• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

ramonmercado

CyberPunk
Joined
Aug 19, 2003
Messages
58,109
Location
Eblana
Israelite Alphabet May Have Been Found
Wed Nov 9, 5:51 PM ET

Two lines of an alphabet have been found inscribed in a stone in Israel, offering what some scholars say is the most solid evidence yet that the ancient Israelites were literate as early as the 10th century B.C.

"This is very rare. This stone will be written about for many years to come," archaeologist Ron E. Tappy, a professor at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who made the discovery, said Wednesday. "This makes it very historically probable there were people in the 10th century (B.C.) who could write."

Christopher Rollston, a professor of Semitic studies at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., who was not involved in the find, said the writing is probably Phoenician or a transitional language between Phoenician and Hebrew.

"We have little epigraphic material from the 10th century in Israel, and so this substantially augments the material we have," he said.

The stone was found in July, on the final day of a five-week dig at Tel Zayit, about 30 miles south of Tel Aviv.

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051109/ap_on_sc/hebrew_alphabet;_ylt=AtXTaiHVwewjA3YXNx5LZTAPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
Link is dead. No archived version found.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It would be good to see a specimen of this writing , to compare it to other scripts .
 
I get the feeling that this is going to get political....

This is very rare. This stone will be written about for many years to come," archaeologist Ron E. Tappy, a professor at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who made the discovery, said Wednesday. "This makes it very historically probable there were people in the 10th century (B.C.) who could write."

And what might those people have written, i wonder?
 
There's a pic here.

and a longish article here.
Embedded link is dead. Here's the relevant text from the MIA web article ...
The Tel Zayit Inscription:
An Archaeological Benchmark in the History of Writing

Last summer, The Zeitah Excavations at Tel Zayit, Israel, made a dramatic discovery: an inscription that bears the oldest known securely datable example of an abecedary, that is, the letters of the alphabet written out from beginning to end in their traditional sequence. The nearly eight-acre site of Tel Zayit lies in the strategic Beth Guvrin Valley in the lowlands region of ancient Judah approximately seven kilometers north and two kilometers west of Lachish, 30 kilometers east of Ashkelon, and 29 kilometers west of Hebron. Since 1999, exploration at the site has proceeded under the direction of Dr. Ron E. Tappy and the institutional sponsorship of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, with major funding from a generous private donor. The project is also affiliated with the American Schools of Oriental Research in the United States and the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.

On July 15, 2005, the final day of the 2005 season in the field, excavators found embedded in a wall a 38-pound limestone boulder with two lines of incised letters on one side and a large, bowl-shaped hollow on the other. The importance of this discovery derives not only from its archaic alphabetic text, which raises the possibility that formal scribal training at the outlying site of Tel Zayit was a result of a rapidly developing Israelite bureaucracy in Jerusalem, but also from the stone's firmly datable archaeological context -- an extremely rare occurrence among the few extant inscriptions of this nature.

The stone bearing the Tel Zayit Inscription comprised part of a wall belonging to a structure that dates to the late tenth century BCE and suffered heavy destruction by fire sometime in that period. (Ironically, the inscribed stone might have been built into the wall because of the ancient belief in the alphabet's magical or apotropaic power, that is, its ability to ward off evil.) Multiple deposits overlaying and sealing the destruction debris accumulated to a depth of over one meter and represent two distinct building levels (with the latest one also ending in a conflagration) and three related sub-phases ranging from the ninth through the early eighth centuries BCE. This secure archaeological context provides a firm date before which the stone-walled structure must have been built and the inscription must have been incised. Stratigraphy, ceramic studies, radiocarbon dating, evidence of tectonic activity (damage from an earthquake during the time of Amos the prophet), and now palaeography (the study of ancient writing) have combined to help determine a precise date for the archaeological level that yielded the inscription.

