The following passage is adapted from an essay on the history of ancient writing systems.
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1 For centuries in ancient Mesopotamia, writing was a highly
2 specialized craft born out of economic necessity. The earliest clay
3 tablets, dating to the late fourth millennium BCE in the city of Uruk,
4 contain simple pictographs used to record transactions of grain, livestock,
5 and manufactured goods. This proto-cuneiform served primarily as an
6 administrative accounting tool for temple officials and merchants who
7 needed to track resources in rapidly growing urban centers. The writing
8 was not designed to replicate spoken language, but rather to serve as a
9 visual ledger for physical commodities.
10
11 Over the subsequent millennium, however, the scribes of Mesopotamia
12 expanded the utility of the script. By simplifying the pictographs into
13 wedge-shaped cuneiform signs, they began to represent phonetic syllables
14 rather than just physical objects. This linguistic adaptation allowed writers
15 to move beyond inventories and record spoken language, opening the door
16 for the preservation of oral epics, legal codes, and historical chronicles.
17 Consequently, a technology that began as a bookkeeping method evolved into
18 a medium for intellectual expression and statecraft, permanently altering the
19 preservation of cultural knowledge.
Based on the passage, which of the following statements best describes the primary focus of Paragraph 2 (lines 11–19)?
- AThe mechanical transition from pictographs to wedge-shaped cuneiform signs that represent phonetic syllables.
- BThe emergence and expansion of cuneiform writing as a primary pillar of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.
- Mesopotamian scribes adapted cuneiform from a commodity-tracking system into a versatile tool for cultural and political expression.Answer
- DThe restriction of cuneiform writing to transactional ledgers due to the difficulty of preserving spoken language.