Clay tokens
Small shaped counters used to track goods become, five thousand years later, the first writing.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4.7 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
From around 8000 BCE, small clay tokens in standard shapes — cones, spheres, discs, cylinders — appear across the Near East, and Denise Schmandt-Besserat's argument is that they represent quantities of specific commodities: so many measures of grain, so many jars of oil. Later they are sealed inside clay envelopes, then impressed on the outside of the envelope to show the contents, then the envelope is dispensed with and only the impressions remain. That last step is cuneiform.