Excavation Report, Trench IX: Concerning the Jingling Sacrament.
We have recovered, at last, a complete devotional cluster: three to five flattened bronze glyphs, each cut with a unique jagged edge, bound together upon a single ring. Rival scholars have called these "coins," but coins do not come toothed, and coins are not carried in such reverent bunches against the hip, where the wear on the Ancients' garments proves they were worn daily, close to the body, like a saint's relic.
Observe the teeth. No two clusters share a pattern. We conclude that each citizen was issued a personal sequence at maturity, a sacred signature in metal, unrepeatable, worn until death. To lose one's cluster was clearly a spiritual catastrophe: excavated dwellings show frantic disorder, drawers overturned, cushions displaced, evidence of the terror that seized a soul separated from its glyphs.
Note also the ring's companion charms, small effigies and stamped tokens hung alongside. These were the citizen's affiliations, the households and guilds to which the soul swore loyalty, jangling in audible prayer with every step. To walk was to announce oneself. To run was to sing.
The younger scholars insist these were mere tools for opening portals. Absurd. One does not carry a tool against the heart for a lifetime. One does not weep, as the fragmentary texts record, upon reclaiming a lost one.
They were a people who believed a soul could be sealed shut and reopened, who trusted the whole of their dwelling and their carriage-machines to a fistful of teeth, and who could not bear to leave home without the small metallic sound of proof that they belonged somewhere. They locked everything.
One suspects they were terribly afraid, and terribly beloved, and never entirely sure they would be let back in.