Posted on 12/24/2001 5:04:31 AM PST by blam
Archaeologists rewrite timeline of Bronze and Iron Ages, including early appearance of alphabet
FOR RELEASE: Dec. 19, 2001
Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: 607-255-3290
E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C.
Writing in two articles in the forthcoming issue of the journal Science (Dec. 21), archaeologists from Cornell University and the University of Reading (England) and a physicist from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (Germany) have given a new kind of precision to the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Aegean and the Near East.
"Establishing this chronology means that the objects -- metalwork, furniture, woven textiles, and an alphabetic inscription found in a tomb in central Turkey -- were older than previously thought by some 22 years," said Peter I. Kuniholm, Cornell professor of art history and archaeology.
Among the artifacts found in the Midas Mound Tumulus at Gordion, the capital of ancient Phrygia, a site west of Ankara, Turkey, is a shallow, bronze bowl with a patch of beeswax on the rim carrying an alphabetical inscription. The inscription is a precursor to -- or contemporary with -- the earliest attested occurrences of the Greek alphabet. In addition to letter forms known from ancient Greek, there is a vertical arrow, known also from Etruscan inscriptions.
With the new chronology, the bowl now is independently dated circa 740 B.C., making its inscription as old as the oldest known artifacts on which the Greek alphabet appears: an oinochoe (a wine pitcher) from the Dipylon cemetery in Athens and a cup from Pithekoussai (now Ischia) in the Bay of Naples. The estimated dates of these pots previously had provided archaeologists with only an approximate date for these early alphabetic inscriptions. "The alphabet, which originated in Phoenicia at a time that is still disputed, was moving west at a rapid pace, traditionally thought to be by sea but now clearly by land as well. That's what this chronology shows: The alphabet was really catching on," says Kuniholm. Scholars believe that the birthplace of all Western alphabets, including the Greek and Roman, was Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon, Israel and Palestine).
The oldest known Phoenician inscription was found in the Ahiram epitaph at Byblos, Lebanon, dating from about the 11th century B.C. Scholars think the alphabet was spread throughout the Mediterranean by traders who found the new shorthand an improvement over the syllabic scripts such as Linear B and cuneiform Hittite.
Kuniholm and his colleagues are using the science of both carbon dating and dendrochronology, dating through tree rings, to calibrate history. Their latest research involved carbon-14 analysis on 10-year slices -- that is rings covering 10 years of growth -- on wood from pine trees from the Catacik Forest in Turkey and from oak trees in Germany. By currently accepted models, the carbon-14 concentrations should have been identical in both the pine and the oak. And while the scientists discovered that this was true in general, they were surprised to find that for certain key periods, the Turkish pine appeared to be older than the German oak by as much as 17 years.
"Those pieces of wood are the same tree-ring age, and they should have the same radiocarbon age, but they don't," says Kuniholm.
What happened, Kuniholm believes, is that the Turkish pine, growing in a warmer climate and at a lower latitude, absorbed less carbon-14 during documented periods of so-called solar minima -- prolonged cooling periods in the Northern Hemisphere, such as those in the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. and in the 15th and 16th centuries A.D. The German oak, which starts its growing season later in the spring than does the Turkish pine, absorbed measurably more amounts of carbon-14 during such cooling periods. "The trees are like a tape recorder of the radioactivity of the cosmos," Kuniholm said, "but they record only when they are growing."
Carbon-14, an isotope of the element carbon, is produced in the Earth's lower stratosphere by the collision of neutrons, produced by cosmic rays, with nitrogen. (An isotope is made up of atoms of the same element but with different numbers of neutrons.) During periods of high solar activity, the solar wind prevents charged particles from entering the atmosphere -- thus producing little carbon-14. However, carbon-14 production peaks during the solar minima, and it enters the Earth's troposphere as carbon dioxide-14 during the late spring in the Northern Hemisphere. By the following spring, the higher concentration of carbon in the troposphere is diluted. Thus, German oak, which grows late in the spring and summer, absorbs less carbon dioxide-14 than Turkish pine or juniper, which grows from the early spring to summer. "This is the first time scientists have been able to note a regional difference in tree rings of the same dendrochronological age," says Kuniholm. "Sadly, now, with all the carbon in our atmosphere, with the pollution we have from our cars and factories and energy facilities, the trees have all but given up providing many of these valuable signals."
Kuniholm's co-authors on the Science papers were Sturt Manning of the University of Reading, Bernd Kromer of Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, and Maryanne Newton, Cornell doctoral candidate. Research collaborators also include Marco Spurk, Universität Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany, and Ingeborg Levin, Universität Heidelberg, Germany. The concurrent Science articles are titled, "Regional Radioactive Carbon Dioxide Offsets in the Troposphere: Magnitude, Mechanisms and Consequences" and "Anatolian Tree Rings and a New Chronology for the East Mediterranean Bronze-Iron Ages."
The research was funded by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory, the National Science Foundation, the Malcolm H. Wiener Foundation, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Germany's Federal Ministry of Educational Research.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.
o Aegean Dendrochronology Project:
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro
o A companion opinion piece in Science by Paula Reimer, Livermore Laboratories:
http://www.calib.org/paula
|
|
|||
Gods |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
||
|
· Discover · Nat Geographic · Texas AM Anthro News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · Google · · The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists · |
|||
Yeah, that’s right, 19 years ago... and it’s now going to become one of *those* topics.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks again blam.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks again blam.
|
One of *those* topics.
The sixth city of Troy is conventionally placed in the fourteenth-thirteenth centuries before the present era, a dating which ultimately depends on Egyptian chronology. Here an observation by Rodney Young, the excavator of the Phrygian capital Gordion, needs to be cited:
"In their batter as well as their masonry construction the walls of the Phrygian Gate at Gordion find their closest parallel in the wall of the sixth city at Troy." But a gulf of time separates these two constructions in the conventional timetable.
"Though separated in time by five hundred years or thereabouts, the two fortifications may well represent a common tradition of construction in north-western Anatolia; if so, intermediate examples have yet to be found."
Still today no intermediate examples have been found. As to the date of the Phrygian Gate and wall of Gordion, Young wrote:
"The Phrygian Kingdom was . . . at the apex of its power toward the end of the eighth century, when it apparently extended as far to the southeast as the Taurus and was in contact with Assyria. This period of power was apparently the time of the adornment and fortification of its capital city."
This points to the eighth century for the erection of the city wall and gate. Eighth-century Gordion is similar to thirteenth-century Troy, yet intermediate examples of the peculiar way of building the gate and the wall beg to be found.The Dark Age Of Greece by Immanuel Velikovsky
Chapter II: Mute Witnesses: Troy and Gordion
Another book by Velikovsky that I need to get. So many books. So little time.
'Face
:o])
It'll be easier for ya, it is only available online. Generally, browsers and OSes today will use speech synthesis to read the pages to you, if you ask nice. :^)
” With the new chronology, the bowl now is independently dated circa 740 B.C., making its inscription as old as the oldest known artifacts on which the Greek alphabet appears: “
Placing it in Herodotus’s realm.
I trust Herodotus to tell us what was known at that time.
Oh, pretty please? With sugar on it? And chocolate?
‘Face
:o])
There are 1552 topics in the Epigraphy and Language keyword. Seems inhumane to post the whole thing, so, here's a mere selection:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
