Posted on 03/05/2004 2:51:50 PM PST by blam
Expert Says Iraq Could Rewrite Archaeology Books
Thu Mar 4,10:15 AM ET
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq, torn apart by years of war and sanctions, remains so rich in hidden ancient wonders that a leading expert believes the world's archaeology books will have to be rewritten over the next decade.
Reuters Photo
As security improves to allow excavation, evidence may emerge that advanced societies existed in the area much earlier than previously thought, said Dr John Russell, professor of archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
"A decade of research in Iraq could rewrite the books of archaeology, no question," Russell, who is currently serving as a senior adviser to Iraq's ministry of culture, told Reuters on Thursday at the opening of new conservation and restoration laboratory at Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad.
"There is just a phenomenal amount of history in this country and much of it is yet to be discovered. But over time it will be and we'll have to totally rethink what we know."
In 1989 and 1990, Russell led excavations at the site of Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire, which lies on the Tigris river in northern Iraq, near modern-day Mosul.
In each year, he said, his team made discoveries that essentially pushed back the timeline for ancient civilization by a millennium. "It was just absolutely incredible, they were unprecedented discoveries. But Iraq is like that," he said.
Often referred to as the cradle of civilization, Iraq's modern-day boundaries encompass ancient Mesopotamia, the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which was the foundation for the world's earliest societies.
Over the centuries, hugely important discoveries have been made in the area, from the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq with its massive ziggurat, to ancient Babylon south of Baghdad.
TREASURES ON SHOW
Beyond those widely known sites, there are scores of other, lesser known settlements that are steadily being excavated and perhaps dozens more that have yet to be discovered.
But the big hurdle is security. Almost a year after Saddam Hussein was overthrown, many areas remain unsafe and armed looters are a common enemy, particularly at remote sites.
In April last year, days after Saddam's fall, looters struck another terrible blow against Iraq's ancient heritage, stealing scores of priceless artifacts from the National Museum, many of which have yet to be recovered.
Some 5,000 cylinder seals, small cylindrical stones carved with decorative designs and used to identify tablets and ceramics, were stolen, along with the so-called Sumerian Mona Lisa, a 5,000-year-old alabaster sculpture of a woman's face.
That mask and some 1,000 of the seals have been recovered, but Russell, who is helping to oversee the restoration of the museum, says about 20 "unique, world-class pieces" are still missing, along with an estimated 10,000 smaller works.
Some of the pieces were smuggled out of Iraq, and investigators are working through the courts to try to recover items taken to Switzerland, the United States and Britain.
But Russell believes most of the outstanding artifacts are still in Iraq, and says the recovery rate for those stolen, at around 25 percent, is far better than it might have been.
He hopes the museum, which has been extensively renovated, will re-open in the next couple of months if security permits, allowing many of Iraq's greatest treasures to be on show again.
"This is one of the great museums of the world," he said. "In time, we hope to turn it into a truly viable academic research institute that draws art historians and archaeologists from all over the world."
I believe it was around Nineveh where the Assyrians took the Northern Tribes of Israel, wasn't it?
BTW, thanks for posting; I always enjoy the articles you find.
This article is more critical than a previous report I read about the losses.
Archeological Excavations: The Discovery of Evidence
Sampson's credentials appear to be solid enough:
"One of the most important excavations’ locations of recent years, under the responsibility of the inspector of antiquities Mr Adamantios Sampson, is the island of Gioura in the Sporades Islands’ complex. . .Adamantios Sampson is famous for his research on the prehistory of the Dodecannese (excavations on the island of Gyali in Nisyros - a source of 'obsidian'; study titled 'The Neolithic Period in the Dodecannese'), of Evoia (Cave of Skoteini Tharounia), the very important excavation in Manika of Chalkida, the prehistoric research in caves of Achaia and Kopaida e.t.c. Today he is the supervisor of the Inspectorate for Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of the Cyclades."
