and financial instruments similar to options and derivatives compensating for future events like bad harvests, waylaid caravans, and mines playing out, despite money not having been invented yet and it all being what we might regard as forms of barter.
posted by XMLicious at 9:05 PM on June 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

RobotHero

Once gold was accepted as a universal payment, barter was diminished to a lower level of social complexity.
posted by NeoRothbardian at 9:18 PM on June 14, 2017 [1 favorite]

AIUI there never was a stage of society with a big complex barter system, because credit is older than money. Anthropologists studying pre-monetary societies find that day-to-day transactions don't work on the "can anyone trade wood for sheep?" model but the "I want this wood now, I'll give you some sheep (or something else) down the line" model. The Wealth of Nations got this wrong. No time to dig up proper references at the moment but Wikipedia points to David Graeber for this.
posted by finka at 1:03 AM on June 15, 2017 [2 favorites]

The units of mass section of Wikipedia's "Ancient Mesopotamian units of measurement" article has a photo of weights which fit the "they looked like suppositories" description and which look like they could have made some of the stamped imprints on one of the tablets in the OP article. (I didn't see an image of the described tokens in the OP article itself, but my ad blocker might have zapped one.)
posted by XMLicious at 1:59 AM on June 15, 2017

It's a tangent, but I want to take this opportunity to correct a frequent misapprehension about Jews that is related to accounting. There is a sort of general idea that Jews wound up being moneylenders in Europe because Christians were forbidden from doing so, and there is also a positive stereotype about Jews being good at business.

To address the first thing: There were plenty of places where non-Jews could legally be moneylenders, but they tended to be so usurious that borrowers tended to go to Jewish moneylenders. And I think that usoriousness might be related to the next point:

Jews were early adopters of Arabic numerals, and other Europeans trailed behind, sometimes by centuries, often prevented by law from using the Arabic system. It's a vastly better system than the Roman system, because you can do this:

400 +
135

And so create tables that allows for fast equations, which is much harder when you are trying to add XIX to XVIII. It also makes more complex equations, like figuring interest, much easier. So Jews weren't better businessmen, they just had a technological advantage over Christians that was primarily retained through Christians having a religious prejudice against Muslims.

Anyway, I don't know how hard it would be to do math via cuneiform, but there is a lesson in history that ignoring skills developed in the Near East is just bad business.
posted by maxsparber at 7:07 AM on June 15, 2017 [5 favorites]