ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how, in Mesopotamia, the use of seals (discussed in Chapter 2) came to be combined with ‘tokens’ (Chapter 1) to supply more powerful recording mechanisms: seals identified the persons responsible for a transaction, and tokens or other marks represented types and/or quantities of goods. But there were still limits to records’ representational capacities: there was no way to represent the nature of a transaction, its date or contexts, or the roles played by the different parties. Moreover, while records of this kind can be effective when used by people who know the circumstances of record-making, they do not easily convey meaning to third parties distant in space or time. The chapter explains how the invention of writing linked record-keeping with language and thus permitted a wider range of variables to be represented in a way that was knowable to a wider audience. The earliest written records in Mesopotamia were made for much the same purposes as their unwritten predecessors; they served to account for the administration of commodities and economic resources. But when it became possible to use writing to inscribe complete sentences and continuous prose, some individuals began to make records relating to private ownership of land.
