Text 1
For decades, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has argued that clay tokens found throughout the Near East starting around 8000 BCE were the direct precursor to cuneiform writing. According to her theory, these three-dimensional geometric counters evolved systematically into complex, inscribed tokens, which were eventually pressed into clay envelopes to create the earliest two-dimensional pictographic signs. She asserts this transition represents a linear cognitive progression from concrete accounting to abstract representation.
Text 2
While acknowledging that Neolithic clay tokens served administrative functions, anthropologist Piotr Michalowski argues that cuneiform did not gradually evolve from these accounting tools. Michalowski emphasizes that cuneiform writing emerged rapidly in the late fourth millennium BCE in Uruk as a sophisticated administrative system. Rather than being a natural continuation of token usage, writing was a sudden structural invention designed to meet the immediate bureaucratic needs of a highly centralized state.
Based on the passages, how would Michalowski (Text 2) most likely respond to the assertion in Text 1 that cuneiform developed through a "linear cognitive progression"?
- AHe would support it by presenting evidence that the bureaucratic needs of centralized states accelerated the development of early pictographs.
- BHe would qualify it by suggesting that while the transition was linear, it occurred much later in Uruk than Schmandt-Besserat estimates.
- He would challenge it by arguing that cuneiform emerged abruptly as a novel institutional tool rather than through the gradual modification of accounting tokens.Answer
- DHe would dismiss it by pointing out that clay tokens were not actually used for administrative or accounting purposes.