Don’t count on Denise Schmandt-Besserat to stop working
just because she has entered a
phased retirement from The University of Texas at Austin this year.
The internationally renowned scholar, who holds a joint appointment
in the College of Fine
Arts and the Center
for Middle Eastern Studies,
is blessed with endless curiosity. Asking questions is what she does.
She also finds answers. Schmandt-Besserat is credited with two monumental
discoveries: the origins of writing and the origins of abstract numbers.
They are discoveries that are critical in understanding how human
civilization developed. And they have won her numerous accolades and
the respect of scholars around the world.
Her book “How Writing Came About” was named in American
Scientist one of the “100 or so books that shaped a century
of science.” The “Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia”
recently named her one of just 62 “Discoverers,” along
such estimable names as the Greek historian Herodotus, American philologist
A. Leo Oppenheim and Babylonian King Nabonidus.
Still, Schmandt-Besserat says she came to her career the way that
many people come to things: “completely by chance.”
While a Radcliffe Fellow in the late 1960s, she set out to study
the beginnings of the use of clay by humans. Schmandt-Besserat traveled
from museum to museum making a survey of clay objects. She found the
expected bricks, pots and figurines, but she also found a surprising
abundance of tiny clay objects shaped like cones or disks.
“I became quite puzzled because wherever I was going, they
were always next to the figurines, always boxes full of these types
of things,” she says. “So if they were everywhere, if
they were fired clay, then I knew they must be important.”
No one working in the field, however, knew what these objects, termed
“tokens,” were. Ever the question asker, Schmandt-Besserat
decided to find out.
The token trail led her through collections of ancient artifacts
in the west and the Middle East and all the way to Baghdad. Following
this trail brought her to the very beginning of when humans learned
to count and write.
What Schmandt-Besserat discovered is that around 7,500 B.C., early
farmers became concerned with keeping track of goods. The tokens she’d
encountered were a means of doing that. They were counters.
The counters came in a dozen shapes and each shape corresponded directly
with a specific item. A cone, for example, stood for a small measure
of grain, while a sphere stood for a large measure of grain and a
cylinder stood for an animal. It was a simple invention, but it was
the first symbol system ever created for the sole purpose of communicating.
At first the tokens held a one-to-one correspondence with the objects
they represented. In other words, if a farmer had six sheep, he would
have six tokens representing sheep. The tokens were stored in sealed,
clay envelopes, like an ancient safe deposit box.
Mankind’s first form of writing came when people realized that
the tokens inside the envelope could be recorded on the outside by
pressing a token into the clay while still soft to leave a mark. From
there, they eventually stopped putting the tokens inside because the
recording on the outside was sufficient. The envelopes then turned
into tablets, and writing was developed.
It took no fewer than four inventions—tokens, envelopes, markings
and tablets—and about 4,000 years to fully reduce three-dimensional
tokens for counting to written signs.
The literary-minded may be disappointed to discover that writing
developed not as a form of storytelling or recording poetry, but as
a means of accounting. Schmandt-Besserat, however, points to it as
one of the pinnacle achievements of human civilization.
“Writing is an accumulation of knowledge,” she says.
“It means we can go to a library and find the knowledge of 100
years ago. It means that ideas don’t go away. Your words are
not finished being said before they are gone. So the fact is that
writing makes speech solid.”
This year Schmandt-Besserat took her research further, winning a
prestigious fellowship to the Stanford Humanities Center. There she
is studying the impact of art on writing and writing on art through
examination of the Warka Vase.
The alabaster vase, carved in ancient Sumer more than 5,000 years
ago, depicts for the first time the relationship among the divine,
humans, animals, plants and water. The vase is also one of the items
temporarily missing after the lootings at the National Museum of Iraq
in Baghdad in 2003.
Preserving and protecting the world’s irreplaceable antiquities
is of great importance to Schmandt-Besserat. While she rejoiced at
the return of the Warka Vase, she recognizes that more needs to be
done to protect the antiquities collected over centuries of careful
excavation. They are beloved objects, but they are also data. They
are necessary to future generations of seekers.
“Whenever there are new questions, you can go and find what
you are looking for and eventually find answers,” she says.
“The material is never finished giving answers because people
come with new ways of looking at it.”
