When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story

An archaeologist and art historian examines the impact of literacy on visual art during the early urban period in the Near East.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat opened a 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. Her discovery, was published in Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform and How Writing Came...