I have become fascinated with counting tokens from Mesopotamia that are thought to be the precursors to cuneiform writing. I am equally compelled by the precise drawings of them in archeological scholarship, often with cross-sectional views and sorted by shape, size, and markings into orderly arrays. When seen in aggregate, they have a quality both rational—their sortings appear very regimented—and arcane. As images, the tokens resist identification, and yet they take on characteristics of familiar objects.