Anthropologists tell us that in Suma, in about 4,000 BCE, Sumerians used tokens to represent numbers, an improvement over notches in a stick or bone. A very important development from using tokens to represent numbers was that in addition to adding tokens you can also take away, giving birth to arithmetic, an event of major significance.The Sumerian’s tokens made possible the arithmetic required for them to assess wealth, calculate profit and loss and even more importantly, to collect taxes, as well as keep permanent records. The standard belief is that in this way numbers became the world’s first writings and thus accounting was born.