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Before Writing: Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform

Amazon.com Price:  $29.97 (as of 03/05/2019 05:50 PST- Details)

Description

Before Writing gives a new point of view on the evolution of communication. It points out that when writing started in Mesopotamia it was once not, as up to now thought, a sudden and spontaneous invention. As a substitute, it was once the outgrowth of many thousands of years’ worth of experience at manipulating symbols.

In Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes how in about 8000 B.C., coinciding with the upward thrust of agriculture, a system of counters, or tokens, seemed in the Near East. These tokens—small, geometrically shaped objects made of clay—represented quite a lot of units of goods and were used to count and account for them. The token system was once a breakthrough in data processing and communication that in the end led to the invention of writing about 3100 B.C. Through a study of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Schmandt-Besserat traces how the Sumerian cuneiform script, the first writing system, emerged from a counting device.

In Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat presents the primary data on which she bases her theories. These data consist of several thousand tokens, catalogued by country, archaeological web page, and token types and subtypes. The information also includes the chronology, stratigraphy, museum ownership, accession or field number, references to previous publications, material, and size of the artifacts. Line drawings and photographs illustrate the quite a lot of token types.

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