Prof. Denise Schmandt-Besserat - Conference Languages in Contact (11-12...
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Denise Schmandt-Besserat is professor emerita of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her field is the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She was trained at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris, France.
Schmandt-Besserat has worked on the origin of writing and counting. Her publications on these subjects include: How Writing Came About, University of Texas Press 1996; Before Writing (2 vols), University of Texas Press 1992; The History of Counting, Morrow Jr. 1999 and numerous articles in major scholarly and popular journals (among which Science, Scientific American, Archaeology, American Journal of Archaeology, and Archaeology Odyssey).
Her work has been widely reported in the public media (Scientific American, Time, Life, New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor.) She was featured in several television programs such as Out of the Past (Discovery Channel), Discover (Disney Channel); The Nature of Things (CBC), Search for Solutions (PBS), and Tell the Truth(NBC).

In When Writing Met Art (2007), Denise Schmandt-Besserat investigated the impact of literacy on visual art. She showed that, before writing, art in the ancient Near East mostly consisted of repetitive motifs. But, after writing, conventions of the Mesopotamian script, such as the semantic use of form, size, order and placement of signs on a tablet was applied to images resulting in complex visual narratives. She also shows how, reciprocally, art played a crucial role in the evolution of writing from a mere accounting system to literature when funerary and votive inscriptions started to be featured on art monuments.
Schmandt-Besserat’s present interest is the cognitive aspects of the token system that functioned as an extension of the human brain to collect, manipulate, store and retrieve data. She studies how processing an increasing volume of data over thousands of years brought people to think in greater abstraction.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat edited and is the main contributor of Symbols at ‘Ain Ghazal, Vol. 3 of the ‘Ain Ghazal Excavation Reports, Ex Oriente, Berlin 2013. She authored 10 chapters of the volume, documenting and analyzing tokens, animal figurines, human figurines, a stone statuette, decorated human skulls, plaster statues, mural and floor paintings, and finally, a conclusion on neolithic symbolism.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat has received a Dr. h. c., from Kenyon College, OH.; the Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement; the Holloway teaching award; the Eugene Kayden Press Book Award and twice the Hamilton book Award. She has been cited Outstanding Woman in the Humanities by the American Association of University Women. Her book, How Writing Came About, was listed as one of the 100 books that shaped science in the 20th century. She is listed in Who’s Who in America and Wikipedia.
The Writing Code
LANGUAGE MADE US HUMAN. WRITING GAVE US CIVILIZATION.
We
are born with language, but writing had to be invented. The Writing
Code explores the creation of civilization’s greatest achievement. Where
was writing created and why?
Join us on this fascinating journey
as The Writing Code traces the origins and evolution of writing with
authors (Elmore Leonard & Margaret Atwood), linguists (George Miller
& Steven Pinker), historians, editors, anthropologists, book
makers, a mathematician (Charles Seife) and a physicist who prefers to
write with a quill pen—Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The Writing Code is
the bookend to The Human Language Series, first broadcast on PBS and now
available in the libraries and curricula of more than 2,000 colleges
and universities worldwide. Like The Human Language Series, The Writing
Code consists of three, 55-minute DVDs.
言語が人間を作った。書くことで文明が生まれました。
人は生まれながらにして言語を持っていますが、文字は発明されなければなりませんでした。ライティング・コード』は、文明の最大の成果である文字の誕生を探る。文字はどこで、なぜ作られたのでしょうか?
作家(エルモア・レナード、マーガレット・アトウッド)、言語学者(ジョージ・ミラー、スティーブン・ピンカー)、歴史家、編集者、人類学者、本の製作者、数学者(チャールズ・シーフ)、羽ペンで書くのが好きな物理学者(ニール・デグラッセ・タイソン)が登場します。
The Writing Code』は、PBSで初めて放送され、現在では世界中の2,000以上の大学の図書館やカリキュラムで利用されている『The Human Language Series』のブックエンドです。 The Human Language Seriesと同様、The Writing Codeは55分のDVD3枚で構成されています。
www.DeepL.com/Translator(無料版)で翻訳しました。
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