Located in the ancient lowlands district of Judah, the site of Tel Zayit served as a borderland settlement that guarded one of the main approaches into the hill country around and south of Jerusalem. Though the part of the site where the inscription was found has only begun to be studied, preliminary results suggest that in the tenth century BCE Tel Zayit was associated with the highland culture of southern Canaan, not the coastal culture of the Philistine plain, and therefore it very well may have functioned as part of the new state being formed by Kings David and Solomon, with its capital at Jerusalem. The early appearance of literacy at Tel Zayit will play a pivotal role in the current discussion of the archaeology and history of Israel and Judah in the tenth century BCE -- a century about which there is currently hot debate among archaeologists of Israel, in large part due to the paucity of epigraphic data concerning this era.

The Israelites adapted their alphabet (Hebrew, written from right to left) from that of the Phoenicians, and although several tenth-century Phoenician inscriptions are known, very few examples from this early period have been found inland, where the alphabet was evolving in the direction of Hebrew and (farther north) Aramaic. The Tel Zayit Inscription, therefore, represents an extremely important landmark in the history of alphabetic writing. All successive alphabets in the ancient world (including non-Semitic ones, such as Greek) derived from the alphabet seen in the Tel Zayit Inscription. In fact, the letters of the very words that you are reading right now descended directly from the letters seen on the stone from Tel Zayit!

The New York Times broke the story of the Tel Zayit Inscription on November 9, 2005. On November 20, 2005, Dr. Tappy (Director of The Zeitah Excavations and G. Albert Shoemaker Professor of Bible and Archaeology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) and epigrapher P. Kyle McCarter (William Foxwell Albright Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University) will, respectively, describe the archaeology relating to the discovery of the stone and analyze the writing on it at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature at the Philadelphia Convention Center in Pennsylvania. ...
SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051124212740/http://www.zeitah.net/UpdateTelZayit.html


There are also inscriptions from a contemporary or at least near contemporary period at Tel Rehov, this article can be found here.
Embedded link is dead. The MIA article can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20041215101421/http://www.rehov.org/Rehov/publications/index3.htm


Sorry about all the links but I didn't want to make a superlong post.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've seen the text now . It is in Proto-Canaanitic , and spells out two names ALWT and LWT (remember that alphabets of that area tend not to spell vowels) . This name could refer to the Philistine name Alyattes , but that is not certain . Personally , I feel that the link between this name and Goliath is very tenuous to say the least - in order to link it with the name more credibly I would expect to see a G somewhere in the script (written down I would expect Goliath to be spelt something like GLIT or GLIAT ).
 
gerardwilkie said:
I've seen the text now . It is in Proto-Canaanitic , and spells out two names ALWT and LWT (remember that alphabets of that area tend not to spell vowels) . This name could refer to the Philistine name Alyattes , but that is not certain . Personally , I feel that the link between this name and Goliath is very tenuous to say the least - in order to link it with the name more credibly I would expect to see a G somewhere in the script (written down I would expect Goliath to be spelt something like GLIT or GLIAT ).

Sorry , posted it in the wrong thread , but at least I suppose it still is kind of relevant.
 
Next, the Chinese built Atlantis...
Chinese writing '8,000 years old'

Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.
State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country.

They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters.

Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.

The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing.

"We have found some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters," Li Xiangshi, a cliff carving expert at the North University of Nationalities in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, told Xinhua news agency.

"The pictographs are similar to the ancient hieroglyphs of Chinese characters and many can be identified as ancient characters."

Until the discovery, the earliest characters included 4,500-year-old inscriptions on pottery from Henan province in central China.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 669569.stm
Published: 2007/05/18 13:19:31 GMT
© BBC MMVII
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 669569.stm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The story of how we got our alphabets

From intricate and beautiful Egyptian hieroglyphs, to wedge-shaped cuneiform imprints from ancient Mesopotamia - our ancestors developed many ways of recording their thoughts and information.

We might see them as primitive, but these early written languages were instrumental to shaping and forming the alphabets used across the world today.

With Dr James Clackson - senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge - learn about some of the people and places where writing was born.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14544388

Great overview.

Five minutes of your life well spent.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It could literally be rewritten.

