Denise Schmandt-Besserat facts for kids
Denise Schmandt-Besserat (born August 10, 1933) is a French-American archaeologist. She used to be a professor of art and archaeology, studying the ancient Near East. She taught for many years at the University of Texas. She is best known for her important work on how writing and counting first began. While many people use her research, some parts of it have been debated by other experts. However, the main idea that writing grew out of 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 people who made wine. 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 spent time in Ireland and Germany to study languages.
In 1954, she met Jurgen Schmandt, who would become her husband, in Germany. They got married in 1956. They lived in Paris, France, where they had three sons.
Denise decided to go back to school and studied at the École du Louvre. She finished her studies 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. She started teaching art history there.
Career and Discoveries
Denise Schmandt-Besserat has studied how writing and counting started. She also looked at how people managed information in societies that mostly used spoken language.
Her first major works about clay tokens were published in 1977 and 1978. These included a book called "Archaic Recoding System and the Origin of Writing" and an article in Scientific American magazine.
In these writings, Schmandt-Besserat explained her methods. She also looked at the history of clay counting tokens found at important sites in Asia. She gave credit to other researchers, Adolf Leo Oppenheim and Pierre Amiet, for their early ideas. Oppenheim thought of a "dual bookkeeping system," which means keeping two sets of records. Amiet showed that these tokens were much older than people first thought. Schmandt-Besserat said this was a very important discovery.
Her books on these topics include:
- Before Writing (2 books), published in 1992
- How Writing Came About, published in 1996
- The History of Counting, a children's book published in 1999
- When Writing Met Art, published in 2007
- "The Earliest Precursor of Writing," an article in Scientific American (1978)
- Many articles in important science and popular magazines like Science and Archaeology.
Her work has been shared widely in newspapers and magazines like The New York Times and Time. She also appeared on several TV shows, including Out of the Past and The Nature of Things.
She retired in 2004. She was a professor of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
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, ideas from Mesopotamian writing, like using size and order of signs, were used in art. This helped create more complex stories in pictures. She also showed how art helped writing grow from just a way to count things to a way to tell stories.
Schmandt-Besserat is currently interested in how the token system helped people think. She studies how handling more and more information over thousands of years helped people think in more abstract ways. However, some of her ideas have been questioned by newer researchers. She also continues to study ancient symbols at a site called 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan.
Awards and Recognitions
Denise Schmandt-Besserat has received several awards. These include the Walter J. Ong Award for her career achievements and the Holloway teaching award. She also won the Eugene Kayden Press Book Award and the Hamilton book 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 books that shaped science in 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 at their graduation ceremony.
Scholarly Discussions
Other experts have discussed Denise Schmandt-Besserat's ideas. Simple tokens and number marks suggest that tokens were used for counting in ancient times. Other archaeologists, like Pierre Amiet, first noticed this. Over the years, this idea has become widely accepted. Many experts agree that simple tokens were early forms of the signs used for numbers and measurements in the first written texts. Even though Schmandt-Besserat gave credit to others, she is often seen as the main person who discovered these connections.
However, some of Schmandt-Besserat's specific ideas about how tokens led to writing, especially the more complex ones, have been debated:
- Archaeologists in the past did not always collect or record small clay objects very well. This means Schmandt-Besserat's collection of tokens might not show a complete picture.
- There are no clear rules for deciding if a token was used for counting or as a step towards writing. Some tokens might have been used for other social reasons, like in burial sites. So, some objects she called "tokens" might not have been used for counting.
- She suggested that tokens were used in a one-to-one way (one token for one item). But studies have shown that ancient counting in Mesopotamia used many different systems with specific number rules.
- She claimed that tokens formed one clear system used across Mesopotamia starting very early. But others have pointed out that tokens varied a lot in shape, size, and number.
- Her idea that complex tokens directly led to writing has also been questioned. For example, there is little connection between complex tokens and the first pictures used to label goods. Also, some common goods, like sheep, do not have many complex tokens linked to them, even though sheep were very important.
- She suggested that ancient people did not understand that "8 sheep" and "8 bushels of grain" both meant the quantity "8." However, experts believe that ancient accountants were very skilled and likely understood this shared quantity.
See also
In Spanish: Denise Schmandt-Besserat para niños
