Bread loaf idols (Brotlaibidole) are mysterious, fired clay or stone artifacts from the Early Bronze Age (approx. 1750–1550 B.C.) found across Central Europe, from Poland to Italy. Shaped like small loaves, they are covered in, at present, undeciphered symbols—lines, dots, and impressions.
Around 500 to 600 of these mysterious, decorated clay objects have been found, with significant collections in museums in Hungary and surrounding regions. These artifacts, first discovered around 1860, are often found in sets and are believed to have served a ritual or administrative function, though their exact purpose remains a mystery.
For the life of me I can’t come up with a decent guess as to their purpose. Any thoughts?
Since bread was a mainstay part of the diet for thousands of years, maybe it was a token passed around to show who was the best baker in the area, or who was the most important person in the tribe, since the person who knew how to bake bread using ground flour from wild wheat and natural yeast would be pretty important in any group during that period.
I very much doubt this speculation is actually true, but:
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Brotlaibidole represented some kind of “cargo cult”-style or talismanic imitation of Mesopotamian clay accounting tokens and tablets encountered via Bronze Age trade networks.
Kind of like how many Westerners nowadays will own amulets or jewelry with (sometimes fake) ancient Chinese or Tibetan coins or whatever with characters that they don’t understand. “This is the sort of thing those faraway wise people do their magic with, this is so cool.”
Added to the fact that if there was any awareness, however diluted by time and distance, that these mystic incisions on clay actually conveyed detailed specific meanings about trade transactions to the people who used them… well, that would seem pretty magical.
I think this sentence has too many assumptions. Clicking through and reading the Wiki link, it shows lines, dots and depressions and that’s all - calling them actual “symbols” isn’t wrong, but again, I feel it’s too strong. To me, there’s no evidence of actual language or other communicative purpose. And even the article admits “Bread loaf idols” a general term coined by some German researchers - I’m not convinced all of the objects are fully related.
For the matter, the theory you advance for “ritual of administrative function” seems largely discarded by your cite:
The purpose of the tablets is still wholly unknown. They were initially conjectured to be ritual objects[citation needed] but their occurrence within the sites has mostly excluded that possibility.[citation needed]
But if I had to make a WAG, I’d actually go with one of the theories reported in the same link:
On the other hand, the way many tablets are split, and the absence of the matching half suggest a purpose related to trade or other social interaction,[9] possibly similar to the tally sticks.[5] Calendars, game pieces,[5] and stamps for decorating ceramics[3] or textiles[citation needed] have also been suggested.
According to Harald Meller [de] they probably represent a ‘sign system’ involved in trade. They are often found broken in two which may indicate some sort of credit/debt system.[7] They could have been used as proof of identity or representation.[7]
Again, makes sense of a variant of the tally stick or similar accounting with the various lines and impressions serving to prevent easy duplication.
This was my thought, too, even before reading down to the part where wiki dismisses the idea. I still think that’s what they are. What Germans call them now is a red herring.
They sort of look like they were made by wrapping a beaded cord around them. Different bead shapes would give different impressions. I know it says the lines don’t tend to continue on the back, but that could be because they were wound together with something (maybe whatever was being tallied).
By looking at them. The name describes how they looked to some modernish observer, not a speculation on what they originally represented. (That information is in the op linked Wikipedia article.)
My best guess would be it’s related to trade somehow. Maybe those are tally marks. Maybe they’re just the earliest examples of conspicuous spending in the form of collectibles. Like pet rocks, beanie babies, or whatever those little stuffed animals the kids like these days are.
My gut opinion is these are tallies of something, but instead of scores on a temporary chunk of wood, the tally has been memorialized into more permanent clay. Likely as proof of some transaction, and maybe to record a credit or debt. The additional markings identify the specific transaction or participants.
Hence, the whole proto part. Maybe it took a few more centuries before they worked the kinks out of the system and landed on the idea of putting king’s faces on metal coins
That could be why they’re broken - you record the value of the transaction on both ends of a longer piece, fire the clay, break it in half and each party keeps one piece. When you come to redeem the transaction that only happens if both halves fit - like an indenture.