Science / Medicine : A Page in History for Accountants : Archeology: Ancient number crunchers may have been responsible for the development of writing.

Let’s face it. Accountants are not universally loved in our society, especially now that income tax time is nearing and a depressed economy is forcing the “bean counters” to make drastic cuts in budgets of all kinds.

It may, then, come as a big surprise that accountants are responsible for two of the most basic concepts that provide the underpinning of modern society: the development of writing and the ability to use numbers in complex mathematical manipulations.

Even that disparaging name, bean counter, is more apt than most people realize. A growing body of archeological evidence indicates that the first accountants, beginning perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, kept track of their sheep, cows, grain and wine by counting bean-like pieces of clay.

The use of those tokens led directly to the development of both writing and mathematics, according to archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas at Austin.

More than two decades of research by Schmandt-Besserat suggests that these tokens, once dismissed by archeologists as little more than bottle caps and toys, represent the key link in the conversion of the spoken word into the written, as well as in the development of abstract numbers that could represent any and every item that humans might want to count.

These developments also had one other outcome that many people would view as somewhat less benevolent, especially at this time of year. They made possible the first system for taxation and the redistribution of goods.

The theory is not universally accepted. Some critics claim that Schmandt-Besserat has over-interpreted the limited amount of data available. Many others, however, argue that it is the most plausible explanation available.

Schmandt-Besserat’s ideas are “the best theory that has come along to explain the evidence so far,” said historian Marvin Powell of Northern Illinois University. “I think it is pretty clear that the cuneiform writing system that was invented in southern Iraq . . . has its background in these token systems that she has discovered.”

She has been “ingenious, verging on brilliant, to put so many bits and pieces of evidence together to develop an extremely plausible interpretation,” said anthropologist Patty Jo Watson of Washington University in St. Louis.

Schmandt-Besserat discussed her research recently in Los Angeles in a lecture that is part of a monthlong series on life in the ancient city of Sumer, in what is now Iraq, sponsored by the California Museum of Ancient Art. It is also the subject of a forthcoming book called “Beyond Writing.”

The Texas researcher did not set out to study writing. Her interest was in the first uses of clay, particularly the fine, easily worked clay characteristic of the Middle East.

“I wanted to find out how clay was discovered, for what and when, so I went from museum to museum to review clay collections from the times between 10,000 and 6,000 BC,” she said. “I was looking for things like bricks and pots. Instead, I was surprised to find all these little clay objects. Nobody really knew what they were. . . . They were everywhere.

The “objects” were small clay artifacts, ranging up to an inch in size, that were shaped like geometric figures, such as spheres or cones, or like naturally occurring objects, such as animals. The artifacts had been exhumed from archeological excavations throughout the region in numbers ranging from one or two to as many as 1,500. Archeologists had largely dismissed them as unimportant.

Schmandt-Besserat, however, focused on the objects’ similarities: They were all made of clay and they were about the same size. But a solution to their meaning continued to elude her.

“Then I was asked to teach a class on writing in the Near East,” she said. “I pulled out an article where the earliest tablets were illustrated.” Those clay tablets bore the earliest known writing, small pictograms inscribed with a stylus.

“I saw these signs (on the tablets) and I thought, ‘Those are the tokens!’ ” she said. The tokens she had been studying were the same shape as the pictograms. This had to mean, she reasoned, that the tokens were precursors of writing.

But it has taken her a long time to prove her ideas--two decades of “long and laborious” work.

Her theories filled a void that had long troubled archeologists. Most had assumed that some form of writing preceded the use of cuneiform on clay tablets, but the prevailing theory was that early humans wrote on perishable materials, such as paper or wood, which had long since disintegrated.

But Schmandt-Besserat’s theories provide for a simpler origin of writing, one that does not require the development of ink and paper. Archeologists have generally found that simpler explanations are more likely to be correct.

Her theory is counter-intuitive in another sense. Most archeologists have assumed that the first writing was pictographic, with symbols shaped much like the items they represent. But Schmandt-Besserat’s studies indicate that the first writing was largely abstract, with symbols not resembling the actual objects, and that pictographic symbols did not develop until later.

The bulk of archeologists now seem to accept her findings, but a few, such as Richard Zettler of the University of Pennsylvania, remain unconvinced.

“There’s no doubt she is on to something in pointing to the tokens as an early accounting system,” Zettler said. “But I am not sure it is the origin of cuneiform. Writing is . . . an invention that developed very rapidly, almost as if someone sat down and said things are way too complex with this old system.”

