History of accountancy, abstract of the introductory lecture delivered at the opening of the New York University School of Commerce, Accounts and finance;

              HISTORY OF ACCOUNTANCY
Abstract of the Introductory Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the New York University
School of .Commerce, Accounts and Finance
By C W. HASKINS, C. p. A.,
Dean and Professor of Auditing and of the History of Accountancy.*
The earliest regular commercial and financial rec­ords
of whose chronology we have any certain knowl­edge
are found in what are historically called the first group of nations; that is, in the countries south and east of the Mediterranean; especially in the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys. The archive-chambers and counting-houses of Babylon and Assyria have recently given to the spade of the excavator hundreds of thou­sands
of business books and documents, collectively known as contract tablets, of so astoundingly ancient dates that the mind almost refuses to believe the signed and sealed writings. These enduring witnesses to the vast antiquity of commerce, accounts and finance, in­scribed
in cuneiform or wedge-shaped letters on little slabs and cylinders of baked clay, have been standing for thousands of years upon the shelves of business and government offices and libraries, awaiting the call of the modern archaeologist to come forth and describe to us the methods of business procedure of those dis­tant
ages. And these same bricks, bearing their east­ern
language, are found far west in upper Egypt. The caravans of eastern commerce were mail-carriers; in the west were schools in which the bewildering sylla­bary
of Babylon and the Semitic and Sumerian tongues were taught; and the center of this literary activity, we are told by the Orientalist, was Canaan.
The Jews in Canaan, devoted rather to agriculture and the pastoral life than to commerce, have neverthe­less
left us, in their sacred writings, instructive and beautiful pictures of the spirit of accountancy, espe­cially
as controlling the relations of man to his Maker. And it may be said of that nation, that, as the storms of the ages have uprooted their successive homes and driven them into the compact ways of brainy finan­ciers,
they still retain, in worthy measure, the sturdy business integrity of the old exile of Chaldea.
Egypt, the land of the papyrus, was a country of scribes. Everything was recorded; even to monu­mental
descriptions of the recorders themselves. These men, more or less, according to position or capacity, did all the bookkeeping, all the auditing, all the ren­dering
of accounts. Their book was a papyrus roll; their pen was a reed from the banks of the Nile; their inks were red and black; and their inkstands were little pots fitted into a wooden hand-palette. In the chiseled and painted pictures of the glory of the Pharaohs we find these accountants keeping track of all the items of the vast royal revenue; of the income and outgo of every slave's backload of wheat in the granaries; and if anything is missing anywhere, we are sure to have somewhere a description of the hunt for the shortage and the fixing of responsibility under the guidance of the gods of light.
Tyre and Sidon were centers of a world-commerce controlled by the Phoenicians; or, as some think, by the Arabians in the more general ethnological sense. This commerce, which wafted the ships of the sea far out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and guided that "ship of the desert," the camel, in his northern, eastern and southern voyages, traded everywhere in Tyrian
purple, in Oriental pearls and gold, in the spices of Arabia, in African ivory, panthers' and lions' skins, and slaves, in Egyptian linen, in Grecian fine wares and pottery, in Cypriote copper, in Spanish silver, in El­ba's
iron, in English tin, and in the amber of northern Germany. We know nothing of the accountancy of this great commercial nation; but in this connection a suggested solution of another question is incidentally very interesting. How did the Phoenicians, who are not known to have been a literary people, come to in­vent
the alphabet? Merely for purposes of bookkeep­ing,
has been one of the suggested answers. Trading on the Egyptian coast, it was tantalizing to them, we are told, to behold the educated accounting officers, in a priestly picture and word-sign writing which it would take half a lifetime to learn, keeping a perfectly intelligible account of all the loadings and unloadings of the foreign vessels. And so, setting themselves to inquiring and inventing, they at last evolved, out of the few accidental simplicities contained in the lum­bering
old Egyptian vehicle of thought, a little alpha­bet
of sound signs that might be so combined into words of their own as to express their debits and cred­its
and keep them from being cheated. And this, it is thought, would account for the Greeks having remem­bered
them as inventors of the alphabet.
The classical languages abound in words and phrases belonging to an early accountancy more elab­orate,
however, than that of the Egyptians. Greek and Roman writers, but especially the later legal minds, have left us, all in all, a fair picture of what they thought accountancy, in its inner spirit, ought to be. Many documents, some of them—as, for example, the recently recovered waxed tablets of Pompeii—of a highly interesting character, have thrown much light on the business methods of the Latins and the earlier Greeks. A few German and French writers have la­boriously
reconstructed this department of classical life; and one work, at least, minutely describing the governmental accountancy of the Athenians, has been translated into English. Coming to the study of this subject predisposed, as we all are, in favor of many Greek and Roman ideals, we soon learn not to look for too much from Greek and Roman reality; and as we trace the causes of the sapping of life to the final fall of these greatest nations of antiquity, and apply our re­flections
to our professional calling, we see that defec­tive
accountancy may become the handmaid of finan­cial
corruption.
The light of historical investigation is slowly dispell­ing
the gloom of the middle ages; but as yet, aside from the Exchequer system, we know little of meth­ods
of accounting from the downfall of the Western Empire to the Reformation. Mohammed was a busi­ness
man, and gave his followers, in his moral writ­ings,
the benefit of much of his practical knowledge and wisdom; so that in the Koran we find creditable directions for the conduct of commercial life, includ­ing,
in the second chapter, explicit instructions in re­gard
to the recording of sales and loans. A knowl-
*Copyrighted by the American Academy of Political and Social Science.