ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN ACCOUNTING AND HUMAN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION

Accounting Historians Journal, The, Dec 2004 by Mouck, Tom

But even as the evolution of the accounting system approached a full-fledged system of cuneiform writing, as described earlier, Donald does not consider the ESS sufficiently developed to support the transition to 'theoretic culture'. The early forms of writing that evolved from the Mesopotamian accounting system were extremely difficult and time consuming to master. As a result they were learned by a small elite who were, in turn, charged with maintaining records of economic and legal transactions, and with preparing official accounts related to religious and political matters. It was only with the evolution of the Greek phonetic alphabet that writing and reading became accessible to a wider range of individuals and writing became a catalyst for critical reflective thought on all aspects of life, the world and human affairs. Beginning with the Greeks, written stories, reflections, speculations, and critiques formed an increasingly elaborate 'external symbolic storage system' (ESS) which was available to the EXMF.

Thus, while the writing systems of the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and others constituted external symbolic storage systems, their cultural impact was much more circumscribed than the ESS developed by the Greeks. Stimulated by the Greek phonetic alphabet, the growing body of books and other written artifacts began to have an increasingly potent influence on the conduct of human affairs, culminating eventually in a transition from a predominantly mythic culture to a predominantly theoretic culture. Thus, in Donald's diagrammatic scheme, the phonetic alphabet can be seen as the beginning of the most recent phase of human cognitive evolution, with a solidly established ESS and cognitive pathways linking the ESS, via the EXMF, to the V/S cognitive structures. And finally, the phonetic writing system created direct linkages between the V/S structures and the cognitive structures of language, L. These cognitive structures and their linkages are indicated diagrammatically as Level IVc in Figure 4.

In summary, Donald's thesis about the stages of human cognitive evolution are presented in diagrammatic form in Figures 1 to 4. Note that the fourth stage of cognitive structure, the one involving an EXMF and an ESS is indicated as going through three evolutionary phases indicated as Levels IVa, IVb, and IVc (portrayed in Figures 2, 3, and 4, respectively). In this scheme of cognitive evolution, the ancient Mesopotamian accounting system played the most influential role in the developments leading to cognitive level IVb [Figure 3]. This ancient accounting system solidified the linkage between V/S and M; it established a tentative EXMF with tentative linkage to the V/S system; and the system of writing that emerged from the accounting system eventually incorporated the use of syllabaries, providing a tentative linkage between the V/S structures and the linguistic structures, L.

This diagrammatic scheme thus offers an interesting way to pinpoint the role of accounting in human cognitive evolution, but in and of itself it conveys only a partial and altogether too modest a picture of the cognitive significance of Mesopotamian accounting. A more complete picture can be fleshed out from the perspective of Clark's [1997] notion of scaffolded cognition; a notion that is thoroughly compatible and closely related to Donald's ideas about external memory fields and external symbolic storage systems.