But that is a minority view. More typical is that of archeologist Robert D. Biggs of the University of Chicago, who feels that the bulk of Schmandt-Besserat’s ideas “are fairly well accepted.” But he argues that many of her identifications of the meanings of individual tokens are probably not correct. “I think she went further than the evidence would allow.”

Nevertheless, Schmandt-Besserat is convinced that her scenario is both plausible and convincing:

The earliest humans, hunter-gatherers, had little need for accounting. They had meager possessions and no common stores of food or other items for which records needed to be kept.

But the need for a system of reckoning changed drastically when humans began growing grain. “Accounting became a matter of survival, since food storage became necessary, as did the saving of quantities of seeds for the next crop,” Schmandt-Besserat said.

Farmers undoubtedly began accounting with pebbles or shells, allowing one pebble, for example, to stand for one bushel of wheat. But this system suffered a major drawback: The identity of what was being represented by the pebbles was clear only to the person doing the counting.

Sometime around 8000 BC, a particularly bright individual made what Schmandt-Besserat called a “conceptual leap.” That person recognized that accountants could make small clay tokens whose specific shapes identified the commodity they represented. “The tokens could always be understood by anyone who had been initiated into the system,” she said.

Archeologists have now found 15 main types of tokens, ranging from cones, spheres, disks, cylinders and tetrahedrons to tool and animal shapes.

The two most common tokens were cones and spheres. Each cone represented about one quart of grain, while a sphere stood for a bushel. Two bushels of grain were represented by two spheres, and so on. Archeologists made these connections by working backwards from the deciphered symbols used on clay tablets.

Some of the tokens bear markings that further aid identification. The token for a sheep, for example, was a disk with a “+” inscribed on it, while an egg-shaped token with a line crosswise represented a jar of oil.

This system of accounting spread rapidly throughout the Middle East and persisted virtually unchanged for more than 4,000 years. But the tokens became more complex, beginning about 3350 BC, when accountants in the then-emerging cities began to keep track of man-made goods such as fabrics and clothing.

The transition from tokens to writing on clay tablets occurred over a relatively brief time span, Schmandt-Besserat said. The process started around 3300 BC when someone invented envelopes, called “bullae,” to hold the tokens. The package was in effect the bill of lading sent along with a shipment of goods.

The importance of the bullae in bookkeeping had previously been recognized by researchers such as the late A. Leo Oppenheim of the University of Chicago and Pierre Amiet of the Louvre in Paris, but it was left to Schmandt-Besserat to decipher their importance to the origin of writing.

The problem with the bullae--clay spheres about two to four inches in diameter--was that their contents could not be discerned without breaking the spheres open, she said.

To overcome this problem, accountants began pressing the tokens into the clay before closing the envelope and hardening it. It didn’t take them long to realize that with the impressions of the tokens on the clay’s surface, there was no longer any need for the tokens themselves.

The hollow spheres were then replaced by clay tablets about the same size.

“This simple change, from tokens to their negative impression on the face of a clay tablet, can now be recognized as the invention of writing,” she said.

More complex tokens often did not make a sharp impression in the clay. The accountants got around this problem by tracing the outline of the token in the clay with a sharp reed stylus.

Over a short period of time, perhaps 100 to 200 years, the system of negative impressions of tokens and a few inscribed symbols evolved into a system that employed only inscribed symbols. And something very interesting happened during that interval, she said.

When accountants used envelopes and negative impressions on the first clay tablets, they continued to use one symbol for each item. Three sheep, for example, would be represented by three disks with a “+” on each.

But by the time the accounting had shifted completely to written symbols, the accountants had begun using symbols that stood for numbers. For example, three sheep would be represented by a symbol representing three followed by only one disk with a “+.”

The system of numbers did not spring directly into a full-blown system for counting, however. Initially, the accountants worked with only two numbers, a wedge representing “1” and a circle representing “10.” Multiples of each were represented by repeating the figures the appropriate number of times.

For the first time, Schmandt-Besserat said, the idea of the number of objects (quantity) had been separated from that of the identity of the objects (quality). “When the notions of quality and quantity are split, then the notion of quality becomes writing in its own right. It’s no longer saying, ‘How much of what?’ It is saying ‘what.’ From that ‘what,’ it can be developed to say anything that a human being wants to say.”

Indeed, by 2900 BC, writing was already being used to record historical events and religious hymns and prayers, she noted.