Why were cones and tetrahedra such popular counting-tokens in the ancient Near East?

What is it about?

Clay counters in various geometric shapes were used across a wide swath of the ancient Near East for over 5,000 years. Across time and region, cones greatly outnumbered rectangular prisms, and tetrahedra greatly outnumbered pyramids. These relative frequencies are surprising given previous psychological research showing that humans perceive and create right angles more easily than oblique angles two-dimensionally. To understand why cones and tetrahedra were so frequent as ancient counters, I examined the relative sculpting ease of cones, tetrahedra, rectangular prisms, and pyramids by employing adult participants to sculpt these shapes. For these participants, rectangular prisms were no more difficult to create than cones, and pyramids were easier to create than tetrahedra. I concluded that cones and tetrahedra were popular counting-tokens in antiquity, not because of any non-semantic factor, but because they were figurative of sunbeams and stood for solar time-units.

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Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article is the first to suggest that the ancient Near East geometric counting-tokens were not exclusively arbitrary (i.e., not intentionally portraying the things counted). The evidence that cone and tetrahedron counting-tokens portrayed downward-shining sunbeams and counted solar time-units is important for understanding the socio-cultural evolution of the prehistoric Near East and the invention of cuneiform writing.

Perspectives