![]() To fulfill its new role, writing evolved to replicate speech this in turn made it possible to compile, organize, and synthesize unlimited amounts of information and to preserve and disseminate information across time and space. ![]() She shows how, beginning in 2700-2600 BC, the inclusion of inscriptions on funerary and votive art objects emancipated writing from its original accounting function. Schmandt-Besserat then demonstrates art's reciprocal impact on the development of writing. Using examples of ancient Near Eastern writing and masterpieces of art, she shows that between 35 BC the conventions of writing-everything from its linear organization to its semantic use of the form, size, order, and placement of signs-spread to the making of art, resulting in artworks that presented complex visual narratives in place of the repetitive motifs found on preliterate art objects. In When Writing Met Art, Schmandt-Besserat expands her history of writing into the visual realm of communication. In 1999, American Scientist chose How Writing Came About as one of the "100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science." Her discovery, which she published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came About, was widely reported in professional journals and the popular press. Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a major new chapter in the history of literacy when she demonstrated that the cuneiform script invented in the ancient Near East in the late fourth millennium BC-the world's oldest known system of writing-derived from an archaic counting device.
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