6 ms·

Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’

96 points by benbreen 5y ago

golemiprague 5y ago
Why do they use the terms "Palestine" when the artifacts were found in Israel? It's not like this area was called Palestine in those artifact's days and it is not called Palestine these days.
- Naga 5y ago
  You're probably correct that it wasn't called Palestine then or now, but basically the entire period between those two times the name Palestine wasn't that far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palestine%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palest...
- intergalplan 5y ago
  It's common usage in North African and Middle Eastern / Near-Eastern studies, in English. "Palestine" designates and area larger than either Israel or the Palestinian Territories are, individually or combined. Further, by convention, it's essentially timeless—if you write "Palestine" in this sort of context, it'll mean the same thing in 100 years as it does now, provided that convention continues. Meanwhile, the borders and names of modern nation-states change from time to time. I haven't looked into it, but the convention may descend from the German, which language dominates studies of those regions—aside from English and Arabic, now, but for much of the 19th and 20th centuries it eclipsed all other Western languages as the language of Near East studies, generally. (it also comes up more than one might expect in social science concerning South America, in that time period)
suzzer99 5y ago
I saw this on a 2-part Nova episode and was blown away. I had absolutely no idea that all world alphabets descended from the same source.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Wait until you find out about the source of all the people in the world! ;)
- mchaver 5y ago
  Hangul is one outlier I can think of.
- bradrn 5y ago
  Not quite. Writing was independently invented about three or four times: • Sumerian cuneiform was undisputedly the first writing system to be invented. • Egyptian hieroglyphics was probably made with knowledge of cuneiform, but could have been an independent invention. All Western writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin etc.) are ultimately descended from hieroglyphics. • All native writing systems of India, SE Asia and Oceania are descended from Brāhmī. I believe the current theory is that Brāhmī was descended from Aramaic script and hence also from hieroglyphics, but there are disputes. • Chinese characters (hànzì) were an independent invention. Descended from them are Japanese hanja and kana, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, Sawndip and some others. • The writing systems of Mesoamerica (most notably that for Mayan) are of course a completely independent invention. And then of course there are Hangeul, Cherokee, CAS etc., which were scripts consciously designed under the influence of other scripts. These tend to have rather unique structures compared to other writing systems of the world.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cedex12 5y ago
    I think the parent is maybe referring to something else, that I also heard in a documentary: that all writing systems with a "reduced" alphabet descend from the same source. I guess the japanese case is a counterexample to this, but the idea was, iirc, that writing systems appeared at different places, and followed this pattern: * At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to. * These evolve to symbols. * Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols. This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are. * Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound. If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound. The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment. It does sound a bit much. I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!
baybal2 5y ago
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matgillard 5y ago
Not working
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
Very interesting. What I find the most interesting question about the development of writing is the origin of Chinese writing. We know that Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley were in fairly close contact throughout ancient times. For example, with Sanskrit, we can find very similar languages in Syria with the Mitanni. However, written Chinese as far as I know, seems it was not part of that milieu and seems to be developed completely independently.
- bloak 5y ago
  Also, the development of writing in Egypt seems to be independent of the development of writing in Mesopotamia, though that's just 2000 km away. It's possible that the Egyptians got the idea of writing from Mesopotamia and commissioned a clean-room implementation though there's little evidence of intellectual property law being a major concern in those days.
  - heresie-dabord 5y ago
    One wonders if our past hominin cousins would have understood the phenomenon of two teams of lawyers arguing a case before a judge. "Wot's it all about, Org?" asked Maka. "Intellectual property versus progress and betterment for all," replied Org.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      Not sure it'd go as far back as you're suggesting, but one of the handful of ancient Egyptian stories that survives is called "The Eloquent Peasant" and is entirely about lawyering, basically. ~1800BCE, most likely, but there's a history of Egyptian stories being badly mis-dated, due to both modern and ancient lies about when a story was composed.
      - heresie-dabord 5y ago
        > Not sure it'd go as far back The hypothesis is that our hominin cousins may have been different from us psychologically. In particular, they may not have thought about abstractions as homo sapiens does. In other words, they may have thought us mad. I look at the world and I think I can agree!
janandonly 5y ago
Shameless plug: I conduct Bible tours and one of the finds I discuss is the writing around Hathor’s temple close to Serabit el-Kadim. #1: Discoveries from ancient Egypt https://mybible.tours/ https://mybible.tours/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serabit_el-Khadim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serabit_el-Khadim
- blowski 5y ago
  I've got really into biblical studies this year, and some of those tours sound fascinating. Are any of these online tours? I live in Suffolk so can get there in person, but... you know life at the moment.
  - janandonly 5y ago
    Yeah there is a whole bunch of (biblical) history minded guys (it's usually guy's is't it?) who conduct all kinds of virtual tours. Personally I conduct them over Zoom, and use my own picture materials combined with free to use video's and pictures from sources like Wikipedia.
    - blowski 5y ago
      Do you run (or recommend) anything like seminars for this? It seems like most of the courses on this are either part of a masters degree, or are run by extremely dogmatic organisations who assume a literal interpretation of the Bible.
singularity2001 5y ago
No article about early near eastern alphabets should omit mentioning the Ugaritic Alphabet: https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/Ugaritic https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/Ugaritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet
chadlavi 5y ago
So it says "Abed's honey"?

96 points by benbreen 5y ago

Why do they use the terms "Palestine" when the artifacts were found in Israel? It's not like this area was called Palestine in those artifact's days and it is not called Palestine these days.

