The Sanga Simulacrum

The Life

The office of the *sanga* — the temple accountant — emerged in the Sumerian city-states of the late fourth and early third millennium BCE, in the period during which writing itself was invented. The earliest administrative tablets from Uruk, dated to around 3200 BCE, are sanga records: lists of grain, livestock, and labour, accounted to particular officials, against particular receipts, on particular dates. Specific named sangas are recorded in slightly later tablets from Lagash, Ur, Shuruppak, and other city-states of the Early Dynastic period; they were senior temple officials, trained in the scribal schools (*edubba*) that produced the literate administrative class of the cities. The sanga of the temple of Ningirsu at Lagash, under the rulers Eannatum and Entemena, is among the better-documented of these figures.

The Thought

The sanga was the inventor, in practice, of the bureaucracy — the systematic use of writing, numbers, and dated records to administer a large institution with resources beyond any individual's memory. The temple was the primary economic institution of the Sumerian city-state: it owned fields, herds, workshops, and storehouses; it collected offerings and distributed rations; it lent at interest and accounted for what it had lent. None of this was possible without written records, and the sanga's role was to create, maintain, and audit them.

The accounting technology the sangas developed — tablets, seals, dated receipts, running tallies, periodic inventories, cross-checks between independent records — was more sophisticated than most modern readers realise. The distinction between a record of receipt and a record of disbursement was drawn cleanly; the aggregation of individual transactions into monthly and yearly summaries was routine; the practice of comparing one official's records with another's, to detect discrepancies, was institutionalised. The double-entry innovation of Pacioli, nearly five thousand years later, was not the first time such principles had been grasped.

The Legacy

The sanga tradition is the origin of accounting, and therefore of most of the administrative practices on which complex societies depend. The Edubba of Nippur, the Babylonian scribal schools that descended from the Sumerian temple-office tradition, produced the literate class that administered the later Mesopotamian empires; the Egyptian scribal bureaucracy, the Persian satrapal administration, the Hellenistic royal treasuries, the Roman imperial fisc, and ultimately the medieval and modern financial administrations all descend, through long and branching lineages, from the practices the sangas established. To audit is to act in a tradition that is older than any written text in any other genre.