出土文献与古文字研究学术论坛

Denise Schmandt-Besserat's New Way of Seeing

BY ADA CALHOUN

Dr. Denise Schmandt-Besserat's great discovery -- that the origins of writing are actually found in counting -- began, as most such groundbreaking work does, with a seemingly unrelated pursuit. When the University of Texas at Austin professor began her academic career in the 1960s, at issue was not "Where did writing come from?" but rather "What in heaven's name are all these little bits of clay?" At nearly every Middle Eastern archeological site, in addition to the urns and other such explainables, deep down there were baffling little pieces of fired clay. For years no one knew what they were, though it was evident they were something. In one of several frustrated attempts to classify the tokens, the University of Pennsylvania's Carleton S. Coon wrote in his report on Belt Cave, Iran: "From levels 11 and 12 come five mysterious unbaked conical clay objects looking like nothing in the world but suppositories. What they were used for is anyone's guess." Then along came Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Fresh from study at the ...cole du Louvre in Paris, the French-born graduate student, through a number of fellowships and grants, began what would be more than two decades of combing archives and sites all over the world trying to discover, and then to prove, what the clay cones, spheres, disks, and cylinders -- "tokens," as she called them -- might have been. For 30 years, article by article, Schmandt-Besserat has built an ironclad case to explain a mystery that foiled archeologists, anthropologists, and philosophers for hundreds of years.

What she found was that the tokens comprised an elaborate system of accounting that was used throughout the Middle East from approximately 8000 to 3000 B.C.E. Each token stood for a specific item, such as a sheep or a jar of oil, and was used to take inventory and keep accounts. Ancients sealed the tokens in clay envelopes, which were marked with the debtor's personal "cylinder seal" (which acted as a kind of signature). After using this system for some time, a new one emerged: People began to impress the tokens into the side of the envelope before sealing them up, so they wouldn't have to break the seal (and thus the bargain) to check the envelope's contents. Eventually, it occurred to people that they didn't actually need to put the tokens in an envelope at all, and could just impress the tokens onto the clay in order to keep track of the account. Then still another transformation occurred -- the ancient Sumerians realized it was possible to simply inscribe with a stylus the image of the token. This served as the earliest type of written sign. Schmandt-Besserat had found her answer