CALL FOR PAPERS "Accounting and Bookkeeping as Social Practice in Cuneiform Cultures" (original) (raw)
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Unusual Accounting Practices in Archaic Mesopotamian Tablets
§1.1. The archaic texts examined in this paper all come from the earlier Erlenmeyer Collection. As is widely known, this tablet collection was auctioned off in December of 1988 by the London auction house Christie's, and the majority of them were purchased by the State of Berlin and transferred to the Vorderasiatisches Museum as a permanent loan. 1 Many of the tablets are fully preserved and in very good condition, allowing unequivocal analysis of their administrative contents. Unfortunately, deriving from irregular excavations, the provenience of the tablets is unknown and can be only tentatively proposed on the basis of similarity with other tablets.
Accounting and accountability in ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 2007
The aim of this paper is to identify the relevance and implications of ancient accounting practices to the contemporary theorizing of accounting. The paper provides a synthesis of the literature on ancient accounting particularly in relation to issues of human accountability, identifies its major achievements and outlines some of the key challenges facing researchers. We argue that far from being an idiosyncratic research field of marginal interest, research in ancient accounting is a rich and promising undertaking that holds the promise of significantly enhancing our understanding of the roles of accounting in organizations and society. The paper concludes by considering a number of implications of ancient accounting practices for the theorizing of accounting and identifies a number of possible avenues for future research.
Accounting and Forms of Accountability in Ancient Civilizations: Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The aim of this paper is to identify the relevance and implications of ancient accounting practices to the contemporary theorizing of accounting. The paper provides a synthesis of the literature on ancient accounting particularly in relation to issues of human accountability, identifies its major achievements and outlines some of the key challenges facing researchers. We argue that far from being an idiosyncratic research field of marginal interest, research in ancient accounting is a rich and promising undertaking that holds the promise of significantly enhancing our understanding of the roles of accounting in organizations and society. The paper concludes by considering a number of implications of ancient accounting practices for the theorizing of accounting and identifies a number of possible avenues for future research.
Accounting and the Input-Output Principle in the Prehistoric and Ancient World
Abacus, 1989
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.
TSU, 2023
The analysis of archaeological material made it possible to answer the following questions: when, where, why and how was the system of economic accounting, mathematics, the art of writing and script originated and developed producing the social-economic revolution. The work describes an accounting system used in Near East since the Neolith Age. The accounting was kept with the help of clay tokens, denoting numbers and various goods. Sometimes the clay tokens were attached to clay bullae hung on wool ropes or were put into spherical bulla-envelopes and then sealed. They were stamped on the outer surface of the clay bullae and denoted the number of tokens in the bullae. The process of stamping with the tokens on the outer surface of the clay bullae resulted in the appearance of pictographic, linear and cuneiform scripts in 3500–2800 BC. These scripts are found on numerous clay tablets, the deciphering of which proves that writing is an immediate result of counting goods and was used for economic and administrative registration. The detailed correspondences between several Mesopotamian and Common Kartvelian forms are given in the appendix.
1993
Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East
The Role of Management Accounting in Ancient India: Evidence from the Arthasastra
Journal of Business Ethics, 2016
The various forms of accounting practice have a long history. However, the focus of historical accounting scholarship examining premodern times has tended to be the genesis of double-entry book-keeping techniques. In particular, very few scholars have examined influences on the adoption of management accounting techniques in the ancient periods of India's long history. We respond to this lacuna by examining management accounting at an organizational level within an ancient and economically successful society, namely the Mauryan period (322-185 BC). The aim is to explore management accounting practices implicated in the enforcement of economic and ethical behavior in the daily lives of Mauryan organizational actors. Drawing on a translation of original records in the form of a collection of texts known as the Arthasastra (lit. the science of wealth), this paper explores the intended uses of management accounting and, in particular, controls to persuade organizational actors to adapt the values and norms of wealth generation within the boundaries of socially acceptable roles. Our contribution is to highlight the society-oriented role of management accounting within Mauryan organizations.