Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forward’ biases in first appearance dates of moralizing gods in the archaeo-historical record. When we minimally correct for this, the paper’s major finding reverses: moralizing gods precede the dramatic rises in social complexity. Second, the authors handle missing observations on moralizing gods by re-coding them as known absences. These values make up 61% of all outcome data. When missing data are handled appropriately, their result again reverses. Finally, inspections of the Seshat coding reveal systematic inaccuracies, inadequate vetting, and misleading claims.

The solid line indicates when writing and moralizing gods are first recorded in the same century, and the dashed lines show when writing appeared 100 years before moralizing gods and when moralizing gods appeared 100 years before writing.NGAs are colored by whether social complexity data are available both before and after the appearance of moralizing gods or not. Only NGAs with social complexity data available both before and after the appearance of moralizing gods were included in the analysis (and only these NGAs are shown in Table 1). It must be noted that while writing first appears at 2500 BCE in the Kachi Plain, it is absent for the subsequent two polities in the dataset, and does not reappear until 300 BCE -the same time as the first appearance of moralizing gods. Extended Data Figure 2 | Boxplots (center line, median; box limits, upper and lower quartiles; whiskers, 1.5x interquartile range) & distributions (data points) of "social complexity" score for N = 801 observations, by 'moralizing gods' outcome status. Before statistical analyses were performed in Whitehouse, et al., all "unknown" cases were treated as moralizing gods "absent" without explicit description in the manuscript.

As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantitative coding of historical data taken by the Seshat team, as revealed in the backing data (seshatdatabank.info/nature), as well as by a lack of clarity concerning the degree of involvement of expert historians in the coding process. The apparent lack of appreciation for historical scholarship that this coding strategy displays runs the risk of permanently alienating the community of academic historians, who are essential future collaborators in any project devoted to large-scale historical data analysis. In the present commentary, we present a preliminary critical review of their latest article, “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History” (2019).

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 Amiet and Maurice Lambert in the 1960s the theory was put forward that tokens, or calculi, represent an early cognitive attempt at recording. This theory was taken up by Denise Schmandt-Besserat who studied a large diachronic corpus of Near Eastern tokens. Since then little has been written except in response to Schmandt-Besserat's writings. Most discussions of tokens have generally focused on the time period between the eighth and fourth millennium bc with the assumption that token use drops off as writing gains ground in administrative contexts. 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 a significant new contribution to the documented material. These tokens are found in association with a range of other artefacts of administrative culture — tablets, dockets, sealings and weights — in a manner which indicates that they had cognitive value concurrent with the cuneiform writing system and suggests that tokens were an important tool in Neo-Assyrian imperial administration.