Rethinking a History That's Carved in StoneThree months after the announcement of its discovery in Central Asia, a tiny stone object inscribed with symbols thought to be the writing of an obscure desert culture from 4,000 years ago is more of an enigma than ever. If this is indeed an early form of writing, as its discoverer has suggested, it is strong evidence for a previously unknown civilization that began about 2300 B.C. across much of modern Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan... An even more puzzling aspect of the discovery has been raised by specialists in ancient Chinese writing. They contend that the inscription bears more than a passing resemblance to Chinese writing -- not an early script, but one that was not used until about 200 B.C... There is no clear evidence for Chinese writing before about 1300 or 1200 B.C. -- 1,000 years after people lived at the Anau site in Turkmenistan where the mysterious inscription was unearthed... Another possibility, which would throw the scholarship of Chinese writing into turmoil, is that the 2300 inscription date is correct. That would suggest that influences from Central Asia or farther west might have contributed to the invention of Chinese writing. Dr. Mair, who holds that such influences were greater than previously thought, has raised this controversial point.
by John Noble Wilford
July 31, 2001Another ancient civilization found"It's not ancient Iranian, not ancient Mesopotamian. I even took it to my Chinese colleagues," he said. "It was not Chinese." ...No one knows the extent of this civilization, which may reach beyond Margiana, deep in the Kara Kum desert, and Bactria, which straddles the Uzbek-Afghan border. Hiebert said he believes that a third area, Anau, outside Ashgabat near the Iranian border, is connected to this civilization, perhaps even the origin of the culture. It is about 2,000 years older, going back to 4500 BC, or the Copper Age.
by Faye Flam
May 3, 2001 [no url]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, 15 May, 2001, 05:57 GMT 06:57 UK'Earliest writing' found in ChinaSigns carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists... They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC... The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols inscribed on the tortoise shells. The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China. The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC. The research was carried out by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, and a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province... Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears. He emphasised that he was not suggesting the Neolithic symbols had the same meanings as Shang characters they resembled... The shells come from graves where, in 1999, the researchers unearthed ancient bone flutes. These flutes are the earliest musical instruments known to date.
by Paul Rincon
'Earliest writing' found in ChinaTartaria tabletsOne of the Tartaria tablets The three Tartaria tablets are believed by some to be a very early form of writing, over a thousand years older than the Sumerian and Egyptian writings. They were created around 4500 BC by the so-called Vinca culture and were mamed after Tartaria, Transylvania, Romania, where they were found.
The script combine pictograms with abstract symbols which some experts consider to be comparable in design to the early Sumerian writings, while others consider them to be simply random scribbles. Their meaning (if any) is unknown. If they do comprise a script, it is also not known what kind of writing system they represent.
These illustrations show (a) the collection of symbols that accompany the Magdalenian cave art in France, from 20,000 years ago or less, and characters in three of the early written languages which resemble the Paleolithic marks: (b) Indus Valley signs, India, (c) Greek (western branch), and (d) Runic (after Forbes and Crowder, 1979) -- From Plato Prehistorian by Mary Settegast. [after Forbes and Crowder, "The Problem of Franco-Cantabrian Abstract Signs: Agenda for a New Approach." World Archaeology 10 (1979): 350-66.]
