Denise Schmandt-Besserat ( French: Denise Schmandt-Besserat ; born August 10, 1933 ) is a Franco-American archaeologist , a former professor of art and archeology of the ancient Near East .
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Content
Education
Schmantt-Bessera studied at the Louvre School.
Career
Schmandt-Besser worked on the origin of writing, calculations and the nature of managing information systems in society. Her publications on these topics include
- “Before Writing” (2 volumes), University of Texas Press 1992;
- “How Writing Arose,” University of Texas Press, 1996;
- A History of Calculus, Morrow Jr. 1999
- “When Writing Meets Art” (University of Texas Press, 2007), as well as:
- numerous articles in leading scientific and popular journals, including: Science, Scientific American, Archeology, American Journal of Archeology and Archeology Odyssey.
Her work was widely disseminated in the media (Scientific American, Time , Life , New York Times , Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , Christian Science Monitor.) She was featured in several television programs, such as: From the Discovery Channel, Disney Channel, The Nature of Things ( CBC ), Finding Solutions (PBS), and Tell the Truth ( NBC ).
Until 2004, she served as professor of history and art in the Ancient Near East at the University of Texas at Austin .
In her latest book, When Writing Meets Art (2007), Schmandt-Besser explored the effects of literacy on visual art. She showed that before writing, the art of the ancient Near East mainly consisted of repeating motifs. But after writing, such conventions of the Mesopotamian manuscript as the semantic use of form, size, order and placement of signs on the tablet were used to depict the essence of complex visual stories. She also emphasizes at the same time that art played a decisive role in the evolution of writing from a simple accounting system to literature, when funerary inscriptions and promises began to be placed on monuments of art.
Schmandt-Besser’s real interest was the cognitive aspects of the formal system, which functioned to improve the functioning of the human brain to collect, process, store and retrieve data. It shows how processing the increase in data volume after thousands of years will make people think more abstractly. She also continues to do her research on Neolithic symbolism at the site of Ain-Ghazal , near Amman , in Jordan , where she studied, in particular, the statues of Ain-Ghazal .
Notes
- ↑ German National Library , Berlin State Library , Bavarian State Library , etc. Record # 143609831 // General regulatory control (GND) - 2012—2016.
- ↑ SNAC - 2010.