Hundreds of clay tablets marked in cuneiform have been found in excavations of the Sumerian city of Uruk (in present-day Iraq). Though the tablets date from roughly 3000 B.C., the writing on them uses relatively few pictographs; instead, numerous
The earliest of the tokens were simple in form—small cones, spheres, and pyramids—and they were often inscribed. In 1966, a hollow tablet containing several of these tokens was discovered, and more than 100 additional tablets, which are now recognized as sealed envelopes of clay, have since been found. Later envelopes are also inscribed with impressions of tokens in the outer clay, signaling exactly what each envelope contained. …
The token system, essentially a system of three-dimensional nouns, was replaced in about 3100 B.C. by a system of marks on clay tablets. A few centuries later, this latter system was to display the first use of numerals, where simple marks coded the concepts of one, two, and so forth. The eventual evolution of this system into mature writing, Schmandt-Besserat suggests, can be seen in the following example: At first it took two ovoid tokens to record two jars of oil. A little later, it took two markings on a clay tablet to achieve this—one mark, using the outline of the old token, to record the customary unit measure for oil, the jarful, and a second mark to convey the numeral: two oil jars. Eventually, it took three signs on the tablet, one for the numeral 2, one for the standard jarful, and a new symbol that denoted oil itself. With three such signs, an abstract and flexible written form had arrived.
With which one of the following statements regarding the sign for
It could have been replaced without loss of significance by any other sign that was not already being used for something else.
Supported, because the sign for “sheep” was abstract – it didn’t look like a sheep. Although the symbol happened to be a “circled cross,” there’s no reason it had to look like that. Perhaps a cross within a triangle would have worked, or a cross within a square?
The sign gets its meaning in a radically different way from the way in which the cuneiform sign for "metal" gets its meaning.
No support for the different signs imparting meaning in a “radically different” way. The circles cross signified sheep; the crescent with five lines signified metal. What’s so different about how these symbols impart meaning?
The way in which it represents its meaning resulted from the fact that
No support for any significance to the agricultural aspect of sheep. Notice that we also get an example of the symbol for metal. There’s no difference in how the sheep symbol represented sheep and how the metal symbol represented metal.
The way in which it represents its meaning was not the subject of scientific scrutiny prior to that given it by Schmandt-Besserat.
No support for the idea that Schmandt-Besserat was the first person to give the sheep symbol scientific scrutiny. First, notice that the clay tablets from Uruk are different from the clay tokens mentioned later in the first paragraph. Schmandt-Bessert’s book concerns these tokens; it’s not clear that it concerns the specific Uruk tablets that contained the sheep symbols. Second, Schmandt-Besserat may have addressed something “often ignored by archaeologists” – but that doesn’t mean no archaeologist scientifically analyzed the tablets or tokens before she did.
The abstract nature of the sign reveals a great deal about the political life of the people who used the language expressed by cuneiform writing.
No support for a connection to “political life.”
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