As far as I know the invention and use of counting boards went hand-in-hand with written (cuneiform) records. Or at least, we don’t have any evidence of earlier

As far as I know the invention and use of counting boards went hand-in-hand with written (cuneiform) records. Or at least, we don’t have any evidence of earlier positional counting boards, only artifacts like tally sticks and piles of (non-positional) tokens. The Sumerian society that developed cuneiform numeration/writing was a large bureaucratic urban society built on complicated debt/taxation/social organization.