Keeping tabs

As we continued to warm up and settle down in ever bigger towns or cities we specialised, trading skills for food and started counting to keep tally of who owed what to whom. Sometimes we needed to buy or sell something now that would leave us in debt until we received or delivered it. As time went on, to save disputed memories of who owed what, we created little tokens with pictures saying what was owed and how much by tokens inside. These ancient “piggy” banks were a shared clay contract that jogged our memories and kept us honest at payback time.

It was not long before the systems used for keeping count of stuff became more generally used for keeping records of anything. Even stuff that happened that could be replayed at will by those that could read the code. The specialist writers started to capture stories that had long been passed down the generations from parents to children and shared amongst friends by setting out picture books on clay for anyone later who could crack the pictorial code.

The first accounting codes used pictures to show what was being counted and notches to tell how many. The tablet below is forty centurues old and list details of what workers were paid for their labour.

And this one appears to list out payment in beer