The earliest texts were pictographs on tablets written with a stylus, with accounting-specific writing systems evolving into more expressive systems that described politics, religion, and news. They would record trade transactions, debts and advances, in duplicate on clay tablets to be retained by the parties to the transaction. The earliest scribes served as lawyers and accountants in the early cities.
#Brief history of double entry bookkeeping portable#
With stylized signs, all information could be recorded directly on clay tablets, which were cheaper and more portable than tokens.
They were easy to identify and duplicate representing daily life commodities. These forms seem fully arbitrary and to be dictated only by the concern for making with the least effort. Their shapes include spheres, flat and lenticular disks, cones, tetrahedrons, and cylinders. In the middle of the ninth millennium BCE, communities began coalescing around marketplaces that eventually became the cities of antiquity. Accounting was practiced in the ancient Middle East by means of small counters - tokens modeled in clay in different shapes, each symbolizing a particular commodity. They are tally sticks with counting notches carved into a baboon’s fibula, found in the Lebombo mountains located between South Africa and Swaziland. These are arguably the oldest known accounting computers. The earliest extant record of humans keeping track of numbers is the Lebombo Bone (several dozen have been found to date) which have been carbon-dated to about 35,000 BC. I'm here to tell you the real story of the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and modern accounting.Īccounting and auditing are ancient, with many modern practices that are rooted in traditions that date back millennia. This section details the evolution of accounting, with explanations of how historical developments live on in the idiosyncrasies of accounting and auditing today. One of the great myths, perpetuated by accountants and academics alike, is that modern accounting was a purely European invention by a friend of Leonardo DaVinci's named Luca Pacioli. Ever since I was in school, this myth has been repeated, without primary or secondary sources to lend it any credibility at all. This didn't make sense to me, since accountants had been using double-entry around the world many centuries earlier than the Renaissance. But the accounting profession and academics have steadfastly maintained that modern accounting could only have been a European invention.
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