The Origins of Accounting

Question: Where did accounting originate?
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Many historians argue that 'accounting', in the form of 'tallies', was the precursor of written language in all civilisations. The need to keep permanent records of transactions, commodities, tax receipts, etc., prompted ancient civilisations to adopt various media, most often clay, and devise appropriate writing tools. A primary example was the use of a reed stylus to produce wedge-shaped (cuneiform) markings on clay tablets that evolved in the Sumerian civilisation of Iraq around 3,400 BCE.

With many early tally systems, items were ennumerated with simple strokes rather than mumeric characters. What was initially required was a way of denoting the items being recorded. This led to the development of pictograms and ideograms - simple symbols representing these items. In many languages these pictograms evolved into characters representing sounds that could be used in combination to form words, whether as alphabetic or syllabic scripts. Ideograms combined with text were the key to the decipherment of Cretan Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, who demonstrated that the language was an early form of Greek. These scholars were able to develop values for individual characters by comparing textual content with the pictographic symbols.

Scripts, alphabets and syllabaries could spread through cultural diversion, regardless of the original language or the languages that adopted them. Cuneiform, for example, was dispersed from Mesopotamia throughout the Middle East and was adapted for the Akkadian, Hittite and Elamite languages and many more. This pattern was repeated with most early scripts, and these early forms of writing gradually developed (in most cases) to more easily used forms, especially as new media (papyrus, parchment, etc.) allowed a more flowing cursive style.

So that 'accounting' was one of the earliest skills and markers of civilisations and led directly to the development of written language.

A good account of the early archaeology and decipherment of ancient texts for the general reader is 'Voices in Stone' by Ernst Doblhofer. Although first published in 1957, this remains a classic account of some of the most important discoveries in the area of ancient languages. ‘The Man Who Deciphered Linear B’ is a (much more) recent biography of Michael Ventris.