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/
to - ken
NOUN
token (noun) · tokens (plural noun)
1. a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc.:
a characteristic or distinctive sign or mark,
especially a badge or favor worn to indicate allegiance to a particular
person or party:
a word or object conferring authority on or serving to authenticate the speaker or holder:
2. a voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services, typically one given as a gift or offered as part of a promotional offer:
a metal or plastic disk used to operate a machine or in exchange for particular goods or services:
3. linguistics
an
individual occurrence of a linguistic unit in speech or writing, as
contrasted with the type or class of linguistic unit of which it is an
instance. Contrasted with type.
4.computing
a sequence of bits passed continuously between nodes in a fixed order and enabling a node to transmit information.
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.