The study of clay tokens in the Ancient Near East has focused, for the most part,on their role as antecedents to the cuneiform script. Starting with Pierre Amietand Maurice Lambert in the 1960s the theory was put forward that tokens, orcalculi, represent an early cognitive attempt at recording. This theory wastaken up by Denise Schmandt-Besserat who studied a large diachronic corpus ofNear Eastern tokens. Since then little has been written except in response toSchmandt-Besserat's writings. Most discussions of tokens have generally focusedon the time period between the eighth and fourth millennium bc with theassumption that token use drops off as writing gains ground in administrativecontexts. Now excavations in southeastern Turkey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe— the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital Tušhan —have uncovered a corpus of tokens dating to the first millennium bc. This is asignificant new contribution to the documented material. These tokens are foundin association with a range of other artefacts of administrative culture— tablets, dockets, sealings and weights — in a mannerwhich indicates that they had cognitive value concurrent with the cuneiformwriting system and suggests that tokens were an important tool in Neo-Assyrianimperial administration.