Posted on 10/19/2002 10:28:48 AM PDT by vannrox
Introduction - Investigations of Bolivia
Fuente Magna and the Monolith of Pokotia
The following material is reprinted by permission from Bernardo Biadós Yacovazzo & Freddy Arce, OIIB - Omega Institute Investigations (Bolivia), INTI - NonGovernmental Organizacion (Bolivia).
A large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, and now known as the Fuente Magna, was originally discovered in a rather casual fashion by a country peasant from the ex-hacienda CHUA, property of the Manjon family situated in the surrounding areas of Lake Titicaca about 75/80 km from the city of La Paz.
The site where it was found has not been subject to investigation until recently. The Fuente Magna has not been shown in Bolivia until year 2000. It was considered false, until we began the investigations.
The Fuente Magna was found The piece in question is a little out of place. It is beautifully engraved in chestnut-brown both inside and out. It reveals zoological motifs and anthropomorphic characters within.
Fuente Magna - Rosetta Stone of the Americas.
In 1958/60 Don Max Portugal Zamora, a Bolivian archaeologist, learned of it's existence Pastor Manjon. Mr. Portugal "baptized" the site with the name it bears today, "Fuente Magna"--in our view an accurate assessment. Instantly it's rescuing was studiously embarked upon. Through the mediation and negotiation of General Armando Escobar Uria property was swapped for another parcel in the neighborhood of Sopocachi.
Safely under the protection of the honorable, municipal, mayoralty Mr. Portugal began to restore it by applying cement to the parts that showed chipping and deterioration--minor repairs for effect, in our view. He lost no time in attempting to decipher the writting inside the object turning to the texts known as "Qellga Llippichi" one of those interpreted by Don Franz Tamayo. He also consulted a publication by our illustrious friend, Dr. Dick Edgar Ibarra Grasso, entitled "Indigenous Andean Writing" (HAM La Paz 1953), it ends as you might expect (fruitless). The limits of his honest efforts. The writing is undoubted from the Old World.
Hebraic--from the sinaitic appearance influenced by cuneiform, or simply cuneiform of possible Sumero-Akkadian origins, this being the take-off point on which we announced our extraordinary discovery. Two mayors (local guys) don Armando Escobar Uria and Don Mario Mercado Vaca Guzman have been looking after our investigation until very recently with many restrictions since we cannot count on the support of the state. Nevertheless, work has continued on what we call the "Rosetta Stone of the Americas", for lack of a better name. If our method of investigation holds up several things are worthy of note:
We are dealing with an object which was made in keeping with Mesopotamian tradition.
It contains two texts, one in cuneiform and another Semitic language of possible Sinaitic extraction cuneiform influences.
According to the symbols used one would be before an object that evidently shows itself to be from the transitional period between ideographical writing and cuneiform.
Chronologically, this leads us to the 3500/3000 B.C., the Sumerian/ Akkadian period.
(Excerpt) Read more at world-mysteries.com ...
It contains two texts, one in cuneiform and another Semitic language of possible Sinaitic extraction cuneiform influences."Sinaitic extraction cuneiform" ... say, what?
According to the symbols used one would be before an object that evidently shows itself to be from the transitional period between ideographical writing and cuneiform.Um, cuneiform is ideographic (like Chinese writing). What it isn't is phonetic-consonantal (at least not originally), like some of the early Canaanite (Sinaitic?) adaptations, adaptations that many scholars believe were the first halts and half-starts toward alphabetic scripts.
Chronologically, this leads us to the 3500/3000 B.C., the Sumerian/ Akkadian period.Yeah. Only no. Because that would massively predate any of the Canaanite-Semitic adaptations. It would also massively predate any of the Meso-American civilizations (Incas, Aztecs, Olmecs etc., etc.).
Well, that's fine mystical speculation. However, the Egyptians did not use cuneiform. They used their own heiroglyphics and the demotic form.
Interesting stuff, even if only myth.
Well, it is cuneiform:
Main Entry: 1cu·ne·i·form
Pronunciation: kyu-'nE-&-"form, 'kyü-n(E-)&-
Function: adjective
Etymology: probably from French cunéiforme, from Middle French, from Latin cuneus + Middle French -iforme -iform
Date: 1677
1 : having the shape of a wedge
2 : composed of or written in wedge-shaped characters <cuneiform syllabary>
It may well be that it does not look like cuneiform from the ME region. Which may mean that any connections to the "Old World" are bunk. But technically, some of it is clearly cuneiform.
Well, it is cuneiform:
Main Entry: 1cu·ne·i·form
Pronunciation: kyu-'nE-&-"form, 'kyü-n(E-)&-
Function: adjective
Etymology: probably from French cunéiforme, from Middle French, from Latin cuneus + Middle French -iforme -iform
Date: 1677
1 : having the shape of a wedge
2 : composed of or written in wedge-shaped characters <cuneiform syllabary>
It may well be that it does not look like Proto-Sumerian from the ME region. Which may mean that any connections to the "Old World" are bunk. On the other hand, they claim to be "translating" it on their website (see previous response for link.) So who the heck knows?
