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I used to virtually hang out with 'Gringo' on the Globe (a defunct forum system) whose real name is, well, that's not important. He's got a book out in a new edition, and lives in a predominantly Moslem country, so let's skip his real name. We used to email back and forth a bit, and regarding a public discussion of the Rudgley book, he wrote:

"The archaeologist in the Rudgley book got involved in researching clay figures that are found in the thousands all over Mesopotamian and other Middle Eastern sites dating from 8,000 to 6,000 BC. These are little clay geometric shapes, sometimes with odd markings, and later become a bit more complex, in shapes of animals, etc.

"It turns out that these were an early accounting system, as she discovered when she came across a clay 'envelope': a kind of egg-shaped jar containing about 26 of these clay tokens, with an inscription on the jar enumerating them and what they represented. (She calls it her 'Rosetta Stone'.)

"With some further research she was able to show how these geometric clay tokens came to be represented by line drawings that imitated their original shape as the ancient accountants (about as swift as their present day counterparts) eventually, after like thousands of years, realized they could use a two-dime method of counting sheep and wheat rather than the more cumbersome three-dime method."