Early tokens and tablets in Mesopotamia: New information from Tell Abada and Tell Brak

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Abstract
Although it is generally agreed that small clay objects may have functioned in prehistory as accounting devices, there exists in Mesopotamia no sequence of evidence from their extensive 8th/7th millennium occurrence to the period in which writing developed, sometime in the 4th millennium. Indeed such objects are not common on 6th/5th millennium sites, a time when ‘potters’ marks’, another plausible precursor of writing, are found in both Mesopotamia and Iran. Nor, until the recent excavation of Abada, was there actual evidence for the close association of different types of small clay object within any ‘system’. Abada now provides such evidence, though only for a relatively short time span in the 5th millennium. Recent excavations at Tell Brak, in northeastern Syria, have also added a new dimension to the origins of recording systems, in the discovery of two pictographic tablets which reflect either an independent North Mesopotamian tradition or a very early stage of the development attested at Warka.