Accounting analysis of the Achaemenes archives: a summative content analysis

ABSTRACT This study deciphers provocative features of the Achaemenid Empire’s accounting system. In particular, it investigates the accounting and bookkeeping mechanisms, practised in that era (in what is present-day Iran), and the major social and physical duality characteristics of these mechanisms. The research employs the techniques of summative content analysis to examine accounting clay-tablets found in the fortifications of the Persepolis. The tablets date back to the thirteenth to the twenty-eighth year (509–494 BCE) of the rule of Darius the Great of the Achaemenid Empire. The findings reveal the development of an elaborate accounting system that represented physical duality (transfer of actual physical commodities in the scheme of input-output analysis) as well as social duality (transfer of ownership, investing and/or lending and borrowing within the input-output system). The use of tokens to record, classify, and analyse accounts, to establish control and accountability, and to allocate resources suggests that our present-day systems are grounded in the knowledge transmission of earlier eras.