Posted on 01/08/2020 1:54:01 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
To Herodotus and other Greeks of that period, a barbarian was anyone who did not speak Greek. So even civilized peoples could count as barbarians. It’s thought that the term came from the foreign language sounding like nonsense syllables to a Greek: “bar-bar-bar-bar.”
True; I have Akkadian and Assyrian dictionaries, but my Sumerian is strictly a phonetic rendering {for example: http://sumerian.org/sumerian.pdf} IIRC Sumerian is NOT Semitic, not pre-Semitic; although perhaps related to the Akkadian and Assyrian - my memory is foggy.
***Samuel Noah Kramer noted that the names for the major rivers and even the cities in Sumer didn’t have Sumerian names***
I feel a little bit sheepish, but Kramer and I had a bone of contention. It had to do with the Sumerian word ME {or Mi}. He identified it as a somewhat untranslatable divine concept; I translated it as 'Who?'. It gets a little complicated, but it opens the possibility that the priest class may have believed in the 'one god' concept. The Sumerian Dictionary defines it: divine power, attribute, office.
***(they believed that cities were never founded by humans, but by the gods)***
Don't tell George Tsoukalos! :^)
***The Elamites were the big dog in the area of Iran long before the Persians. They too had a written language, but it’s still obscure (I don’t think a large preserved archive has been discovered). The Harappan script is also pretty old, but hasn’t been cracked to the satisfaction of anyone but the individual translators — there’s been no bilingual texts discovered, which may be a permanent problem and stumbling block***
Interesting. Again, if I studied all that my memory is epoxied. I wish I had the time now.
"Parthians and Medes and Elamites" are among the people present in Jerusalem on Pentecost day who were able to understand the apostles in their own language (Acts 2.9). The Elamite language eventually died out but not until the Middle Ages, I think.
Cuneifrom was cracked in modern times because Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language, and the translator recognized patterns. As it opened out, the other languages in the same archives (which had been brilliantly sorted by unknown language as part of the ongoing attempts at decipherment) could be correctly pronounced due to the nature of cuneiform itself. Early on it was recognized that Akkadian had been adapted into cuneiform, and that the other large body of texts must be the native language — that was Sumerian.
Old Elamite remains unread. The Elamite high king Chedorlaomer is mentioned in the Old Testament (Sodom and Gomorrah) — the name is believed to be a multi-layer transliteration of Kudur-Lagamar (”the servant of the goddess Lagamar”).
written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, the Behistun Inscription by King Darius did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Scholars were able to first decipher the cuneiform of the Old Persian part of the inscription and use that to make sense of the Elamite and Babylonian portions
I have a fairly extensive file on the Behistun Inscription. {Wikipedia once posted a translation of the inscription - which is in my file - but now they link to: https://web.archive.org/web/20090413214509/http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Persia/Behistun_txt.html - which is similar to my archived translation.}
If such finds as this acted as a 'Rosetta Stone' why is Elamite still so unread?
If 'adapted' was there possibly an earlier written form of Akkadian? As I remember, all written languages {cuneiform and Egyptian... and?} were made up of phonetic characters until the Semitic languages of Palestine & the Sinai created 'alphabets'. {you are drawing me into an area that could consume the remainder of my life; stop it! ;^D}
Do you have the book I.J. Gelb A Study of Writing? I have it in paperback and I thought a few years ago it would be nice to get a less worn copy; I looked on Amazon and it was about $250! ...in paperback! I decided to just enjoy the copy that I have.
Biblical Arch Review published an article by Orly Goldwasser in the March/April 2010 issue - 'How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs'. I wrote Ms. Goldwasser and BAR and pointed out that her work duplicated I.J. Gelb's earlier work, perhaps coincidentally. Even her graphics were almost exactly the same. She answered and said that she would get back to me - she never did. BAR just ignored my essay. She ended up getting an award - as usual I ended up getting the shaft.
Oh wow, I was looking for something lese, found a really old file deep in the hard drive, behind some cobwebs and the body of Forrestal.The Lost Civilization of the Stone Age"The proposition that Ice Age reindeer hunters invented writing fifteen thousand years ago or more is utterly inadmissible and unthinkable. All the data that archaeologists have amassed during the last one hundred years reinforce the assumption that Sumerians and Egyptians invented true writing during the second half of the fourth millennium. The Palaeolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic progression to civilisation is almost as fundamental an article of contemporary scientific faith as heliocentrism. Writing is the diagnostic trait, the quintessential feature of civilisation. Writing, says I.J. Gelb, 'distinguishes civilised man from barbarian.' If Franco-Cantabrians [i.e. Ice Age inhabitants of parts of France and Spain] invented writing thousands of years before civilisation arose in the Near East, then our most cherished beliefs about the nature of society and the course of human development would be demolished."
by Richard Rudgley
The Elamites were around a long time, and changed their writing system. Probably the old one was good enough at the time, but like most early inventions, was found wanting after a while.
Lost Languages:['Civ commented] Amusingly, the author reproduces a letter to The Economist magazine regarding its article on the Phaistos Disk. The letter calls it a century old fraud (the disk, not the magazine) that could be exposed as such using thermoluminescence. [p 298]. [/snip]
The Enigma Of The World's
Undeciphered Scripts
by Andrew Robinson
Whoops, for “Cuneifrom” read “Cuneiform”. Or, if writing in boustrophodon...
How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
Biblical Archaeology Review | Mar/Apr 2010 | Orly Goldwasser
Posted on 03/24/2010 6:51:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2479150/posts
Who Really Invented the Alphabet — Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates?
Biblical Archaeology Review | August 2010 | Anson F. Rainey & Orly Goldwasser
Posted on 08/31/2010 7:45:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2581158/posts
Buddha statues in Afghanistan
once great culture ruined by stone age islamists.....in a peaceful, respectful, prosperous world, works of art and culture can be accomplished...now,not so much...
>>>Buddha statues in Afghanistan
Exactly! While the Taliban were destroying the cultural History of Afghanistan, they were ordering goats to wear diapers (anti-islamic to expose gentilia) plus children not to fly kites or eat ice-cream, only because their Mohammad did not fly kites.
That’s exactly my point. Barbarian to Herodotus doesn’t mean the same thing that it means to us.
Yes. Herodotus was writing before Conan the Barbarian.
:^D Amazing how the files and directories add up in time.
***If Franco-Cantabrians [i.e. Ice Age inhabitants of parts of France and Spain] invented writing thousands of years before civilisation arose in the Near East, then our most cherished beliefs about the nature of society and the course of human development would be demolished."***
Rather pithy. Obviously one can never prove a negative. AND, if we discovered a prehistoric language, if it was representative of the 'click' language for example, what would it look like? What if they wrote by arranging dead insects... that sort of thing?
I refreshed my memory a bit. Linear Elamite {linear? Linear B [??] confusing enough} and Proto-Elamite. Apparently affected by Akkadian.
***the Phaistos Disk. The letter calls it a century old fraud***
The Phaistos Disk is questionable. I think the thermoluminescence testing would help.
If you are interested I can send you the essay letter I wrote to BAR about the possible plagiarism of the info from I.J. Gelb with graphic comparisons, etc.
AS I asked before, do you have Gelb's book?
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