As we have seen, small clay tokens appear in Hassunan sites in northern Mesopotamia; and actually we have some limited evidence of tokens of these sorts appearing on sites in the Near East as far back as 8000. They're a common feature of later farming societies in these areas, and they don't look very impressive, as you can see; they're fairly small and formless. Yet they seem to have been used in an inventory system; these tokens were literally tokens, probably of some kind of agricultural or craft products. So we have this prehistory of these tokens through time.posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:11 PM on August 24, 2010
By the middle of the Uruk period, about 3500, a little bit before, these tokens were themselves being stored within hollow clay spheres or balls called bullae. You can see that one would take the tokens, and then globe them into this small clay ball that served to do two things: It served first to conceal the contents, the specific tokens, from outside examination; and second, when it had dried, to prevent covert tampering with the contents. You couldn't get back into this without breaking it.
These bullae, then, were, increasingly during the Uruk period as well, marked with seal impressions; that is, the people were taking stone seals and marking them with a variety of different symbols on the outside. This provided evidence of ownership and/or involvement in economic transactions, those economic transactions that were inventoried inside the bullae. So one would have both a secure inventory, with the tokens inside, plus ownership designated by the stamp seals on the outside on the clay on the bullae.
Slightly later in Uruk times, clay tablets begin to appear on Uruk sites; and these clay tablets bear imprints resembling both the tokens and the seals. So this is a clay tablet, and then the tokens and the seals are actually pressed into the clay physically. They seem to be acting almost as a supplement to the bullae, because when you think about it, these would allow inventories to be checked more easily without destroying the object of record within.
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Oh, the irony.
Imagine if the Sumerians had PDF and the Internets; We would have had Fark.com by the end of the 2nd Dynasty of Lagash.
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on August 24, 2010