Ancient writing found in Turkmenistan

BBC ^ | Tuesday, 15 May, 2001, 05:57 GMT 06:57 UK | staff

[SunkenCiv]

A previously unknown civilisation was using writing in Central Asia 4,000 years ago, hundreds of years before Chinese writing developed, archaeologists have discovered... The discovery suggests that Central Asia had a civilisation comparable with that of Mesopotamia and ancient Iran as far back as the Bronze Age, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert told the BBC... It is not known what the people of the civilisation called themselves, so researchers have dubbed the society the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex (B-Mac), after the ancient Greek names for the two regions it covers.

[Ilya Mourometz]

Well, I don't know about that. The civilization that's being discussed (BMAC) is approximately 2500-1500 BC.

[Ilya Mourometz]

I don't know what the writing discovery is. The problem is, without a "Rosetta Stone", it is virtually impossible to relate symbols that are writing with any particular language. Unless there is a way to connect the symbols with phonemes (sounds), it is really impossible to know what language family epigraphs relate to.

[Ilya Mourometz]

Soma, or haoma (in the ancient Avestan or "Old Bactrian"), probably was a specific plant, perhaps one that was over-harvested and now extinct. Zarathrustra was very concerned about the "injudicious use" of haoma for psychotropic effect rather than it's purely ritualistic use. The word "drug" actually comes from the word "druj" which is an ancient Iranian word meaning "falsehood" or "lie".

[Redcloak]

This stamp is from the site...

It could be an ancient Goa'uld script, or I could just be having an SG-1 moment.

[Eastbound]

Well, if anything, it looks like it was made for clay impressions. It looks like a pretty fancy handle. Maybe an official stamp. Tax? Postage? Toll fee paid? Assay stamp? Weight and purity?

It looks like it only has four characters on it. I think that would rule out a single letter, or phonic in a word, or even a complete word. A calendar script maybe. A notary public seal or King's seal or coin stamp?

Appears to have the geometry and simplicity of Greek.

It has little similarity or none at all to Sumerian or Cuneiform.

[Eastbound]

Forget to ping you.

[SunkenCiv]

I quite agree with Ilya. Cuneiform (a syllabary, rather than an alphabet) was cracked from the trilingual at Behistun, although some progress had been made through some brilliant intuitive leaps. At first Akkadian (a Semitic tongue) was thought to be the language to first use it, but various oddities kept surfacing.

The Decipherment Of Cuneiform Script
Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project

Already by the turn of the seventeeth century, European travellers in the Near East had begun to notice traces of what appeared to be writing, but in a totally unknown script... As Akkadian began to surrender its secrets, it became clear that not all of the Mesopotamian texts were written in this Semitic language. For some time afterwards controversy surrounded this apparently agglutinative language with no recognisable relation to any other known; was it a real language or just a cryptography of Akkadian scribes (as argued by the semitist, Joseph Halévy)? After much heated debate and an avalanche of new textual material from the French excavations at Al-Hiba, Sumerian was universally recognised as a language.

The Hattusas archive of tablets in Anatolia was in cuneiform, but it was used for eight different languages, with two or three making up the bulk of the archive. They could be sounded out (because cuneiform was understood) but could not be read for a couple of decades, until a Swiss scholar got to work on it and could hear German (including some grammar) of sorts, due to the common Indoeuropean roots of German and Hittite.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for that image. I think I've seen something like this, but not from that part of Asia. Perhaps more later, if I get de-lazified and find what I'm after.

Another ancient civilization found
by Faye Flam
May 3, 2001

"It's not ancient Iranian, not ancient Mesopotamian. I even took it to my Chinese colleagues," he said. "It was not Chinese." ...No one knows the extent of this civilization, which may reach beyond Margiana, deep in the Kara Kum desert, and Bactria, which straddles the Uzbek-Afghan border. Hiebert said he believes that a third area, Anau, outside Ashgabat near the Iranian border, is connected to this civilization, perhaps even the origin of the culture. It is about 2,000 years older, going back to 4500 BC, or the Copper Age.

You'll never take me alive. Oh, sorry. No URL for this one, but it would probably have dropped dead by now anyway.

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[SunkenCiv]

a similar story, quoted from the NYTimes:

In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Asian Culture
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
New York Times - 05.13.2001
The New York Times
Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States, & Eurasia
http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/051301Times.shtml

[SunkenCiv]

archaeologist Says Central Asia Was Cradle Of Ancient Persian Religion
AFP/Yahoo | 3-18-2005
Posted on 03/19/2005 8:59:31 PM PST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1366457/posts

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

• In Ruin, Symbols on a Stone Hint at a Lost Asian Culture [05/25/2011]
• Turkmen capital is 8 thousand years old, archeologists say [06/11/2010]