Counting: Humanity’s first FinTech
Imagine yourself in the fertile valleys on the west bank of the Euphrates river, around 9000 BCE. You’re living through one of the most profound transitions in human history. The first sedentary peoples have began to domesticate animals, cultivate cereals and in doing so have devised a novel technology; counting.
You’ve had a successful week hunting gazelle and equids, you’ve harvested some lushious bushels of rye and barley but you have no means of recording your bountiful stockpile or communicating it across the neighbouring Tells. Enter tokens: simple clay structures, devoid of markings and modelled in a dozen simple geometric shapes, including cones, spheres, discs, ovoids and cylinders.
Figure 1: Plain tokens from Tepe Gawra (Iraq).
Before you even had a pot to piss in (pottery won’t be invented for a few thousand years) you have a high-tech method of accounting for your livestock and grain. For example, a cone stood for a small measure of barley, a sphere for a larger measure of barley and a disc for sheep. The number of units of goods was expressed by the number of tokens in a one–to–one correspondence: three small measures of barley were shown by three cones.
Counting was based on a sexagesimal system (base-60), the number system intended by the gods. The reason is routed in human anatomy. If you hold your hand out infront of you, you’ll notice that each of your four fingers is divided into 3 segments. Its thought that ancient people would use the thumb of their right hand to tap each segment of each finger, counting up to 12. When they reached 12, they would raise a finger on their left hand. When you had 5 fingers raised on your left hand you had 60. Thats why we have 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a circle and the 12 cycles of the moon confirm the divinity of such a system.
I wish there was a way to record all this without handling hundreds of tokens!
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Some Ancient Mesopatamian (probably)
As society grew more complex, so did the token system. Tetrahedrons represented units of labor, triangles marked metal ingots, and patterned discs denoted textiles. But success brought its own challenges. With livestock multiplying, crops expanding, and administrative needs growing, the system of some 300 different token shapes became unwieldy. This complexity sparked a revolutionary solution: writing. The innovation was elegantly simple - pressing these three-dimensional tokens into clay tablets created two-dimensional impressions. A cone left a wedge-shape signifying a small measure of barley, while a sphere created a circular mark representing a larger measure. In this way, the physical tokens evolved into the first written symbols.
Figure 2: Impressed tablet from Godin Tepe, Iran, ca. 3200 BC. The circular signs, deriving from the sphere token, stand for 1 large measure of grain. The wedges, deriving from the cone token, for a small measure of grain.
To see how this primitive accounting system evolved into the world’s first financial infrastructure, we need to travel to humanity’s first metropolis - Eridu.
The Temple of Eanna: A Sumerian Stripe
Eridu was the first Sumerian city, which kicked off a whole constellation of urban settlments dotting southern Iraq around 5400 BCE. We’re talking the first ever 10,000-person+ metroplises where financial technology is about to skyrocket. These independent city-states each centered around their temples and were ruled by priest-kings known as Ensi, with some help from a council of elders.
At the risk of sounding like the Librarian from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (iykyk), there’s this text called “The Gifts of Inanna” that describes how Enki, the patron god of Eridu (and the god of water, knowledge, crafts, and creation, and one of the Anunnaki), handed down various technologies to his daughter Inanna, who then, passed them down to humanity. The whole package: carpentry, copper-smithing, leather-working, building, reed-working and most importantly scribing.
In the city of Uruk, scribing on clay tablets became a routine practise by administrators for their record-keeping and counting. Uruk is the epic Gilgamesh’s epic hometown, a city crowned with the white temple dedicated to Anu, the sky god, and later the Temple of Eanna (Inannas abode). Within the walls of this 5.5 km2 city, we find the first example of a payslip. We’ve only just started counting, so instead of money this man is paid in beer (efficient, less middlemen).
Figure 3: The human head feeding from a bowl indicates a “ration” and the conical vessel “beer”. The scratches record the amount to be paid.
Now drawing on some neolithic-Marxist ideas of alienation (labor did also have it’s own token afterall), as these cities grew larger and more densely populated, rather paradoxically the people grew further apart, in that it became harder to trust the unfamilliars. Now Marx might mumble something about the urban fabric breaking down but what he fundamentally misunderstands time and time again is the power of technology.
Figure 4: 5500-4500 BC. A sealed spherical clay bulla envelope, containing clay tokens which can be heard rattling inside
To rewind slightly before the conception of writing, this ingenious homologous clay technology has been evolving in parallel. Originally, bullae were hollow clay balls used to encapsulate tokens. Just before the first cities, the Sumerian farmers are producing more grain than they can store themselves and so depend on shared facilities. In order to account for the stored grain, they would encapsulate their tokens inside a bulla. When they needed to account for the grain, they would break it open and reveal its contents. Later, these bullae were signed with a unique seal to identify the owner and prevent tampering.
This hollow clay ball (bulla) was the world’s first form of financial contract. Over time, they started stamping the contents of the bulla on the outside while still wet; a precursor to writing. This meant accountants didn’t have to break open the clay ball everytime they needed to check the contents but the tokens inside acted as an early form of backup storage for disaster recovery.
The Urukians, with the confines of the Temple of Eanna had created the perfect setup for the emergence of lending at interest. If you lent someone 30 cattle for a year, you’d expect 30 cattle back plus a little extra for your trouble. The Sumerian word for interest, “máš,” was the same as the word for calf - when cattle is your currency, interest is the offspring of your capital.
You can think of the Temple of Eanna as ancient Mesopotamia’s first unicorn startup, and they were bullish (pun intended, given all the cattle-based lending). The temple complex served as a bank, warehouse, trade center, and the original WeWork all rolled into one. Merchants would come to deposit their goods, receive those clay receipt-tokens we talked about, and even get loans backed by the temple’s substantial reserves. The priests weren’t just spiritual leaders; they were the first fintech bros. Like any good tech hub, the Temple of Eanna had its own elite class of specialists - the scribes - who were essentially the Sumerian equivalent of software engineers, maintaining and upgrading the ‘code’ (cuneiform) that not only kept this whole financial ecosystem running but ensured the Urukian economy’s path to accelerated growth.
Sargon of Akkad: Open Banking APIs
To be continued…