Ranking: five artefacts that define the record
Ordered by age. Each entry gets a count, a place and a one-line verdict on what it actually proves.
- Lebombo bone — c. 43,000 years. A baboon fibula with 29 notches, recovered from Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains between South Africa and Eswatini. Verdict: strong evidence of deliberate marking; whether it tracks a lunar month or something else cannot be settled.
- Dolní Věstonice wolf bone — c. 30,000 years. Found in 1937 in Moravia, Czech Republic, by Karel Absolon. Reported to carry 55 notches, with an early run grouped in fives. Verdict: the earliest frequently cited sign of grouping.
- Ishango bone — c. 20,000–25,000 years. Excavated in 1950 by Jean de Heinzelin near Lake Edward in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and held by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Three columns of notches; one column reads 11, 13, 17, 19. Verdict: famous, heavily interpreted, and the prime-number reading is contested.
- Exchequer tally sticks — c. 12th century to 1826. Royal England recorded tax and loan payments on split hazel or willow sticks. Verdict: the first tally used as a state-grade financial instrument.
- Inca quipu — 15th–16th century. Knotted cords encoding numbers in a base-ten position system. Verdict: not a stroke tally, but proof that a counting record could run an empire without writing.
How a split tally worked
A clerk cut notches across a stick to record a sum, then split it lengthwise. Both halves carried the same notches. The longer half, the stock, went to the payer; the shorter half, the foil, stayed with the Exchequer. When accounts were settled the halves were matched. A forged notch showed up instantly because it would not line up.
Notch size encoded value. Contemporary descriptions give a cut the width of a palm for £1,000, a thumb for £100, a little finger for £20 and a swollen barleycorn for £1; shillings and pence took smaller cuts and scratches. That is a graded number system cut into wood.
The vocabulary outlived the sticks. A holder of a stock was a stockholder; the retained half survives in the word counterfoil.
1834: the tally that burned Parliament
When the Exchequer finally retired its sticks in 1826, it was left with cartloads of obsolete wood. On 16 October 1834 workmen fed them into the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. The flues overheated and the old Palace of Westminster burned. Westminster Hall survived; most of the rest did not. The rebuild, designed by Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin, is the building seen today.
Charles Dickens used the episode in an 1855 speech to the Administrative Reform Association as a case study in official inertia: a system kept running for centuries after better tools existed, then disposed of carelessly. Verdict: the most expensive tally in history.
Side by side
| Artefact | Approx. date | Place | Material | Count method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lebombo bone | c. 43,000 BP | Border Cave, southern Africa | Baboon fibula | 29 single notches |
| Wolf bone | c. 30,000 BP | Dolní Věstonice, Czech Republic | Wolf bone | Notches, partly in fives |
| Ishango bone | c. 20,000–25,000 BP | Ishango, DR Congo | Bone with quartz tip | Three notch columns |
| Exchequer tally | c. 1100–1826 | Westminster, England | Hazel or willow | Graded notches, split stock and foil |
| Quipu | c. 1400–1532 | Andes | Cotton or camelid fibre | Positional knots, base ten |
What the record says
Three lines. Marking quantities on objects is older than farming. Grouping arrives early and sticks. Once a tally became a contract — two matching halves — it could carry money, which is why a medieval stick system survived into the age of steam. The mark systems that followed are scored in the next ledger.