What
makes this problem interesting is that a first writing system would
not be too interested in preserving sound. It is also
contemporaneous with the building of the Great pyramid and the global
emergence of the European Bronze Age Civilization which was sea based
and certainly demanded a working record keeping system. Since we
lack the evidence for an Atlantean writing system it is reasonable to
assume it was lost.
This
working system from Mesopotamia nicely confirms its existence was
possible and known technology. However, if it was used only to
record contracts then private symbol systems make excellent sense.
Your scribe becomes the arbitrator of disputes.
Contracts
are also temporary. Preservation in Mesopotamia was a function of
the material used and not the content. We know that changed toward
the end of the Bronze Age and ultimately became sound centric in the
Mediterranean.
This
actually begs an important question. Some narrative text does exist
and appears plausibly in translation in the Old Testament. This
suggests an independent priesthood retaining knowledge until it
became necessary to give up ancient poorly understood script for a
more usable script.
In
practise’s, the knowledge of script systems was likely widespread
but only important in the face of trade and then generally for trade.
From that and a global trade empire, we have a natural creation of
local scripts followed by a natural evolution thereof. Chinese
script and Mayan script become no surprise. What is missing are
plenty of script systems simply lost due to the limitations of their
media.
The
Indians used birch bark and we would never have known had it not been
directly observed in use. A similar system surely operated in
Europe. Unfortunately, Oetzi did not have a contract with him. Or
did he? He certainly used birch bark extensively.
Breakthrough in
world's oldest undeciphered writing
By Sean Coughlan
The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far
defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about
to be decoded by Oxford University academics.
This international
research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle
eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the
starvation level.
"I think we are
finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl,
fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World
Research Cluster.
Dr Dahl's secret
weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever
before.
In a room high up in
the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and
fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away
and flashing out light.
This device, part
sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality
images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets.
This is Indiana Jones with software.
It's being used to
help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between
around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern
Iran.
And the Oxford team
think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last
great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.
Tablet computer
Dr Dahl, from the
Oriental Studies Faculty, shipped his image-making device on the
Eurostar to the Louvre Museum in Paris, which holds the most
important collection of this writing.
The clay tablets were
put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging
System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights
and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the
surface of the clay tablets.
It allows a virtual
image to be turned around, as though being held up to the light at
every possible angle.
These images will be
publicly available online, with the aim of using a kind of academic
crowdsourcing.
He says it's
misleading to think that codebreaking is about some lonely genius
suddenly understanding the meaning of a word. What works more often
is patient teamwork and the sharing of theories. Putting the images
online should accelerate this process.
But this is
painstaking work. So far Dr Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs,
but he says that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown,
even such basic words as "cow" or "cattle".
He admits to being
"bitten" by this challenge. "It's an unknown,
uncharted territory of human history," he says.
Extinct language
But why has this
writing proved so difficult to interpret?
Dr Dahl suspects he
might have part of the answer. He's discovered that the original
texts seem to contain many mistakes - and this makes it extremely
tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.
He believes this was not just a case of the scribes having a bad
day at the office. There seems to have been an unusual absence of
scholarship, with no evidence of any lists of symbols or learning
exercises for scribes to preserve the accuracy of the writing.
This first case of
educational underinvestment proved fatal for the writing system,
which was corrupted and then completely disappeared after only a
couple of hundred years. "It's an early example of a technology
being lost," he says.
"The lack of a
scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the
writing system may eventually have become useless."
Making it even harder
to decode is the fact that it's unlike any other ancient writing
style. There are no bi-lingual texts and few helpful overlaps to
provide a key to these otherwise arbitrary looking dashes and circles
and symbols.
This is a writing
system - and not a spoken language - so there's no way of knowing how
words sounded, which might have provided some phonetic clues.
Dr Dahl says that one
of the really important historical significances of this
proto-Elamite writing is that it was the first ever recorded case of
one society adopting writing from another neighbouring group.
But infuriatingly for
the codebreakers, when these proto-Elamites borrowed the concept of
writing from the Mesopotamians, they made up an entirely different
set of symbols.
Why they should make
the intellectual leap to embrace writing and then at the same time
re-invent it in a different local form remains a puzzle.
But it provides a
fascinating snapshot of how ideas can both spread and change.
Mr One Hundred
In terms of written
history, this is the very remote past. But there is also something
very direct and almost intimate about it too.
You can see fingernail
marks in the clay. These neat little symbols and drawings are clearly
the work of an intelligent mind.
These were among the
first attempts by our human ancestors to try to make a permanent
record of their surroundings. What we're doing now - my writing and
your reading - is a direct continuation.
But there are glimpses
of their lives to suggest that these were tough times. It wasn't so
much a land of milk and honey, but porridge and weak beer.
Even without knowing
all the symbols, Dr Dahl says it's possible to work out the context
of many of the messages on these tablets.
The numbering system
is also understood, making it possible to see that much of this
information is about accounts of the ownership and yields from land
and people. They are about property and status, not poetry.
This was a simple
agricultural society, with a ruling household. Below them was a tier
of powerful middle-ranking figures and further below were the
majority of workers, who were treated like "cattle with names".
Their rulers have
titles or names which reflect this status - the equivalent of being
called "Mr One Hundred", he says - to show the number of
people below him.
It's possible to work
out the rations given to these farm labourers.
Dr Dahl says they had
a diet of barley, which might have been crushed into a form of
porridge, and they drank weak beer.
The amount of food
received by these farm workers hovered barely above the starvation
level.
However the higher
status people might have enjoyed yoghurt, cheese and honey. They also
kept goats, sheep and cattle.
For the "upper
echelons, life expectancy for some might have been as long as now",
he says. For the poor, he says it might have been as low as in
today's poorest countries.
The tablets also have
surprises. Even though there are plenty of pictures of animals and
mythical creatures, Dr Dahl says there are no representations of the
human form of any kind. Not even a hand or an eye.
Was this some kind of
cultural or religious taboo?
Dr Dahl remains
passionate about what this work says about such societies, digging
into the deepest roots of civilisation. This is about where so much
begins. For instance, proto-Elamite was the first writing ever to use
syllables.
If Macbeth talked
about the "last syllable of recorded time", the
proto-Elamites were there for the first.
And with sufficient
support, Dr Dahl says that within two years this last great lost
writing could be fully understood.
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