Overview

This volume, entitled Signs Sounds Semantics and offered as part of the Wiener Offene Orientalistik series, presents eight essays that emerged from talks given at two workshops during the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, which was held 1620 July 2018 at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Although the workshops were initially conceived and presented independently, their shared focus on the nature and transformation of writing in the Ancient Near East made them eminently suitable for combined publication. As both workshops did, the contributions in this volume explore several topical issues in investigating early writing systems: the relationship between language and writing; the influences and pragmatics that affect sign form, organization, meaning, and purpose; the techniques for and necessity of phonetic values; and the interplay of the cognitive processes, behaviors, and material forms in producing and interpreting writing. Cognitive processing in writing and reading is a specific focus in the contributions here, as it was in both workshops as well, and indeed, the addition of neuroscientific findings to current interpretational methods and theories promises to yield new insights in early writing systems. The first workshop Spoken Words and More: The Early History of the Transmission of Meaning through Cuneiform Writing, organized by Gosta GABRIEL (Freie Universitat Berlin) considered the invention of writing in the 4th millennium BC as probably the most influential legacy of ancient Mesopotamia. Today's writing systems operate mainly as a medium for recording, storing, and disseminating spoken language. This very quality, or the perception that writing has this purpose and nature was exactly what the French philosopher Jacques DERRIDA once criticized as phono- and logocentric, since he saw writing as so much more than a mere servant of the spoken word. Yet because cuneiform signs function in a highly complex way, the cuneiform writing system has not been perceived as having quite the same function, making it perhaps more an example of DERRIDAs point than a target of his criticism. While archaic signs first appeared in administrative contexts, they soon became much more than simply a notation system supporting bureaucratic practices. For example, the lexical lists the ancient glossaries that preserved, over thousands of years, the forms of signs, their semantic and (eventually) phonetic values, and their equivalents in other languages began with the earliest stratum of writing, the Uruk IV period (33503200 BC) . They may thus represent the first step in what would become an ongoing and expanding exploration of the communicative potential of cuneiform writing. And while the earliest signs lacked phonetic specification and the writing system would add phonetic details to become increasingly glottographic faithful to spoken language over time, cuneiform would never become a writing system that solely communicated spoken language, as throughout its lifespan it maintained signs and functions with semantic rather than phonetic functions and intent, including logograms and determinatives. The second workshop, Heritage in Transmission: Adoption and Adaptation of Writing Systems, was organized by Annick PAYNE (Universitat Bern). This workshop considered both the adoption of cuneiform writing among the different peoples of the Ancient Near East and its subsequent adaptation as a cultural technology as the idea of writing spread throughout the region over several millennia. Later alphabetic and hieroglyphic forms share the same cultural heritage. Questions that were addressed during the workshop included what surviving ancient scripts are able to tell us about the intellectual environment of their users, as attested either explicitly in the literary record or implicitly in the structures of the respective writing systems. The workshop also considered the role of transformation as an intercultural contact phenomenon, paying attention to matters like transmission routes and the modalities of their diffusion across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Workshop contributions also discussed the culture dependency of text format, the status of new scripts as technology, the typology and cognitive implications of writing mistakes, and the neurofunctional interpretation and implications of writing in transmission. The volume is organized in three parts that have been integrated across both workshops. Part I examines signs, meanings, and language, while Part II focuses on the pragmatics of signs and their production. Finally, Part III is concerned with the organization of lists.

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