Accounting and the Input—Output Principle in the Prehistoric and Ancient World

The paper offers mainly an interpretation of Professor Schmandt-Besserat's archaeological research from an accountant's point of view. Its major conclusion is that those ancient people were the first to apply the input—output principle (inherent in every actual commodity transfer) to a representational, quasi-numerical (and later numerical) system of record keeping. A second aspect of this paper reveals that both the token-accounting of the ancient Middle East, as well as modern accounting, deal with two distinct but related duality aspects. The first kind of duality involves concrete transactions and belongs to physical reality, while the second kind of duality arises out of ownership and debt relations which belong to social reality. The paper demonstrates how these two types of duality are related and in which way the second type can be reduced to the first type. The final section examines the possibility of connecting the input—output principle manifested in token accounting with the duality principle encountered in ancient Greek accounting practice.