So that much seemed to check out. The next thing I did was look more closely at the find in question and see if it was open to other interpretations besides the one the article advances. If you click on the link I gave for the article (Greek alphabet was in use at 6000 BC) there's a picture of the potsherd being discussed. IMO questions could be raised both about the interpretation of the symbols on the potsherd and about the proposed dating. There are characters that could be interpreted as Alpha, Upsilon, and Delta as the article proposes, but I could see what they're interpreting as Upsilon also being interpreted as a lower-case Gamma, and I could furthermore see the whole set of symbols being interpreted as pictures rather than symbols, with the alleged Upsilon/Gamma being branches of a tree or something (in the picture the Upsilon seems to be "growing" out of a symbol below it). I'm also not confident in the dating of the potsherd, as I know there are problems with radiocarbon date skewing in the Aegean due to the Thera eruption (see Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean: Chronology and Terminology:
"NOTE: In general, absolute dates for the Aegean Stone and Bronze Ages are not yet very reliable and many different sets of dates are often in use for one and the same phase or period. A major debate has been raging since 1987 over the absolute date of the great volcanic explosion of the island of Thera/Santorini early in the Late Bronze Age. As a result, absolute dates within the first two-thirds of the second millennium B.C. (ca. 2000-1350 B.C.) are presently in an unusually active state of flux. It is therefore always best to describe an archaeological assemblage in terms of a relative chronological label (e.g. Early Helladic II, Late Minoan IA, etc.) rather than in terms of its supposed duration in calendar years B.C.").
So I could see some room for interpretation there with regards to both the meaning of the symbols and the dating of the potsherd. I'd personally find it more parsimonious to state that this find may show that certain symbols later used in the Greek alphabet were in use at 6000 BC than to state that this find proves the entire Greek alphabet was in use at that early date. It does raise questions about the relation between the Greek and Phoenician alphabets; however, I could see ways of interpreting the find that would be consistent with what Herodotus says (e.g., there was contact between Greece and the Middle East prior to the Phoenician period, so there may have been prior exchange of certain symbols which preceded the final transmission of the Phoenician alphabet to Greece mentioned by Herodotus). As a rule of thumb when Herodotus conflicts with modern historians, I tend to assume that Herodotus should be given the benefit of the doubt, since he was so much closer to the events than we are and had access to sources we no longer have. Still, that said, it's an interesting find that warrants serious attention.
Reminds me of that commercial where the guy keeps throwing empty beer bottles with messages in them into the ocean and they keep washing up on a desert island where this marooned guy cries, "Why do you torment me?!!!"--LOL!
Below is a pottery shard dredged up from a 9,500 year old site off the Indian coast. Is that writing? (or, could it have been dropped off a ship onto the site?)
Doh!--do you mean I've been spending the past hour digging through my notes on Greek archaeology for nothing?--LOL! Yeah, I've seen that one before--probably from you posting it, LOL! Don't know if it's "writing" or what. That one "m"-looking "winged" shape reminds me of some of the Neolithic European "shorthand" symbols Gimbutas discusses, so it may have that type of pictographic/ideographical significance rather than a logographical/alphabetical significance. The "y" shape reminds me (loosely) of a Greek Gamma or a Hebrew Ayin only modified to be less "curvy" in order to accomodate the hard medium the character appears to be inscribed on (like the shape of Western European runes are designed to be easier to cut into wood/stone surfaces); however it may not have the same meaning as a Gamma or Ayin and may not be alphabetical in significance. But who knows?--hard to tell without more information and without someone deciphering the meaning of the characters. In any case interesting.
Yes, probably, or thereabouts--2 Kings 17:23 says it was "Assyria"; cf. 2 Chronicles 28.
Besides the testimony of sources like Herodotus, we have early examples of Greek alphabetic writing and examples of Phoenician writing, and it's beyond question that the Greek alphabet is derived from Phoenician (or some closely related system).
