Posted on 04/16/2021 7:52:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
Inscription on a jar fragment. ( J. Dye, Austrian Academy of Sciences, courtesy Antiquity Publications Ltd)
An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a "missing link" in the history of the alphabet, a team of researchers said.
"Dating to the fifteenth century BCE, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant," wrote the researchers led by Felix Höflmayer, an archaeologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, in a paper published April 14 in the journal Antiquity.
The earliest evidence of writing that uses a system of letters to represent sounds - an alphabet - was found in Egypt and dates to the 12th dynasty (around 1981 BCE to 1802 BCE), with more examples being found from around 1300 BCE in the Levant (an area that includes modern-day Israel), Höflmayer's team wrote in their paper.
In later times, the Greeks adopted the use of an alphabet system, followed by the Romans (with their Latin writing system) who also used one. The use of an alphabet system was gradually adopted by more and more cultures.
The recently discovered inscription, dating to around 1450 BCE, is being called a "missing link," because it fills a gap between early examples of alphabetic writing from Egypt and later examples found in the Levant, wrote Höflmayer's team.
The inscription also provides clues about how the alphabet may have been transmitted to the Levant, with the team suggesting that the Hyksos, a group from the Levant that ruled northern Egypt until around 1550 BCE, may have helped to bring the alphabet from Egypt to the Levant.
Their reasoning is based on the fact that, for a time, the Hyksos controlled territory in both the Levant and northern Egypt. It is also based on the fact that hieroglyphic symbols were used to symbolize letters on this jar.
Short inscription The newly found alphabetic inscription is quite short: The first word in the inscription contains the letters ayin, bet and dalet, while the second word contains the letters nun, pe and tav.
All of these letters are part of the early Semitic alphabet used at one time on the Arabian Peninsula; they can also be found today in the Hebrew language, although the modern-day symbols look different.
The writer used hieroglyphic symbols to represent some of the letters; for instance, ayin was represented with a hieroglyphic symbol that looks like an eye.
"As in most early alphabetic inscriptions from the Southern Levant, the letter is shaped like a circle, resembling an iris with the pupil missing," the team wrote in the Antiquity article.
They aren't sure what the words mean, though they may be part of two names, the team said. The inscription is being called a missing link because it dates to around 3,450 years ago, after the first alphabetic symbols appeared in Egypt around 3,900 years ago but before they appeared again in the Levant around 3,300 years ago.
The letters in the first word can spell out 'slave', though this doesn't mean that the inscription refers to an enslaved person. The researchers noted that the surviving letters are likely part of longer words, and the combination of those letters that spell out "slave" are used in many other words.
The inscription was uncovered by archaeologists in 2018 near an ancient fortification at Tel Lachish. The researchers also found the remains of barley alongside the jar fragment holding the inscription, and radiocarbon dating indicated that the barley was grown in around 1450 BCE.
That date may be controversial, however, said Benjamin Sass, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University who has written extensively about the early history of the alphabet, but who was not involved in the study.
The dating of the barley may or may not be an accurate date for the inscription, Sass noted. (For instance, the barley could have been harvested after the jar.)
"The data published so far makes this a possibility, but by no means a certainty," Sass told Live Science.
And why 26 letters in the order they are in?
almost spewed coffee (or is that “coththee”?)
Well played!!
Why do Canadians say ‘Zed’ for Z?................
Same reason jethro Bodeen says ought for zero.
Thanks for posting - hilarious!
But the funniest joke was Hartman’s “Clinton” routine:
Audience question: Jennifer Flowers says you have a small p*n*s. Do You?
Hartman’s Clinton’s answer: “It’s not that I have a small p*n*s, it’s that Jennifer Flowers has a big mouth.”
That one had me rolling!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3CjIWeVBo
Many scholars and many Hindus date the Rig Veda to 12,000 BC
The first letter spell out Slave? Couldn’t it spell STOP, START, STAR or STEPHEN? Nothing but the word SLAVE? Sure...
almost spewed coffee (or is that “coththee”?)
Well played!!>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Be carethul now, or the next fing you know fey will be putting kola nut extract back into Coca-Cola!
Not trusting wiki because its an edited opinion, while may other sources disagree.
https://www.learnreligions.com/what-are-vedas-1769572
The Rig Veda: The Book of Mantra
The Rig Veda is a collection of inspired songs or hymns and is a main source of information on the Rig Vedic civilization. It is the oldest book in any Indo-European language and contains the earliest form of all Sanskrit mantras, dating back to 1500 BCE- 1000 BCE. Some scholars date the Rig Veda as early as 12000 BCE - 4000 BCE.
One day maybe we learn why our keyboards are QWERTY and not ABC... etc.
What about Cuneiform B from Sumer? That goes back to at least 3,500 BC.
The 12,000 year dating of the Rig Veda is nonsense.
This is the Digest ping for this week, got it done on Saturday for the first time in a while, a long while.
Immanuel Velikovsky, "Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History", June 10, 1945
One of *those* topics. See my previous post, and visit our fine selection of topics in the "epigraphyandlanguage" keyword.
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Thanks for the topic and pings!
The 12,000 year dating of the Rig Veda is nonsense.
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Because ...?
Uh, because it is.
12,000 years ago, Rig Veda; 8,000 years go by, nothing (including btw no trace of the Rig Veda or any other texts in all of India, other than the Harappan script, oldest known about 3500 BC, but which remains undeciphered, but is nearly uniformly recognized as holding an unknown agglutinative language, which the Indic languages obviously aren't), then all of a sudden, written versions first appear when, surprise, writing makes its debut in the subcontinent.
Michael Wood, in his "The Story of India", does some of his best presentation in the first chapter of that series, but he goes off on his usual "the west is awful and doomed" path throughout the series. Still enjoyable. He makes the obviously untestable and quite ridiculous claim that the oral transmission of epics has been perfectly accurate all the way back to the era when humans were mimicking bird sounds and other animal noises, before humans started speaking on their own.
While oral traditions are clearly what we still operate under, for everyday life (don't eat that, it's poisonous, etc) it falls flat on its ass in the consistent and accurate transmission of prehistory. Too bad, because I've always liked it. Nice and malleable.
Inspired? Who makes that determination?
We already know why. The first typewriter manufacturers noted that the prongs would stick together when someone would type too FAST. So they laid out the keys in such a way as to slow typists down.
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