China stone axes 'display ancient writing'
In this undated photo, markings etched on an unearthed piece of a stone axe are seen near Zhuangqiao grave relic, in Pinghu, in eastern China's Zhejiang province
The stone axes are part of a large trove of artefacts
Fragments of two ancient stone axes found in China could display some of the world's earliest primitive writing, Chinese archaeologists say.

The markings on the axes, unearthed near Shanghai, could date back at least 5,000 years, the scientists say.

But Chinese scholars are divided on whether the markings are proper writing or a less sophisticated stream of symbols.

The world's oldest writing is thought to be from Mesopotamia from 3,300 BC.

The stone fragments are part of a large trove of artefacts discovered between 2003 and 2006 at a site just south of Shanghai, says the BBC's Celia Hatton in Beijing.

But it has taken years for archaeologists to examine their discoveries and release their findings, our correspondent adds.

The findings have not been reviewed by experts outside China, reports say.

"The main thing is that there are six symbols arranged together and three of them are the same," lead archaeologist Xu Xinmin told local reporters, referring to markings on one of the pieces.

"This clearly is a sentence expressing some kind of meaning".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23257700

Cao Jinyan, a well-known scholar on ancient writing, also told local media that the markings could be an early form of writing.

"Although we cannot yet accurately read the meaning of the 'words' carved on the stone axes, we can be certain that they belong to the category of words, even if they are somewhat primitive," he said.

Some scholars, however, remain unconvinced. Archaeologist Liu Zhao from Fudan University in Shanghai told the Associated Press news agency they "do not have enough material" to make conclusions.

If proven, the stone axes will be older than the earliest proven Chinese writing found on animal bones, which dates back 3,300 years.
 
Sumerians and the first accepted from of writing in the world?

Until the Chinese pictorial symbols find is made official? The Sumerians developed a form of pictographic writing that used word pictures like bird, fish, ox or grain etc., ~ 4000 BC. By 3000 BC, it developed into the cursive form of cuneiform style writing which was a wedge shaped linear impression on clay tablets. This is presently the earliest accepted known form of writing. But as with Gobekli Tepe one never knows when a new find could push back the clock.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"Accepted" being the key term here. Recurring symbols in the Vinca script suggest heavily that it was a form of writing that predates the Sumerian cuneiform by several millennia. As you mention, Gobekli Tepe and recent finds pushing organised agriculture back well beyond that (see latest FT) force us to acknowledge that humankind was surprisingly sophisticated even in times of extreme prehistory and I believe it's only a matter of time before the Vinca script found on tablets and pot shards, some dating back at least 8,000 years, is accepted as a form of writing.
 
"Accepted" being the key term here. Recurring symbols in the Vinca script suggest heavily that it was a form of writing that predates the Sumerian cuneiform by several millennia. As you mention, Gobekli Tepe and recent finds pushing organised agriculture back well beyond that (see latest FT) force us to acknowledge that humankind was surprisingly sophisticated even in times of extreme prehistory and I believe it's only a matter of time before the Vinca script found on tablets and pot shards, some dating back at least 8,000 years, is accepted as a form of writing.
From what I understand the earliest Vinca script goes back some 8000 years. There's contention as to whether the early Vinca script is basically a string of symbols or writing?

One should always be open to new these finding and discoveries, but with a bit of skepticism.
 
Last edited:
It seems plausible that the Vinca script on pot shards describes the contents, quantity and ownership or provenance of trade goods. The comb-like characters, with various numbers of teeth certainly seem like numerals. I expect most scripts originated in similar manner.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jim
It seems plausible that the Vinca script on pot shards describes the contents, quantity and ownership or provenance of trade goods. The comb-like characters, with various numbers of teeth certainly seem like numerals. I expect most scripts originated in similar manner.
Now that sounds like a logical hypotheses, indeed.
 
