Abstract
The aim of the study is to examine the stages of accounting, from its emergence to today, in terms of social roles and cultural change. For this purpose, we tried to evaluate accounting in terms of both social roles and characteristics of the periods. For this reason, our evaluation focused mainly on which roles accounting played in each of the periods under study. The topic is discussed under three main headings: the need for account keeping (social identity), the use of account stones/writing (public identity) and double-sided book-keeping technique (institutional identity). It has been observed that social needs and events imposed different identities on accounting during the specified periods and accounting was evaluated for different purposes under the influence of these identities.