A tally stick (or simply a tally) was an ancient memory aid used to record and document numbers, quantities, and messages. Tally sticks first appear as animal bones carved with notches during the Upper Palaeolithic; a notable example is the Ishango Bone. Historical reference is made by Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) about the best wood to use for tallies, and by Marco Polo (1254–1324) who mentions the use of the tally in China. Tallies have been used for numerous purposes such as messaging and scheduling, and especially in financial and legal transactions, to the point of being currency.
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👉 Tally stick in the context of Modern Monetary Theory
Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a macroeconomic theory that describes the nature of money within a fiat, floating exchange rate system. MMT synthesizes ideas from the state theory of money of Georg Friedrich Knapp (also known as chartalism) and the credit theory of money of Alfred Mitchell-Innes, the functional finance proposals of Abba Lerner, Hyman Minsky's views on the banking system and Wynne Godley's sectoral balances approach. Economists Warren Mosler, L. Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton, Bill Mitchell and Pavlina R. Tcherneva are largely responsible for reviving the idea of chartalism as an explanation of money creation.
MMT frames government spending and taxation differently to most orthodox frameworks, and instead relies on functionalist readings of historical events and evidence, such as the use of Tally sticks, or the creation of The Bank of England. MMT states that the government is the monopoly issuer of its currency and therefore must spend currency into existence before any tax revenue can be collected. The government spends currency into existence and taxpayers use that currency to pay their obligations to the state. This means that taxes cannot fund public spending in a nominal monetary flow sense, as the government cannot collect money back in taxes until after it is has been issued into the economy. In this kind of monetary system, the government is never constrained in its ability to pay, rather the limits are the real resources available for purchase in the state's currency.
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Tally stick in the context of Month
A month is a unit of time, used with calendars, that is approximately as long as a natural phase cycle of the Moon; the words month and Moon are cognates. The traditional concept of months arose with the cycle of Moon phases; such lunar months ("lunations") are synodic months and last approximately 29.53 days, making for roughly 12.37 such months in one Earth year. From excavated tally sticks, researchers have deduced that people counted days in relation to the Moon's phases as early as the Paleolithic age. Synodic months, based on the Moon's orbital period with respect to the Earth–Sun line, are still the basis of many calendars today and are used to divide the year.
Calendars that developed from the Roman calendar system, such as the internationally used Gregorian calendar, divide the year into 12 months, each of which lasts between 28 and 31 days. The names of the months were Anglicized from various Latin names and events important to Rome, except for the months 9–12, which are named after the Latin numerals 7–10 (septem, octo, novem, and decem) because they were originally the seventh through tenth months in the Roman calendar. In the modern Gregorian calendar, the only month with a variable number of days is the second month, February, which has 29 days during a leap year and 28 days otherwise.
Tally stick in the context of Burning of Parliament
The Palace of Westminster, the medieval royal palace used as the home of the British parliament, was largely destroyed by fire on 16 October 1834. The blaze was caused by the burning of small wooden tally sticks which had been used as part of the accounting procedures of the Exchequer until 1826. The sticks were disposed of carelessly in the two furnaces under the House of Lords, which caused a chimney fire in the two flues that ran under the floor of the Lords' chamber and up through the walls.
The resulting fire spread rapidly throughout the complex and developed into the largest conflagration in London between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz of the Second World War; the event attracted large crowds which included several artists who provided pictorial records of the event. The fire lasted for most of the night and destroyed a large part of the palace, including the converted St Stephen's Chapel—the meeting place of the House of Commons—the Lords Chamber, the Painted Chamber and the official residences of the Speaker and the Clerk of the House of Commons.
Tally stick in the context of Tally marks
Tally marks, also called hash marks, are a form of numeral used for counting. They can be thought of as a unary numeral system.
They are most useful in counting or tallying ongoing results, such as the score in a game or sport, as no intermediate results need to be erased or discarded. However, because of the length of large numbers, tallies are not commonly used for static text. Notched sticks, known as tally sticks, were also historically used for this purpose.