Thanks Jim! I do find it frustrating that archeological orthodoxy seems determined to declare Middle Eastern cuneiform as the earliest "official" writing, when we seem to have a far earlier example originating here in Europe. The complexity and commonality of certain Vinca pictographs is surely proof that they weren't mere decoration?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jim
Chinese writing '8,000 years old'

I'm a bit confused in light of related sites and research in China. The cited 2007 BBC article refers to the Damaidi carvings. These are located in or near the village of Damaidi (Zhongwei prefecture; Ningxia region). This China.org article of the same date:

http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/211265.htm

... adds a few more details to the otherwise identical BBC account.

The articles on the Damaidi carvings refer to older hieroglyphs. I wonder if the 'hieroglyphs' to which these articles refer are the Jiahu symbols:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiahu_symbols

The Jiahu symbols, in Henan province, are the subject of this 2003 BBC article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2956925.stm
'Earliest writing' found in China

Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists. ...

The symbols were laid down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age.

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.

But the discovery has already generated controversy, with one leading researcher in the field branding it "an anomaly". ...

I find it curious that writings on these two sites / findings don't refer directly to each other. The obvious temptation is to consider the Jiahu symbols as the hieroglyphs from which the Damaidi carvings represent an advancement.
 
This new Smithsonian article describes one explanation for the development of an alphabet in the Levant. This explanation traces an evolutionary path from early formal hieroglyphs and pictographs to symbols derived therefrom and then associated with a language's phonetic repertoire. The key innovation was using a set of symbols for sounds rather than particular objects of reference.
Who Invented the Alphabet?

New scholarship points to a paradox of historic scope: Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read ...

Centuries before Moses wandered in the “great and terrible wilderness” of the Sinai Peninsula, this triangle of desert wedged between Africa and Asia attracted speculators, drawn by rich mineral deposits hidden in the rocks. And it was on one of these expeditions, around 4,000 years ago, that some mysterious person or group took a bold step that, in retrospect, was truly revolutionary. Scratched on the wall of a mine is the very first attempt at something we use every day: the alphabet. ...

In 1905, a couple of Egyptologists, Sir William and Hilda Flinders Petrie, who were married, first excavated the temple, documenting thousands of votive offerings there. The pair also discovered curious signs on the side of a mine, and began to notice them elsewhere, on walls and small statues. Some signs were clearly related to hieroglyphs, yet they were simpler than the beautiful pictorial Egyptian script on the temple walls. The Petries recognized the signs as an alphabet, though decoding the letters would take another decade, and tracing the source of the invention far longer. ...

The Flinders Petries brought many of the prizes they had unearthed back to London, including a small, red sandstone sphinx with the same handful of letters on its side as those seen in the mines. After ten years of studying the inscriptions, in 1916 the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner published his transcription of the letters and their translation: An inscription on the little sphinx, written in a Semitic dialect, read “Beloved of Ba’alat,” referring to the Canaanite goddess, consort of Ba’al, the powerful Canaanite god. ...

“For me, it’s worth all the gold in Egypt,” the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser said of this little sphinx ... “Every word we read and write started with him and his friends.” She explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: “Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.” Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form. ...

In the century since the discovery of those first scratched letters in the Sinai mines, the reigning academic consensus has been that highly educated people must have created the alphabet. But Goldwasser’s research is upending that notion. She suggests that it was actually a group of illiterate Canaanite miners who made the breakthrough, unversed in hieroglyphs and unable to speak Egyptian but inspired by the pictorial writing they saw around them. In this view, one of civilization’s most profound and most revolutionary intellectual creations came not from an educated elite but from illiterate laborers, who usually get written out of history. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inventing-alphabet-180976520/
 
Speculative video here claiming to have partially deciphered the Vinča script and that it is a form of proto Magyar/Uralic language.
That the tablets record quantities, trade goods and occasional astronomical events doesn't sound unreasonable, but there may be a hint of Hungarian nationalism at play here.
The alleged similarities between the Vinča script and ancient African Thinite symbols is also interesting, if far from conclusive.

