Author Description

This volume, entitled Signs Sounds Semantics and offered as part of the Wiener Offene Orientalistik series, presents eight essays that emerged from talks given at two workshops during the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, which was held 1620 July 2018 at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Although the workshops were initially conceived and presented independently, their shared focus on the nature and transformation of writing in the Ancient Near East made them eminently suitable for combined publication. As both workshops did, the contributions in this volume explore several topical issues in investigating early writing systems: the relationship between language and writing; the influences and pragmatics that affect sign form, organization, meaning, and purpose; the techniques for and necessity of phonetic values; and the interplay of the cognitive processes, behaviors, and material forms in producing and interpreting writing. Cognitive processing in writing and reading is a specific focus in the contributions here, as it was in both workshops as well, and indeed, the addition of neuroscientific findings to current interpretational methods and theories promises to yield new insights in early writing systems. The first workshop Spoken Words and More: The Early History of the Transmission of Meaning through Cuneiform Writing, organized by Gosta GABRIEL (Freie Universitat Berlin) considered the invention of writing in the 4th millennium BC as probably the most influential legacy of ancient Mesopotamia. Today's writing systems operate mainly as a medium for recording, storing, and disseminating spoken language. This very quality, or the perception that writing has this purpose and nature was exactly what the French philosopher Jacques DERRIDA once criticized as phono- and logocentric, since he saw writing as so much more than a mere servant of the spoken word. Yet because cuneiform signs function in a highly complex way, the cuneiform writing syste