The Hebrew alphabet was similar--for the Hebrew letters see Psalm 119 which has 8 verses for each letter (aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, he, vau, zain, cheth, etc.). The present-day Hebrew letters are written a bit differently, since they use the Aramaic letters. The oldest Greek letters are closer to the Phoenician letters in appearance, and were written from right to left. The Greek letter names are clearly derived from the Phoenician names, and the order of letters is almost the same (the Greeks made some minor changes, and created a few new letters).
Greek is one of the so-called Indo-European languages; the ancestral language (which English, Latin, Armenian, Celtic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, and many other languages are ultimately descended from) is called Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). The date when PIE was spoken is not exactly certain, but was probably later than 6000 B.C.
Yes, I'd entertain both of those hypotheses before the hypothesis that it's the Greek alphabet, unless there's additional evidence beyond that potsherd. Perhaps if they ever decipher Linear A it will shed additional light on the prehistory of Greek. Linear A has a character that looks like somewhat that Upsilon/Delta character I mentioned--see for instance left-hand pic, second row, third character from right:
Best explanation I've heard yet :) BTW if you flip it over, on the other side it says "© 7500 BC AL GORE" :)
The potsherd of 5500-6000 BC, found at the islet Yura of Northern Sporades bearing Greek alphabet letters. The facsimile to the classic Greek letters Alpha, Ypsilon and Delta can be recognized. This find proves that the classic Greek alphabet is older than the Greek linear alphabets. It also demolishes crushingly and definitely the false theory that Greeks took the alphabet from the Phoenicians, who emerged in history around 1150 BC, i.e. 4500-5000 years after the creation of the Yura written potsherd.And the Russians invented everything before the Americans. [rimshot!]
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Why not?
Fired clay items have been found in large quantities on shipwrecks, even though the ships themselves have deteriorated (even vanished), but fired clay absorbs water. Over long periods of time the clay objects fall apart.
"An indirect method measuring the relative pore volume in a clay body is to measure its maximum water retention. Measurements of the Ashkelon vessels taken at the time of treatment showed that they contained an average of 2 1 % of their dry weight in water. A few of them contained over 30% in water. As a comparison, modern bisque-fired clays absorb only 10 - 14% of their dry weight in water."
Iron Age Shipwrecks in Deep Water off Ashkelon, Israel
Robert D. Ballard and Lawrence E. Stager et al
http://web.mit.edu/deeparch/www/publications/papers/BallardEtAl2002.pdf
If there were huge quantities of these shards with writing on them spread across an entire submerged site, then I'd say that the site itself isn't 8000 years old. The script looks Mediterranean, so my guess is that it's in the area of 2500-3000 years old, and came off a wreck. [cont'd in next post]
Here's a quote from page 77: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
"Forbes and Crowder's justification for reviving the idea that writing may perhaps be traced back to the Ice Age is based on the fact that a considerable number of the deliberate markes found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages extending from the Mediterranean to China."The table Rudgley produces from Forbes and Crowder is much more extensive than the one found in Settegast, but the idea is the same. From pp 67-68:
"Petrie... made an extended study of Predynastic... and made it quite clear that... they were, in fact, a separate system that existed before and then later alongside the hieroglyphs. Petrie was also aware of the similiarities between the Egyptian signs and those found elsewhere in the Mediterranean... He also expressed the belief that because of their similarity of form with the signs that were later used in alphabetical scripts, these early signs may well have something to do with the origins of the alphabet... Winn could only bring himself to describe the Vinca signs as pre-writing, but for Gimbutas, and for others such as Harald Haarman... they are the real thing... most of those who had previously characterized the Tartaria tablets and analogous Vinca signs as genuine writing did so on the mistaken assumption that they were later than Sumerian and could always be neatly 'explained' as somewhat pale imitations of Near Eastern intellectual innovations. We have also seen how many scholars, on realising that the Vinca signs were simply too early to be derived from Mesopotamia, abruptly dropped the question... For others, who had tried and failed to bolster the traditional chronology for prehistoric southeastern Europe by invoking the Tartaria tablets as a refutation of radiocarbon dates, the tablets were simply dismissed as meaningless jumbles of signs."
Even with turbo? ;')
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