 
Last edited:
Newly published research analyzes an inscribed jar fragment that seems to bridge the previous evidentiary gap from Egyptian alphabetic innovation to alphabet usage in the Levant.
Alphabet's 'missing link' possibly discovered

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 B.C., 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 B.C. to 1802 B.C.), with more examples being found from around 1300 B.C. in the Levant (an area that includes modern-day Israel) ...

The recently discovered inscription, dating to around 1450 B.C., 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 ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/alphabet-missing-link-israel.html

PUBLISHED REPORT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...-tel-lachish/C73F769B7CF3A7E4E2607958A096B7D8
 
Newly published research tracking the evolution of the African Vai writing system (created in 1834) indicates alphabetic / ideographic writing systems tend to become more simplified and more uniform over time.
A Rare, Isolated Script Invented From Scratch Holds Clues to The Evolution of Writing

A rare script from a language in Liberia has provided some new insights into how written languages evolve.

"The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries," says linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia.

"Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time." ...

As far as we know so far, the invention of writing occurred around 5,000 years ago in the Middle East and has been reinvented over and over again. New writing systems are still being created today, in places like Nigeria and Senegal.

Even the earliest writing systems are thought to have been formed by small groups of people within a single generation, just like the Vai script. However, as they moved through generations, the team suggests these systems became simpler over time.

"There's a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs," says Kelly. ...

"But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers," Kelly notes. ...

Kelly and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute analyzed the 200-syllabic alphabet of the Vai people from 1834 onwards using archives across several countries. ...

Over the first 171 years of its history, the Vai script did indeed become increasingly compressed. The simplification occurred over generations of users; symbols with the highest complexity were simplified the most.

These changes are far from random, the research team explained. Languages pass a kind of natural selection process via memory and learning, where the hardest to recall features do not survive. ...

While the rapidness of this writing system's evolution seems rather remarkable, the researchers suggest it occurred because its inventors and users already knew what writing is capable of, because they knew of its use in other cultures. This may have encouraged Vai people to quickly optimize their system.

However, there's a compromise between simplification and ensuring each symbol remains distinctive, which may be why some scripts hold on to complexity. The researchers are hoping to explore this further.
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/rare-s...guage-holds-clues-to-the-evolution-of-writing
 
This is interesting. You wonder how far back it goes and who in that corner of the Eastern Med influenced who. The relationship between Hebrew and Greek seems to criss-cross a lot: one alphabet begins aleph-beth-gimel-daleth, and the other goes alpha-beta-gamma-delta. You can think the sea-trading civilisation in between, the Phoenicians, had to do with this: Hebrew "aleph" and Grek "alpha" can be linked via the Phoenician symbol for "a", for instance.
 
This is interesting. You wonder how far back it goes and who in that corner of the Eastern Med influenced who. The relationship between Hebrew and Greek seems to criss-cross a lot: one alphabet begins aleph-beth-gimel-daleth, and the other goes alpha-beta-gamma-delta. You can think the sea-trading civilisation in between, the Phoenicians, had to do with this: Hebrew "aleph" and Grek "alpha" can be linked via the Phoenician symbol for "a", for instance.

I know someone who has proposed that Greek letters are similar to Hebrew letters but turned at a 90 degree angle.

The Greeks would sail to ancient Israel to trade, and stand at the ports looking at a bill of trade/receipt which would be in the port workers hands, but the Greek sailors would be looking at it from the side angle.

The two far right hand columns of this chart show strong similarities between letter forms.

ancient_hebrew_phoenician_greek_alphabet.jpg
 
Interesting article about the history-changing discovery in Kastoria, Greece. of the 7,300 year old Dispilio Tablet:

disp1.png
disp2.png


Some characters bear a resemblance to both the roughly contemporaneous Vinča script and the much later Linear A.
Like both of them, the Dispilio script is unlikely ever to be fully deciphered.

