The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: I put this book at the top of my wish list, hoping to find in it a history of the development of writing in Sumer and a description of how the writing system operates. Instead I found a long-winded, repetitive discussion in the French philosophical tradition of the nature of reality and whether writing is a "different language" than speaking. More than half the book is spent deriding other French authors. The main thesis of the book, delivered with great rhetorical finesse and little or no evidence, is that writing did not develop gradually but was "invented" suddenly as a full-blown system.