villagefinance

The work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat is reshaping our concept of the origins of writing and counting, shedding new light on both the challenges and opportunities in village finance practice.

A scholar of ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Texas, her books provide strong evidence of her thesis that writing in Mesopotamia came long after strong institutions. It evolved from “a system of tokens – small clay counters of many shapes which served for counting and accounting of goods”. She traces the evolution of tokens from their origins around 8000 BC until their reinvention in cuneiform writing 5,000 years later.

Tokens were clay shapes (cones, spheres, disks, etc.) formed by hand and then fire-hardened.  They represented basic commodities. For example, they may have been used for lending grain. They are often unearthed in town dumps, where they were tossed after the harvest — a time when village debts are repaid (How Writing Came About.  University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996, p. 30).

‘Plain tokens’ first emerged around 8,000 BC. By about 3,500 BC a ‘complex token’ system evolved that provided sufficient information processing capabilities for public institutions to manage the redistributive economies of cities like Uruk, Susa and Habuba Kabira.

Schmandt-Besserat argues that numerals are among the most abstract concepts in our mental toolkit. “… ‘Two’ does not exist in nature, but only groups of two concrete items, such as two fingers, two people, two sheep” (p. 118). It took 5,000 years to progress from ‘one-to-one correspondence’ (the dominant mode of hunters and gatherers) to numerals.

In working with villagers to introduce community banks, how well do we understand local financial management capabilities? Are we using the right training tools? Do we even have the right training tools?