The article also provides a useful definition of the often subtle difference between writing and proto-writing: proto-writing encodes information (objects, quantities, ownership etc.), whereas true writing encodes language.

https://nicholasrossis.me/2020/11/1...ising-the-origins-and-development-of-writing/
 
Interesting video of Canadian paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, in which she describes the curious commonality of 32 symbols seen in cave art throughout Europe over the period 10,000 to 40,000 BC, and the likelihood of such abstract symbols being a form of proto-writing:

 
I know someone who has proposed that Greek letters are similar to Hebrew letters but turned at a 90 degree angle.

The Greeks would sail to ancient Israel to trade, and stand at the ports looking at a bill of trade/receipt which would be in the port workers hands, but the Greek sailors would be looking at it from the side angle.

The two far right hand columns of this chart show strong similarities between letter forms.

View attachment 50688
Doesn't Aramaic fit in here somewhere too?
 
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051109/ap_on_sc/hebrew_alphabet;_ylt=AtXTaiHVwewjA3YXNx5LZTAPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
Link is dead. No archived version found.

This report seems to cover the same discovery.

3,000-year-old alphabet reported in Israel​

Two lines of an alphabet have been found inscribed in a stone in Israel, offering what some say is evidence that the ancient Israelites were literate as early as the 10th century B.C.
HEBREW ALPHABET

P. Kyle McCarter, an epigrapher and professor of ancient Near Eastern studies at John Hopkins University, talks about the significance of the alphabet found on a rock at the Zeitah Excavations archaeological dig at Tel Zayat, Israel, during a news conference in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. A magnified image of letters from 900-925 B.C. on that rock is projected behind him.Keith Srakocic / AP


Link copied
Nov. 9, 2005, 8:35 PM GMT / Source: The Associated Press

Two lines of an alphabet have been found inscribed in a stone in Israel, offering what some scholars say is the most solid evidence yet that the ancient Israelites were literate as early as the 10th century B.C.

"This is very rare. This stone will be written about for many years to come," archaeologist Ron E. Tappy, a professor at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who made the discovery, said Wednesday.

"This makes it very historically probable there were people in the 10th century (B.C.) who could write."

Christopher Rollston, a professor of Semitic studies at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., who was not involved in the find, said the writing is probably Phoenician or a transitional language between Phoenician and Hebrew.


"We have little epigraphic material from the 10th century in Israel, and so this substantially augments the material we have," he said.

The stone was found during an archaeological dig in June.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9980598
 
Academic, but extremely interesting, paper by Neolithic researcher Marius Meulenberg, claiming partial decipherment of the Vinča script.
The author claims the script was used within the framework of a religion in which two Mother Goddesses with bird characteristics and the Moon Goddess provide rebirth, thanks to the holy marriage with their common partner, the Bull God.

The Tărtăria disk, dating to c. 5300 BC, is translated as "Thanks to the holy marriage Moon Goddesses give new life on Earth."

disk.png


He also claims that V, VV or downward pointing triangle symbols are indicative of female genitalia, whereas M-like symbols are male.
Both of these appear frequently in the Vinča script, but can also be found in far older cave art.

symbols1.png

Several examples can be seen in the full collection of Vinča symbols:

script.png


The extract (first link) is in English, but the lower link to the complete paper is in Dutch:

https://www.academia.edu/38461354/D...cript_and_the_Linear_Pottery_script_signs_pdf

http://www.beeldjestgeertruid.nl/Bladeren in het Vinca boek.pdf
 
Could further deciphering of the Etruscan script be the key to understanding the Vinča script?

Etruscan has been partially deciphered. It used an alphabetic script and many of the extant examples appear to be funerary epitaphs or testaments of possession.

The overlap of several symbols between Vinča and Etruscan has sparked scholarly debate as to whether Etruscan actually derived directly from Vinča (proto)writing.

Maybe don't get too excited though, as Linear A and Linear B also share many symbols, but only the latter has been deciphered.

What remains a certainty though is that the Vinča script significantly predates Sumerian writing, which had long been thought to be the world's oldest.

The table below shows symbols with similarities, but Vinča also contained others with no direct equivalent in Etruscan.

Vinca.png
 
Last edited:
Back
Top