For over three decades, Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s token-enclosure hypothesis dominated scholarship regarding the origins of Near Eastern writing. Her model posited a seamless, evolutionary progression: plain geometric clay tokens representing specific agricultural commodities were progressively enclosed within hollow clay spheres (bullae), impressed onto the outer surfaces of these containers for visual verification, and ultimately flattened into two-dimensional pictographs impressed upon clay tablets. This gradualist paradigm framed proto-cuneiform not as a deliberate intellectual invention, but as the passive administrative outcome of millennia-old agrarian accounting practices.
However, recent epigraphical re-examinations of the Late Uruk administrative archives have cast substantial doubt on this linear continuum. Scholars such as Jean-Jacques Glassner argue that the token-to-tablet hypothesis conflates two fundamentally distinct semiotic systems. While tokens unquestionably functioned as concrete mnemonic counters in localized transactions, proto-cuneiform script exhibits an abstract, syntactically structured sign system created not merely to tally physical assets, but to record complex institutional relationships and labor obligations. Moreover, precise stratigraphical re-evaluations indicate that complex tokens and fully developed numerical tablets coexisted synchronously within Uruk IV strata, directly undermining the assertion of a strict chronological sequence.
To resolve these empirical discrepancies, contemporary paleographers propose a dual-track framework. They assert that while token usage established a cultural precedent for symbolic external memory, true writing emerged through a deliberate conceptual rupture—a centralized, state-sponsored structural innovation engineered to standardize record-keeping across expanding urban polities. Far from representing a mere transcript of physical token counting, early proto-cuneiform constituted an autonomous cognitive technology capable of generating novel semantic categories. Although this revised synthesis acknowledges the preliminary role of token administrative tools, it ultimately reframes the emergence of literacy not as an organic byproduct of accounting, but as a conscious structural leap in social governance and information architecture.
Which of the following best describes the rhetorical organization of the passage as a whole?
- It outlines a long-accepted historical theory, presents empirical and theoretical challenges to its evolutionary framework, and concludes by presenting a revised synthesis that redefines the phenomenon in question.Answer
- BIt summarizes a traditional scientific hypothesis and subsequently provides additional empirical evidence to demonstrate how that hypothesis accounts for recent archaeological discoveries.
- CIt describes how clay tokens were enclosed in bullae, details the stratigraphical evidence from Uruk IV strata, and evaluates specific administrative records from the Late Uruk period.
- DIt introduces an outdated archaeological explanation, aggressively refutes every aspect of its methodology, and insists that token usage played no role whatsoever in early administrative history.
- EIt details the author's own original hypothesis regarding cuneiform script, refutes competing theories proposed by Jean-Jacques Glassner, and establishes a unified theory of urban governance.