Word: schmandt
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...Conversational Desktop is a voice-controlled computer system that acts like an automatic receptionist, personal secretary and travel agent -- screening calls, taking messages, making airline reservations. "Get me two seats to the Bahamas," says Research Scientist Chris Schmandt to his computer. "When do you want to go?" replies the machine...
...first appeared in Mesopotamia around 3100 B.C. in the form of an elaborate system of symbols that were probably used for keeping temple records. But where did the ancients get the idea for their epochal invention? A University of Texas archaeologist may have at last provided the answer. Denise Schmandt-Besserat has found evidence that writing evolved from a much older record-keeping system that is still used in the Middle East. If her theory is correct, it pushes the roots of writing back at least 5,000 years...
...Schmandt-Besserat, 43, a French-born assistant professor of art and an expert on the ancient uses of clay, bases her theory on studies started in 1969. For decades archaeologists had been puzzled by the great numbers of small, geometric clay tokens-some as old as 10,000 years-discovered in digs from Egypt to the Indus Valley. Several experts had speculated that these tokens were toys or pieces from a still undiscovered prehistoric game. In 1966 Pierre Amiet, curator of Near Eastern art at the Louvre, suggested that the tokens were an ancient recording system. Schmandt-Besserat agrees. After...
...process, Schmandt-Besserat believes, evolved in four stages. In the first, which ran from about 8500 B.C.-the date of the oldest tokens found-to around 3500 B.C., the small (up to 5 cm., or 2 in., in diameter) cones, disks, spheres and pellets represented such commodities as sheep, jugs of oil, bread or clothing and were used by merchants and others in the Middle East to keep records. In the second stage, merchants shipping goods from one place to another began enclosing tokens in sealed clay balls known as bullae, which were broken open upon delivery so the shipment...
Once this stage was reached, the fourth step came quickly. Realizing that impressing their shapes on the bullae made enclosing the tokens unnecessary, people abandoned the counters and began keeping their records directly on clay tablets. The efficiency of that technique was immediately obvious, says Schmandt-Besserat, and could explain not only how written record keeping evolved but also why writing spread so rapidly along the trade routes and quickly took hold throughout the civilized world of that day. But even the development of writing did not lead to the disappearance of the tokens. The written word, after all, helps...