Posted on 10/20/2006 10:51:02 AM PDT by blam
Henan Province
Hmmmm...That would have to be Charlie Chan and his number one son, right?
"MADE IN PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA"
or a good place to clean out the tents...........
A linguist at Indiana University has tied such farflung languages as Sumerian, Sa'ami, a written Chinese language, and a spoken American Indian language ~ to the group that first developed writing.
These hieroglyphic/pictographic techniques are not to be confused with alphabets or syllabries invented thousands of years later.
Sioux or Plains Indian sign language is essentially the same as these earliest hieroglyphic/pictographic languages ~ with my little sign language guidebook I was able to read a display of Shang Dynasty written materials at the Smithsonian several years back.
They dug up Charlie Chan? Man, they're strict.
In 1159BC, the trees worldwide recorded a catastrophic event recorded in their rings. The Shang Dyhasty collapsed at this time and it is recorded that 250,000 Chinese 'took to the sea.'
The Olmec And The Shang
Michael Xu, who teaches Chinese studies at Texas Christian University, reports finding artistic motifs on 3,000-year-old artifacts from the Olmec culture in southern Mexico that are identical to Chinese inscriptions from the Shang Dynasty, which dates to the same era.
Xu has studied hundreds of drawings on tortoise shells and animal shoulder blades that have been kept for decades in American museums and largely ignored.
And he reports, "When I first brought my artifacts from the Americas to China, scholars there thought that I just had more examples of Shang writing."
Xu says that Olmec and Shang dynasty symbols for sun, sky, trees, water, rain, astronomy, sacrifice and religion are so close they can't be accidental.
Furthermore, he has found that the symbols occur in the same sequences in both cultures. There are several dozen examples of these, which means the symbols can be read as sentences -- the same sentences with the same meanings in China and in Mexico.
This style of writing, called "jiaguwen," the oldest Chinese characters, existed in Asia for about 600 years, until about 1,000 B.C. Xu dates the similar writing in Mesoamerica at about 1,100 B.C.
What's significant, Xu notes, is that the Olmecs are regarded as the first civilization, the mother culture of the hemisphere, appearing 1,000 years before the Mayans and with no antecedents.
"It seems like those people came out of the sky," says Xu. "Overnight they knew how to use jade, damasks. They had astrology, astronomy." In particular, he said they had artistic motifs on jade bars, called "jade celts," that were used as ritual objects and to identify the rankings of their leaders.
"You cannot find jade celts anywhere else in the world except ancient China and Mesoamerican sites. Nobody else used jade for ritual objects, for burial, especially wrapped up in cinnabar, the red powder, except in these two places."
There is the legend in China, says Xu, that when the Shang dynasty collapsed, replaced by the Zhou dynasty, some 250,000 people were displaced and disappeared.
"I don't think 250,000 people came to America," says Xu. "But some made it. How many does it need to spread the gospel? Maybe only a dozen; look at missionaries today. Scholars ask, where is the bronze, where is this, where is that? Look at the Mayflower people from Europe. Did they bring palace things? They did not. They mostly just brought themselves
I've eaten fortune cookies older than that!
Some believe that the Sumerians were not native to that area and were from places in the east. Refugees from Sundaland?
No doubt they were following the herds North from Sundaland as the Ice Age ended and Sundland was gradually covered with water.
Folks speaking a cognate language went all the way to Norway following the herds ~ most likely reindeer.
Later on Semitic and Indo-European speakers moved in on their territory. They were reduced to being "scribes" while the Semites and Indo-Europeans went about creating Babylon and Persia.
I suspect the Sumerians made a good living out of the "scribe" business for the next few thousand years.
"I've eaten fortune cookies older than that!
"
That's nothing. I've eaten eggs older than that.
So that's who's been raiding my refrigerator. And here I've been blaming my dogs....
'Please to put tab A into slot B'
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One wouldn't be showing one's age, now are we?
Cliff carvings may rewrite history of Chinese characters
Xinhua News Agency | 5-18-07 | unknown
Posted on 05/18/2007 1:33:37 PM EDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1835863/posts
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