What is a TOKEN?

Tokens from Tepe Gawra, present day Iraq, ca. 4000 BC.
. cone, sphere, and flat disk are three measures of cereals: small, larger, largest.
tetrahedron is a unit of work (one man/one day? ).
Courtesy the University Museum, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

During the Urban Period, 3500-3100, new types of tokens appeared besides the plain ones. Among them were further geometric shapes such as quadrangles, triangles, paraboloids, ovals and biconoids, but also naturalistic forms including vessels, tools and animals. These so-called complex tokens were characteristically covered with lines or dots conferring qualitative information. Triangles, paraboloids, and mostly disks occurred in series bearing various sets of lines. Plain and complex tokens were found by the dozen or the hundreds in Near Eastern archaeological sites from Palestine to Anatolia and from Syria to Persia.

1. Counting – Tokens shed light on the beginning of counting. First, the tokens were used in one-to-one correspondence: three jars of oil were shown by three ovoid tokens, which is the simplest way of reckoning. Second, the fact that each commodity was counted with a specific type of tokens, i.e. jars of oil could only be counted with ovoid tokens, denotes concrete counting. Concrete counting is characterized by different numerations or different sequences of number words to count different categories of items. 

2. Economy – Tokens were linked to the economy. Their invention corresponds to the beginning of agriculture. For example, at Mureybet, Syria, tokens occur in level III, where pollen indicated the presence of cultivated fields. (Cauvin, 74) Second, the counters served exclusively to keep track of commodities. The plain tokens stood for farm products: small and large cones, spheres and flat disks stood for different measures of barley; ovoids for jars of oil; cylinders and lenticular disks represented numbers of domesticated animals and tetrahedrons for units of labor. Ca. 3500, the proliferation of token shapes and markings reflected the multiplication of commodities manufactured in urban workshops. Triangular shapes stood for ingots of metal; series of disks bearing on their face various numbers of parallel lines stood for various qualities of textiles and paraboloids for garments. Quantities of beer, oil, honey were shown by tokens in the shape of their usual containers. There is no evidence that tokens were used for trade. Instead they were central to administration. 

3. Administration – The mastery of counting and accounting with tokens fostered an elite based on administrative skills, who controlled the redistribution economy. The main function of tokens was to keep track of household and workshop contributions of surplus goods to the communal wealth and their redistribution for the support of the underprivileged or the organization of religious festivals. The bullae and envelopes with their multiple office seals illustrate the toughening of the city state administrations, when unpaid contributions were recorded until their settlement. 

4. Cognition – Counting with tokens reflected the level of cognition of preliterate oral cultures. (Malafouris) Data processing with tokens was tactile. The counters were meant to be grasped and manipulated with the fingers. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of quantities of commodities were done by moving or removing counters by hand. Tokens processed data concretely. First, the items counted consisted exclusively of goods, such as barley, animals and oil. Second, plurality was treated concretely, in one-to-one correspondence and with concrete numerations.

5. Writing – Tokens represent the first stage in the 9000-year continuous Near Eastern tradition of data processing. They led to writing. The change in communication that occurred on envelopes when the three-dimensional tokens were replaced by their two-dimensional impressions is considered the beginning of writing. Clay tablets bearing impressed signs replaced the tokens enclosed in envelopes.  In turn, the impressed markings were followed by pictographs, or sketches of tokens and other items traced with a stylus. Writing inherited from tokens a system for accounting goods, clay, and a repertory of signs. Writing brought abstraction to data processing: the signs abstracting tokens were no longer tangible; abstract numerals such as “1” “10” “60” replaced one-to-one correspondence; finally, pictographs took phonetic values.

6. Tokens Beyond the Near East – Plain tokens are not unique to the ancient Near East. Identical artifacts have been excavated in Central Asia at Jeitun, in Western China at Shuangdun and the Indus Valley at Mehrgarh. Similar clay counters in the same shapes and sizes are also reported in preliterate excavations outside of the Near Eastern sphere of influence in Europe (Budja), Africa and Mesoamerica suggesting that the tactile, concrete system of data processing corresponds to some fundamental aptitude of the human preliterate mind. However the phenomenon of complex tokens and the evolution into writing occurred only in the Near East.

7. Significance – Tokens played a major role in the development of counting, data processing and communication in the ancient Near East. They made possible the establishment of a Neolithic redistribution economy and thereby set the foundation of the Mesopotamian Bronze Age civilization.        https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/tokens/

TOKENs in Modern Data Processing

Alliance iii.o founders trace their beginnings back to the late 1950s, when Alasdair G. "Sandy" Barclay, who as a young man joined the COBOL computer language team at Ontario Hydro, Toronto, an early UniVac computing installation.
Early use of "tokens" in modern computing in higher level programming languages, such as COBOL, involved the most basic element of source code, a "token". Tokens were pieces of code that cannot be subdivided. Tokens were classified as reserved words, numbers, identifiers, symbols, characters, or character strings. Breaking source code into tokens is known as tokenization and it was the very first step a compiler performed when analyzing code in these source | object code languages. 

In the late 1970s, another Alliance iii.o founder, John T. Oakes, a HUMAN of extraordinary computing agility, pioneered multiple installations of DataPoint Corporation ARC systems, one of the first distributed computing local area network architectures. This disruptive technology hastened the end of punch cards and tape decks. Multiple desktop terminals were connected to storage and processing components, disk drives, printers, bursters, decollators, check signing machines, and other network equipment, and through 1200 baud modems, extended local area networks ("LAN") to wide area networks ("WAN"). 

These late 1970s vintage ARCNET networks were at first loosely coupled LAN-based clustering systems, making no assumptions about the type of computers that would be connected. The token-passing bus protocol of that I/O device-sharing network was subsequently applied to allowing processing nodes to communicate with each other for file-serving and computing scalability purposes. An application could be developed in DATABUS, Datapoint's proprietary COBOL-like language and deployed on a single computer with dumb terminals. When the number of users outgrew the capacity of the original computer, additional 'compute' resource computers could be attached via ARCNET, running the same applications and accessing the same data. If more storage was needed, additional disk resource computers could also be attached. This incremental approach broke new ground.

TOKENs have been used in many forms of commerce for more than 9,000 years.

While their forms may have changed, the breadth of use and flexibility involves a broad range of ARCHETYPES to which our modern efforts may add limited innovation. Legislators, regulators, technologists, commerce participants, publishers and others may wish to familiarise themselves regarding token's ubiquity before charting new legislation and regulation to limit its historic universal applications.