Naga 5y ago
You're probably correct that it wasn't called Palestine then or now, but basically the entire period between those two times the name Palestine wasn't that far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palestine%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palest...
intergalplan 5y ago
It's common usage in North African and Middle Eastern / Near-Eastern studies, in English. "Palestine" designates and area larger than either Israel or the Palestinian Territories are, individually or combined. Further, by convention, it's essentially timeless—if you write "Palestine" in this sort of context, it'll mean the same thing in 100 years as it does now, provided that convention continues. Meanwhile, the borders and names of modern nation-states change from time to time. I haven't looked into it, but the convention may descend from the German, which language dominates studies of those regions—aside from English and Arabic, now, but for much of the 19th and 20th centuries it eclipsed all other Western languages as the language of Near East studies, generally. (it also comes up more than one might expect in social science concerning South America, in that time period)

suzzer99 5y ago

I saw this on a 2-part Nova episode and was blown away. I had absolutely no idea that all world alphabets descended from the same source.

jhgb 5y ago
Wait until you find out about the source of all the people in the world! ;)
mchaver 5y ago
Hangul is one outlier I can think of.
bradrn 5y ago
Not quite. Writing was independently invented about three or four times: • Sumerian cuneiform was undisputedly the first writing system to be invented. • Egyptian hieroglyphics was probably made with knowledge of cuneiform, but could have been an independent invention. All Western writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin etc.) are ultimately descended from hieroglyphics. • All native writing systems of India, SE Asia and Oceania are descended from Brāhmī. I believe the current theory is that Brāhmī was descended from Aramaic script and hence also from hieroglyphics, but there are disputes. • Chinese characters (hànzì) were an independent invention. Descended from them are Japanese hanja and kana, Vietnamese Chữ Nôm, Sawndip and some others. • The writing systems of Mesoamerica (most notably that for Mayan) are of course a completely independent invention. And then of course there are Hangeul, Cherokee, CAS etc., which were scripts consciously designed under the influence of other scripts. These tend to have rather unique structures compared to other writing systems of the world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cedex12 5y ago
  I think the parent is maybe referring to something else, that I also heard in a documentary: that all writing systems with a "reduced" alphabet descend from the same source. I guess the japanese case is a counterexample to this, but the idea was, iirc, that writing systems appeared at different places, and followed this pattern: * At first, people just draw representations of whatever they want to refer to. * These evolve to symbols. * Then, using the "rébus principle", you use the _sounds_ of each symbol to be able to represent things for which you had no symbols. This is the step where, say, the chinese and mayan systems are. * Then, and this is the "reduced" part I'm referring to: you simply forget the original meaning of your symbol, and only take it for a basic sound. If I understand correctly, this happened when some people wanted to adapt hieroglyphs to their (spoken) language: they dropped the hieroglyph as symbolic representations, and only used them for their sound. The documentary I watched seemed to imply that all alphabets with this property (symbols have no meaning) descend from this moment. It does sound a bit much. I may be totally misunderstanding it all, so any correction is more than welcome!

baybal2 5y ago

Error 503 Backend fetch failed

matgillard 5y ago

Not working

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

Very interesting. What I find the most interesting question about the development of writing is the origin of Chinese writing. We know that Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley were in fairly close contact throughout ancient times. For example, with Sanskrit, we can find very similar languages in Syria with the Mitanni. However, written Chinese as far as I know, seems it was not part of that milieu and seems to be developed completely independently.

bloak 5y ago
Also, the development of writing in Egypt seems to be independent of the development of writing in Mesopotamia, though that's just 2000 km away. It's possible that the Egyptians got the idea of writing from Mesopotamia and commissioned a clean-room implementation though there's little evidence of intellectual property law being a major concern in those days.
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  One wonders if our past hominin cousins would have understood the phenomenon of two teams of lawyers arguing a case before a judge. "Wot's it all about, Org?" asked Maka. "Intellectual property versus progress and betterment for all," replied Org.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    Not sure it'd go as far back as you're suggesting, but one of the handful of ancient Egyptian stories that survives is called "The Eloquent Peasant" and is entirely about lawyering, basically. ~1800BCE, most likely, but there's a history of Egyptian stories being badly mis-dated, due to both modern and ancient lies about when a story was composed.
    - heresie-dabord 5y ago
      > Not sure it'd go as far back The hypothesis is that our hominin cousins may have been different from us psychologically. In particular, they may not have thought about abstractions as homo sapiens does. In other words, they may have thought us mad. I look at the world and I think I can agree!

janandonly 5y ago

Shameless plug: I conduct Bible tours and one of the finds I discuss is the writing around Hathor’s temple close to Serabit el-Kadim. #1: Discoveries from ancient Egypt https://mybible.tours/ https://mybible.tours/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serabit_el-Khadim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serabit_el-Khadim

blowski 5y ago
I've got really into biblical studies this year, and some of those tours sound fascinating. Are any of these online tours? I live in Suffolk so can get there in person, but... you know life at the moment.
- janandonly 5y ago
  Yeah there is a whole bunch of (biblical) history minded guys (it's usually guy's is't it?) who conduct all kinds of virtual tours. Personally I conduct them over Zoom, and use my own picture materials combined with free to use video's and pictures from sources like Wikipedia.
  - blowski 5y ago
    Do you run (or recommend) anything like seminars for this? It seems like most of the courses on this are either part of a masters degree, or are run by extremely dogmatic organisations who assume a literal interpretation of the Bible.

singularity2001 5y ago

No article about early near eastern alphabets should omit mentioning the Ugaritic Alphabet: https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/Ugaritic https://github.com/pannous/hieros/wiki/Ugaritic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet

chadlavi 5y ago

So it says "Abed's honey"?