Ancient writing found in TurkmenistanA 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.
Tuesday, May 15, 2001, 05:57 GMT 06:57 UK
Except for the use of stylized hieroglyphs ~ that is, the cuneiform wedge orthography ~ Egyptian and Sumerian aren't particularly distinguishable. Arguments are currently being advanced that the Sumerian system was transmitted to Egypt as it was being developed in Sumer, and further that the earliest Chinese hieroglyphs were substantially influenced by the writing at Sumer ~ and probably developed by trained scribes from Sumer.
Some of the deer stones in Mongolia are about 7,200 years old and bear characters that appear to be meaningful ~ some of which show up in other later writing systems. The deerstone code hasn't been broken yet.
Contemporaneous with the earliest deerstones there are pictographs in the Kola peninsula (the Sapma, home of the Laplanders or Sa'ami, the ancient indigenous population of the far North) that may be interpreted even today.
Philologists argue that the Sa'ami languages of today have the same root as ancient Sumerian, and that there is some link, not yet figured out, between the pictographs and the cuneiform wedge hieroglyphs.
Except for the use of stylized hieroglyphs ~ that is, the cuneiform wedge orthography ~ Egyptian and Sumerian aren't particularly distinguishable. Arguments are currently being advanced that the Sumerian system was transmitted to Egypt as it was being developed in Sumer, and further that the earliest Chinese hieroglyphs were substantially influenced by the writing at Sumer ~ and probably developed by trained scribes from Sumer.
Some of the deer stones in Mongolia are about 7,200 years old and bear characters that appear to be meaningful ~ some of which show up in other later writing systems. The deerstone code hasn't been broken yet.
Contemporaneous with the earliest deerstones there are pictographs in the Kola peninsula (the Sapma, home of the Laplanders or Sa'ami, the ancient indigenous population of the far North) that may be interpreted even today.
Philologists argue that the Sa'ami languages of today have the same root as ancient Sumerian, and that there is some link, not yet figured out, between the pictographs and the cuneiform wedge hieroglyphs.