scholarly journals Beyond Writing: The Development of Literacy in the Ancient Near East

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Object Recognition ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Near East ◽  
Motor Planning ◽  
State Level ◽  
Cognitive Change ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Engagement Theory

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (MET), writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality and brains: movements of hands, arms and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components.

scholarly journals Beyond Writing: The Development of Literacy in the Ancient Near East

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Object Recognition ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Near East ◽  
Motor Planning ◽  
State Level ◽  
Cognitive Change ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Engagement Theory

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components.

scholarly journals Concepts and how they get that way

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Near East ◽  
Cognitive System ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Material Component ◽  
Multiple Material ◽  
Material Form

Drawing on the material culture of the Ancient Near East as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, the journey of how material number becomes a conceptual number is traced to address questions of how a particular material form might generate a concept and how concepts might ultimately encompass multiple material forms so that they include but are irreducible to all of them together. Material forms incorporated into the cognitive system affect the content and structure of concepts through their agency and affordances, the capabilities and constraints they provide as the material component of the extended, enactive mind. Material forms give concepts the tangibility that enables them to be literally grasped and manipulated. As they are distributed over multiple material forms, concepts effectively become independent of any of them, yielding the abstract irreducibility that makes a concept like number what it is. Finally, social aspects of material use—collaboration, ordinariness, and time—have important effects on the generation and distribution of concepts.

Artefacts of Cognition: the Use of Clay Tokens in a Neo-Assyrian Provincial Administration

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John MacGinnis ◽  
M. Willis Monroe ◽  
Dirk Wicke ◽  
Timothy Matney
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Cognitive Value ◽  
Administrative Culture ◽  
Time Period ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Provincial Capital ◽  
The 1960S

The study of clay tokens in the Ancient Near East has focused, for the most part, on their role as antecedents to the cuneiform script. Starting with Pierre Amiet and Maurice Lambert in the 1960s the theory was put forward that tokens, or calculi, represent an early cognitive attempt at recording. This theory was taken up by Denise Schmandt-Besserat who studied a large diachronic corpus of Near Eastern tokens. Since then little has been written except in response to Schmandt-Besserat's writings. Most discussions of tokens have generally focused on the time period between the eighth and fourth millennium bc with the assumption that token use drops off as writing gains ground in administrative contexts. Now excavations in southeastern Turkey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe — the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital Tušhan — have uncovered a corpus of tokens dating to the first millennium bc. This is a significant new contribution to the documented material. These tokens are found in association with a range of other artefacts of administrative culture — tablets, dockets, sealings and weights — in a manner which indicates that they had cognitive value concurrent with the cuneiform writing system and suggests that tokens were an important tool in Neo-Assyrian imperial administration.

Alphabetic Origins

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Pardee
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Writing System ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture

This chapter lays out the peculiarities of the Ugaritic language and hence of its peculiar contributions to our knowledge of the history of culture. It discusses the nature of the language and its place within the languages of the ancient Near East, the nature of the writing system, and the nature of the Ugaritic texts that have been preserved.

Of Ancient Codes

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Ancient Mesopotamia ◽  
The Law

This chapter focuses on the genre of law codes in ancient Mesopotamia. Hammurabi authored—or more likely commissioned—one of the earliest surviving law codes in world history. Hammurabi’s code is part of a small corpus of ancient Near East writings about law that was founded on the principles contained in lexical and omen lists. The law codes of the ancient Near East show how aspects of Babylonian epistemology could be imitated by others even if they did not employ the Babylonian writing system that lay at its core. The chapter first considers the historical context of the law codes before discussing the format of these laws. The composition of law codes flourished in Babylonia in the late third and early second millennia, when four kings commissioned them: Ur-Namma and Lipit-Eshtar in the Sumerian language, Dadusha and Hammurabi in Akkadian.

Unsurprising, in a good way

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 491-492
Author(s):  
Steven Hrotic
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Near East ◽  
State Level ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
History Of

AbstractVan de Vliert associates a greater difference between upper- and lower-class freedoms under less favorable environmental conditions. This pattern is similar to models of the emergence of state-level hierarchies. I argue that Van de Vliert has provided a supportive strand to the history of ancient Near East religion.

Prologue to Genesis (1, 1-11, 26): Prophetic Revelation, History, Myth or Metahistory?

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Михаил Анатольевич Скобелев
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Near East ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Book Of Genesis

В статье рассматриваются богословие, композиция и литературная форма сюжетов, входящих в состав Пролога книги Бытия (1, 1-11, 26). Во второй половине XIX - начале XX вв. в результате появления Документальной гипотезы и сопоставления Священного Писания с литературными памятниками Древнего Ближнего Востока большая часть сюжетов, составляющих Пролог, была объявлена мифами и древнееврейским фольклором (Ю. Велльгаузен, Г. Гунекель, Дж. Фрезер). Кроме выявленных ближневосточных параллелей, новому отношению к повествованиям Пролога книги Бытия способствовали: отсутствие в нём ясно выраженной исторической задачи и символичность изложения. Защищая традиционный взгляд на Пролог как на священную историю и пророческое откровение, епископ Кассиан (Безобразов) предложил рассматривать все библейские сюжеты, содержащие теофанию, как метаисторию. Протоиерей Сергий Булгаков, А. Ф. Лосев, Б. П. Вышеславцев, занимавшиеся феноменом мифотворчества, назвали библейское повествование о начале мироздания мифом, но в ином смысле, чем это делали Г. Гункель и Дж. Фрезер. Они обосновали новый положительный взгляд, согласно которому миф не есть выдумка или фантазия, а реальность, основанная на мистическом опыте. В статье анализируется каждый из перечисленных терминов: «история», «миф», «метаистория» применительно к Прологу, а также рассматривается возможность их согласования с традиционным церковным взглядом на эту часть книги Бытия. The article deals with the theology, composition and literary form of the narrations which constitute the prologue part of the book of Genesis (1, 1-11, 26). During the second half of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th cent., following the emergence of the Documentary hypothesis as well as the comparison of the Holy Scripture with the newly-discovered literary monuments of Ancient Near East, the greater part of the narrations that constitute the Prologue were labeled myths and ancient Hebrew folklore (J. Wellhausen, H. Gunkel, J. Frazer). In addition to the then detected Near Eastern parallels, this new attitude towards the narrations of the Prologue was fostered by its lack of a clearly expressed historical dedication and the symbolic form of their exposition. Defending the traditional view of the Prologue as sacred history and prophetic revelation, bishop Kassian (Bezobrazov) proposed to consider all the biblical narrations that contain theophanies as metahistorical. Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov, A. F. Losev and B. P. Vysheslavtsev, who analyzed the phenomenon of myth-making, called the Biblical narration of the origins of the world a myth, but in a sense different from that proposed by Gunkel and Frazer. They have founded a new and positive conception according to which a myth is not fiction but rather a kind of reality based upon mystical experience. The author of the article analyzes each of the terms enumerated - «history», «myth», «metahistory» - in their use relating them to the Prologue; he also examines the possibility of their harmonizing with the traditional ecclesiastical view of this part of the book of Genesis.

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