Clay Tokens to Clay Tablets ; 3D to 2D

In my last blog post I discussed the attempt of expressing ideas of stone age cave people and the first record keeping method known as clay tokens introduced by ancient Mesopotamians.
   
Here I like to discuss the transformation of clay tokens to clay tablets.

Use of clay tokens in Mesopotamian civilisation is very common. Mesopotamians have used clay tokens over 4 millenniums. However use of putting clay tokens into clay envelops was abandoned gradually due to complexity of taking out the tokens and impression of clay tokens was used instead. Gradually the shape of clay ball turned to flat clay tablets which were handy to imprint the clay tokens.


















Mesopotamian clay ball with imprinted token (above)
Image Courtesy and Location: http://designblog.nzeldes.com/2008/07/

 Flat clay tablets with imprints of clay tokens (above)
Image Courtesy and location: http://designblog.nzeldes.com/2008/07/

Although this is yet another huge step of development of clay tablets, specialists in linguistic says that these kind of  impressions do not represent language aspects in them because they used as memory aids to record data. However these kind of clay tablets are consided as prewritings of man kind.


Evolution of Clay Tablets: Addition of Pictures to clay tablets


The next step of clay tablet is the addition of pictures together with the impressions. Instead of repeating the same picture over and over again to represent multiple objects of the same type, they used diferent kinds of small marks to "count" the number of objects. Following image shows how they used simple picture to represent the item and impressed tokens to show the number of items they have in that item.

Clay tablet with simple pictures and impressions of tokens
Image taken from: http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/graphics/vase4.jpg