Product Description

As the first known system of writing, the cuneiform symbols traced in Sumerian clay more than six millennia ago were once regarded as a simplistic and clumsy attempt to record in linear form the sounds of a spoken language. More recently, scholars have acknowledged that early Sumerian writing -- far from being a primitive and flawed mechanism that would be "improved" by the Phoenicians and Greeks -- in fact represented a complete written language system, not only meeting the daily needs of economic and government administration, but also providing a new means of understanding the world.

In The Invention of Cuneiform Jean-Jacques Glassner offers a compelling introduction to this seminal era in human history. Returning to early Mesopotamian texts that have been little studied or poorly understood, he traces the development of writing from the earliest attempts to the sophisticated system of roughly 640 signs that comprised the Sumerian repertory by about 3200 B.C. Glassner further argues -- with an occasional nod to Derrida -- that the invention of writing had a deeper metaphysical significance. By bringing the divinely ordained spoken language under human control, Sumerians were able to "make invisibility visible," separating themselves from the divine order and creating a new model of power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #884545 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-17
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review

"Glassner does not content himself with giving the Sumerian invention its full measure. He renders an homage to all writing that makes reparation for numerous humiliations." -- Le Monde

"A strikingly original analysis of the origin of cuneiform writing." -- Choice

"Did writing evolve from multiple stimuli into a script that represented a particular language? Or was it invented by a genius at a particular place and time? How did it happen? Jean-Jacques Glassner sets out to answer these questions in this stimulating book, translated from the French, in which he presents his own view -- that writing was invented not as a recording device, nor as a primitive linkage of symbols representing objects, but as a purposeful rendering of the Sumerian language." -- Stephanie Dalley, Technology and Culture

"Glassner has a sturdy knowledge of Sumerian writing, and good knowledge as well of the cuneiform languages that followed Sumerian, as well as New World pictographic writing." -- John A. C. Greppin, Times Literary Supplement

Review

"The Invention of Cuneiform is the only book that presents the origin and early development of the world's first writing system to a non-specialist audience within the context of the discourses on language and representation current in the humanities today. The book is brilliant and deserves to reach a broad Anglophone readership." -- Jerry Cooper, The Johns Hopkins University

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Customer Reviews

Very disappointing
I put this book at the top of my wish list, hoping to find in it a history of the development of writing in Sumer and a description of how the writing system operates. Instead I found a long-winded, repetitive discussion in the French philosophical tradition of the nature of reality and whether writing is a "different language" than speaking. More than half the book is spent deriding other French authors. The main thesis of the book, delivered with great rhetorical finesse and little or no evidence, is that writing did not develop gradually but was "invented" suddenly as a full-blown system.