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The Enigmatic Tablets from Late Bronze Age Deir ‘Alla
- duxup 6y agoI might have missed it so I ask: Do they know what these would have been used for? Earlier writing I've seen on clay tables were for things that would be hard to remember like accounting crops, taxes, calendars. But these seem like phrases from stories or ritual, that wouldn't be hard to remember and bulky to keep in a big tablet... were they ritual items and the inscription somehow was thought to be important / special because it was written?
- lolthishuman 6y agoThey can encode numbers and recipes or algorithms. It’s been found that story can be allegorical memory devices which embed deeper knowledge when parsed. So the same thing that sounds like a story can reference math and other practical things.
- JPLeRouzic 6y agoAn example of memory device is the lukasa which was used in north Congo a few centuries ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukasa_(Luba) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukasa_(Luba)
- madaxe_again 6y agoAs they were found in the vicinity of a temple precinct, and are in an idiopathic script (towards the end of the article they note that small groups of scribes may have had their own local cultivar of script), they’re likely either ritual/offertory, or possibly more mundane - scribes learning to write with set pieces they know orally by rote. The article doesn’t mention it, but there are other examples of “learner” hands throughout antiquity, and even through to modernity - this could be an ancient example of a simplified script intended for beginners.
- webmaven 6y agoFascinating! I was more or less aware of the main progression of alphabetic scripts from Proto-Sinaitic to Phoenician, then splitting to Hebraic, Greek, and Aramaic branches, but I had no idea there was such a proliferation of scripts before the Phoenician.
- redis_mlc 6y agoSumerian writing started 2,000 years before Phoenician. The origins of Sumerian writing are unknown, so it's unique until the Akaddians (nearby city) also adopted it. Literacy was lost for several centuries after the Bronze Age Collapse because all the scribes died of war and famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Writing_syst...
- lolthishuman 6y agoThere’s more evidence. 6 millennium bc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols There’s another I found recently but I forgot the name.