ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN ACCOUNTING AND HUMAN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION

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

The theoretic accomplishments of the Greeks would not have been possible without the development of new cognitive skills. The habits of analytical thought and the metalinguistic skills associated with presentation and evaluation of ideas were formally taught to generation after generation of Greek students. These skills were honed in the formal study of rhetoric, which "emphasized the large-scale, on-line structuring of linguistic thought products" [Donald, 1991, p. 348]. The rigor of Greek rhetoric as a field of study is manifested in Aristotle's three-volume work on the subject. The formal teaching of these habits of thought were subsequently carried forward in one form or another by the Romans and then by Medieval universities, eventually playing a major role in laying the foundation for the development of modern science.

In sum, the development of writing opened up vast possibilities for the external storage of human knowledge, including knowledge of language and analytic thought processes. Furthermore, although writing was initially used in the service of solidifying and disseminating mythological perspectives, the impetus toward critical, analytical thought was essentially a demythologizing move. And although mythology continued to play a major role in subsequent cultures, including our own, the products of theoretical thought processes have taken over an increasingly influential role in major institutions related to education, business, science and politics. In this sense, the development of writing can be seen as the major development that initiated the chain of events by which the forces of theoretic culture have eclipsed those associated with mythic culture.

MESOPOTAMIAN ACCOUNTING AND THE ORIGIN OF WRITING

Accounting played a crucial role in the transition from mythic culture to theoretic culture. Specifically, ancient accounting provided the bridge between mythic culture and the origin of writing. In fact, the first known writing system emerged some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia in the form of written accounting records. This development has been explored in considerable detail by Schmandt-Besserat [1992] and by Nissen et. al. [1993], and their findings have been introduced into the accounting literature by Mattessich [1987; 1989; 1994; 1998; 2000] and Ezzamel and Hoskin [2002]. Thus, only a brief review of these and related developments is provided before turning (in the next section) to an analysis of their relevance to human cognitive evolution.

Until recently, the reigning hypothesis about the development of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia was that a relatively concrete pictographic writing had evolved first and gradually been modified into the more abstract cuneiform writing as evidenced by the many clay tablets that have been discovered by archeological researchers. This hypothesis has essentially been overturned by the archeological research of Schmandt-Besserat, which was first published in the late 1970s. Schmandt-Besserat [1978; 1986a; 1986b; 1992] has provided persuasive evidence that the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing system developed not from a previously existing pictographic writing system but from an ancient clay token accounting system which originated at least 10,000 years ago. In this accounting system, baked clay tokens were used to represent various agricultural goods (such as sheep, wheat and oil), and later manufactured goods (such as pottery and rugs). Certain shapes and sizes of tokens, and tokens with certain markings, were used to represent and to count specific types of items: "Sheep were counted with disks, small and large measures of grain with cones and spheres, and ovoids served to compute jars of oil" [Schmandt-Besserat, 1986a, p. 266].