Denise Schmandt-Besserat facts for kids
Denise Schmandt-Besserat (born August 10, 1933) is a French-American archaeologist and a retired professor. She taught about art and archaeology from the ancient Near East. She spent a lot of her career teaching at the University of Texas. She is most famous for her research on how writing was invented. While many experts use her work, some of her ideas have been debated. However, the main idea that writing grew out of counting and keeping track of farm products is widely accepted.
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Early Life and Learning
Denise Besserat grew up in a family of lawyers and winemakers in France. She was taught at home by tutors when she was young. During World War II, her family moved to southern France. After the war, she went to a Catholic boarding school. The nuns at the school suggested she become a language interpreter. She studied languages in Ireland and Germany.
In 1954, she met Jurgen Schmandt, who would become her husband, in Germany. He was a philosopher. They got married in 1956 and lived in Paris, where they had three sons.
Denise decided to go back to school and studied at the École du Louvre, a famous art school in Paris. She graduated in 1965. Then, her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. She got a special chance to study at Harvard University. There, she researched how clay was first used for writing in the Middle East.
In 1971, she and her family moved to Austin, Texas, where she started teaching Art History.
Her Work and Discoveries
Denise Schmandt-Besserat studied how writing and counting first started. She also looked at how people managed information before writing existed.
Her first important works about clay tokens were published in 1977 and 1978. In these articles, she explained her methods. She also talked about how other archaeologists like A. Leo Oppenheim and Pierre Amiet had already found clay counting tokens in ancient sites in Asia. She said Oppenheim imagined a "dual bookkeeping system" and Amiet showed that these tokens were much older than people thought.
Some of her important books include:
- Before Writing (1992)
- How Writing Came About (1996)
- The History of Counting (1999) – This one was a children's book!
- When Writing Met Art (2007)
Her work has been shared in many popular magazines and newspapers like Scientific American and The New York Times. She was also featured on several TV shows, including Out of the Past and The Nature of Things.
She retired in 2004 from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a professor of Art and Middle Eastern Studies.
In her book When Writing Met Art (2007), Schmandt-Besserat explored how writing changed visual art. She showed that before writing, art in the ancient Near East often had simple, repeated patterns. But after writing, art started to use ideas from Mesopotamian writing. This made art more complex and able to tell stories. She also showed how art helped writing grow from just a way to keep accounts to a way to create literature.
Schmandt-Besserat is also interested in how the ancient token system worked like an early computer. She studies how people learned to think in more complex ways as they processed more and more information over thousands of years. She also continues her research on ancient symbols at a site called 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan.
Awards and Honors
Denise Schmandt-Besserat has received several awards for her work. These include the Walter J. Ong Award and the Holloway teaching award. The American Association of University Women named her an Outstanding Woman in the Humanities.
Her book, How Writing Came About, was listed by American Scientist as one of the 100 most important science books of the 20th century.
She is also listed in Who's Who in America, a book that lists important people. She received an honorary degree from Kenyon College.
Discussions and Debates
Many experts agree that simple clay tokens were used for counting in ancient times, especially around 4000 BC. This idea was first noticed by other archaeologists like Pierre Amiet. While Schmandt-Besserat gave credit to these earlier works, she is often seen as the main person who showed how important these tokens were.
However, some of Schmandt-Besserat's specific ideas about how these tokens led to writing, especially the more complex ones, have been debated by other researchers. Here are some of the points that have been discussed:
- Archaeologists in the past didn't always collect or record small clay objects very carefully. This means the collection of tokens Schmandt-Besserat studied might not have been a complete picture.
- There isn't a clear way that all experts agree on to decide if a token was used for counting or as a step towards writing. Some tokens might have been used for other social reasons.
- Schmandt-Besserat suggested that tokens were always used in a simple one-to-one way (like one token for one sheep). But other studies show that ancient Mesopotamian counting was more complex, using different systems for different things.
- She also suggested that the token system was the same everywhere in Mesopotamia for thousands of years. But others have pointed out that the tokens actually varied a lot in shape, size, and how many were found in different places.
- Her idea that complex tokens directly led to writing has also been questioned. For example, there isn't a strong match between these complex tokens and the first pictures used in writing for goods.
- Some of her ideas about how ancient people understood numbers have also been debated. Experts believe that ancient accountants were very skilled and understood that "8 sheep" and "8 bushels of grain" both shared the idea of "eight."
See also
In Spanish: Denise Schmandt-Besserat para niños
