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...