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.
‘agglutinative’
Damn you, you’re always pushing on the edges of my knowledge.
oral transmission of epics has been perfectly accurate
—
I believe that worked quite well for a very long time with the Iliad before Homer wrote it down. There are long traditions of stories that were transmitted verbatim back when people used to have aural memories which we have since lost.
“writing makes its debut in the subcontinent.”
That have been found - there are many underwater cities off the Indian coastline that are only partially explored, if at all, likely dating back before sea level rise during the end of the Ice Age or end or the Younger Dryas.
I always thought the inventor was in a hurry to get to the patent office and trip and dropped the newfangled typewriter and all the keys fell off. He was in a hurry and quickly put them back on then made up a cockamamie story to the patent office why the keys spelled out QWERTY.... !
Did someone find “Q?”
5.56mm
One reason for the claim of accurate transmission *is* the phony Greek Dark Age between the Trojan War and Homer, that doesn't make it evidence of anything. There are long (oral) traditions of (orally transmitted) stories that were (orally) transmitted verbatim (sic)...
A submerged town from the middle ages was exposed by the Boxing Day tsunami, and some statues where chucked up on the beach, but the sea still covers the town. That's on the east side of India. Off the west side, there's Dwarka, which *may* be ancestral to the Harappan civilization, which was apparently pre- and non-Vedic.
There IS a reason!
In the beginning, the original layout, which has been lost, was mastered by typists quickly and they could literally type faster than the mechanical parts could respond, and subsequently would jam.
So, they came up with the QWERTY layout that slowed the typists down to a speed that the typewriters could handle.................
Maybe it was rigged.........................
We’ve been on opposite sides regarding Velikovsky. I’m no longer interested in his theories.
But did you ever post a thread of his stuff, perhaps on Worlds In Collision? It’s fascinating, but I consider it refuted.
It hasn't been refuted, just disputed. My main interest is in his "Ages in Chaos" model, in fact, that has always been more interesting to me. My guess is, had that been published first, it would have caught on. Instead, he was vilified by the left (still is) led by Harlow Shapley, and this continued under the leftist imbecile Carl Sagan (but gosh, didn't he look nice on TV).
The conventional pseudochronology is just wrong. Even in this topic, the source article shows some the same kind of illogical CYAs going on to defend the pseudochronology -- a mysterious, unexplained gap between two supposedly time-separated identical developments.
The easiest example to understand is the floor tiles from one of Ramses III's structures has a pattern on the top surfaces that had to be laid just so -- and on the bottom surfaces, Greek letters were painted on (before firing) to show the order they were to be laid down. Ramses III lived during classical Greek times, and that's far from being the only evidence. His guts were still in his canopic jars, and radiocarbon dating was conducted not many years ago, at long last -- and just as Dr V predicted, the gap between pseudochronological age and actual age was more than 700 years.
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