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The earliest writing in Mesopotamia was a picture writing invented by the Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets using long reeds. The script the Sumerians invented and handed down to the Semitic peoples who conquered Mesopotamia in later centuries, is called cuneiform, which is derived from two Latin words: cuneus , which means "wedge," and forma , which means "shape." This picture language, similar to but more abstract than Egyptian hieroglyphics, eventually developed into a syllabic alphabet under the Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians) who eventually came to dominate the area. |
| In Sumer, the original writing was pictographic ("picture writing"); individual words were represented by crude pictorial symbols that resembled in some way the object being represented, as in the Sumerian word for king, lu-gal : |
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The first symbol pictures "gal," or "great," and the second pictures "lu," or "man." Eventually, this pictorial writing developed into a more abstract series of wedges and hooks. These wedges and hooks are the original cuneiform and represented in Sumerian entire words (this is called ideographic and the word symbols are called ideograms, which means "concept writing"); the Semites who adopted this writing, however, spoke an entirely different language, in fact, a language as different from Sumerian as English is different from Japanese. In order to adapt this foreign writing to a Semitic language, the Akkadians converted it in part to a syllabic writing system; individual signs represent entire syllables. However, in addition to syllable symbols, some cuneiform symbols are ideograms ("picture words") representing an entire word; these ideograms might also, in other contexts, be simply syllables. For instance, in Assyrian, the cuneiform for the syllable "ki" is written as follows: |
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However, as an ideogram, this cuneiform also stands for the Assyrian word irsitu , or "earth." So reading cuneiform involves mastering a large syllabic alphabet as well as a large number of ideograms, many of them identical to syllable symbols. This complicated writing system dominated Mesopotamia until the century before the birth of Christ; the Persians greatly simplified cuneiform until it represented something closer to an alphabet. |
| The Mesopotamians wrote on clay tablets with long reeds while the clay was still wet. The fresh clay then hardened and a permanent record was created. The original Mesopotamian writings were crude pictures of the objects being named, but the difficulty of drawing on fresh clay eventually produced the wedges and hooks unique to cuneiform. This writing would be formed by laying the length of the reed along the wet clay and moving the end nearest the hand from one side to another to form the hooks. As with all cultures, writing greatly changed Mesopotamian social structure and the civilization's relationship to its own history. Writing allowed laws to be written and so to assume a static and independent character; history became more detailed and incorporated much more of local cultures' histories. Richard Hooker |
Language & Writing - Cuneiform
The Sumerian language was not deciphered until the nineteenth century of our era when it was found to be different from both the Indo-European and Semitic language groups. Fifteen hundred cuneiform symbols were reduced in the next thousand years to about seven hundred, but it did not become alphabetic until about 1300 BC.
By 2500 BC libraries were established at Shuruppak and Eresh, and schools had been established to train scribes for the temple and state bureaucracies as well as to legally document contracts and business transactions.
Schools were regularly attended by the sons of the aristocracy and successful; discipline was by caning.
Sumerian, the oldest known written language in human history, was spoken in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and peripheral regions) throughout the third millennium BC and survived as an esoteric written language until the death of the cuneiform tradition around the time of Christ.
The Sumerian language, which is related to no other known tongue, was only properly deciphered this century.
A considerable literature in Sumerian is currently being reconstructed from fragmentary clay tablets housed in the museums of the world.
A logogram is a meaningful cuneiform sign.
The most important words in Sumerian had their own cuneiform signs, whose origins were pictographic, making an intial repertoire of about a thousand signs or logograms. Sumerian was an agglutinative language not just in its verb construction, but also in its noun or morpheme construction.
The earliest known writing comes from Uruk and has been dated to about 3,300BC. It took the form of 'word-pictures' drawn with a stylus on tablets of damp clay. Each word-picture represented an object. Much later, the complete system had more than 700 signs. Tablets measured about 5cm wide and 2cm thick.
Writing developed as a convenient way to keep records of produce and accounts of trade. It much later became used to record literature and history.
The word-pictures from Uruk developed into the script now called cuneiform. The pictures gradually became 'ideographs', an object also meaning an 'idea'. Then came 'phonograms' representing sounds as well as the meaning of a picture.
Cuneiform was a syllabic script with hundreds of wedge-shaped signs that developed from these pictures.
The Sumerians were the earliest to write in cuneiform, closely followed by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites, Hurrians and the Urartu from Anatolia.
Cuneiform was the language of politics until the fifth century BC. It died out and was replaced by the 22 letter Aramaic in about 900BC.
The earliest known documents in cuneiform were written by the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia, who assigned their own word-sounds to the symbols.
Tools included clay tablets and a wedged shapped stylus to produce writing.
Over 200,000, many from city of Mari, have been preserved. Writing was deciphered by Sir Henry Rawlinson after finding the "Rock of Behistun" in present-day Iran.
Indeed, pre-Gilgamesh(2700BC)
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An agglutinative language is a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme. |
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This is tougher than Math! |
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I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. I've also looked at a lot of cuneiform, and the inscriptions on the pot certainly resemble those found on Mesopotamian tablets.
Does our alphabet resemble the Cyrillic?
Does Hebrew resemble Arabic?
Maybe the marks on the Monolith of Pokotia are just decorations and the resemblance to cuneiform writing is coincidental. Further research is certainly warranted.
The great Olmec centers that soon developed at La Venta, San Lorenzo, and Laguna de los Cerros, and the smaller centers such as Tres Zapotes, were not simply vacant religious sites, but dynamic settlements that included artisans and farmers, as well as religious specialists and the rulers.
The Olmec architecture at San Lorenzo, for example, includes both public-ceremonial buildings, elite residences, and the houses of commoners. Olmec public-ceremonial buildings were most typically earthen platform mounds, some of which had larger house-like structures built upon them. At La Venta we can see that after 900 B.C. such platform mounds were arranged around large plaza areas and include a new type of architecture, a tall pyramid mound. 
I think it means that the story is very old indeed. It was probably very old before it was ever written down. "Books" were very loarge 4000 years ago, so a story had to be important in some way, I would think.
Some say that the storry of Noah had its origions with Gilgamesh. I say, why not the reverse?
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