Ancient writing

Writing is a major step in the transition of Human being from Prehistory to History. Appearing in Gaul during the phase called proto-history (when foreign authors begin to write about non-writing local populations), writing and, more generally speaking, literacy, begins to spread within the Roman period. Its success is probably supported by the growing up of schools, helping even the lowest social classes of people to reach a first level of education. The rise of literacy is well illustrated in Gaul by a number of archaeological finds, from single names scratched on daily use vessels by their owners, to complex lists registrating the goods deposited in potters' kilns by independent craftsmen.

The aim of this paper is to offer an overview of the use of the Latin alphabet to write the so-called fragmentary languages of Italy and Western Europe during Antiquity. The Latin alphabet was created from an Etruscan model to write Latin, but was also used to record texts in other languages: Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, the minor Italic dialects, Faliscan, and Venetic in Italy; Gaulish in the Gauls and other provinces in the north of Europe; and, finally, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian in the Iberian Peninsula. The use of the Latin alphabet to write the so-called fragmentary languages represents a step before complete Latinisation. In some regions the types of inscriptions analysed here are not simply intermittent uses of the alphabet to write the local language, but rather, there was genuine thought about the appropriateness of the system and, consequently, some changes were made such as the creation of new signs, the use of others that come from the epichoric alphabet, and also the development of some distinctive orthographic norms.

El objetivo de este trabajo es ofrecer una síntesis sobre el uso del alfabeto latino para escribir las denominadas lenguas fragmentarias de Italia y el occidente de Europa durante la Antigüedad. El alfabeto romano fue creado a partir del etrusco para escribir el latín, pero también fue utilizado para escribir otras lenguas como el etrusco, el osco, el umbro, los dialéctos itálicos menores, el falisco y el venético en Italia; el galo en las Galias y otras provincias del norte de Europa; y, finalmente, el ibérico, el celtibérico y el lusitano en la península Ibérica. El uso del alfabeto latino para escribir las lenguas fragmentarias representa un paso en la completa latinización de Italia y las provincias occidentales. En algunas regiones se produce una verdadera adaptación del alfabeto que incluye la creación de nuevas letras, uso de otras procedentes de la escritura epicórica y el desarrollo de nuevas normas ortográficas. Palabras clave: Alfabeto latino. Latinización. Romanización. Lenguas fragmentarias. Epigrafía epicórica. Bilingüismo. Contactos lingüísticos. Sistemas de escritura.

The Uruk Expansion, which took place during various phases throughout the 4 th millennium BC, also developed in Northern Mesopotamia. In the area of Birecik, in eastern Turkey, on the edge of the Euphrates, various archaeological sites have been discovered, showing different phases of expansion of the Uruk culture. We focus this study on the Surtepe site, a 8 ha settlement, where we have distinguished a possible Late Calcolithic 5 ritual building, in a phase that we consider Terminal Uruk within the chronology of this Mesopotamian culture.

FINAL 2023 update to replace in around 360 pages the existing excessively long "The Veneti Language..." which is close to 1000 pages and some say with too many side topics and repetition and hard to read. It continues to document my improvement of the results in the deciphering and reconstruction of the ancient Venetic Language that is presented in the ancient inscriptions on objects in the Veneto region of Northern Italy.

The aim of this research is to investigate the origins of Roman writing usually called ‘capitale rustica’. According to the hypothesis presented here, this writing is not born for the production of books, but in the context of the writings painted, when in the course of the first century BC the simple brush is replaced by a brush with the tip broad and flat (‘pennellessa’). The formation of this style is related to the political, social and institutional changes after the Social War: in Rome and cities under the Roman law, the painted ‘capitale rustica’ was used in inscriptions aimed at informing citizens (laws, decrees, lists of public officials, campaign posters, notices ...). In the second half of the first century BC this writing is also widespread in the commercial sector. Finally, when the book became a luxury consumer goods produced by commercial workshops, the ‘capitale rustica’ was imitated in the books elegant, using a calamus with a wide tip, similar to the ‘pennellessa’.

La voz ibérica BALE. Comentario filológico del artículo de Georgeos Díaz-Montexano ¿Usaban ya los íberos la voz BALE (vale) como un término especializado del léxico comercial?
El análisis filológico del uso y posible significado del término ibérico bale, podría mostrar una continuidad entre el ibérico y el romance.

Deir ‘Alla is a relatively small multi-period site of approximately 5 hectares in size, located in the Jordan Valley on the east side of the Jordan river. It is best known for the Balaam inscription from the Phase IX occupation. However, it has also offered unique clay tablets from its latest phase of the Bronze Age occupation, known as the Late Bronze III
period (ca. 1185–1140 b.c.e.). These form an exceptional corpus of written texts on intentionally formed rectangular clay tablets. Unfortunately, the tablets have been left outside of more recent considerations on the development of the alphabet and (Proto-)Canaanite writing in the region, which has skewed the debate on literacy and the spread of the alphabet in the Levant. This has largely been due to the lack of a satisfying widely accepted identification of its signs and the language used in the Deir ‘Alla tablets. The present article is a first attempt to reset the balance by offering a suggested of the tablets using clearly set-out premises.

This study conducts an epigraphic analysis of the yet undeciphered inscriptions of the ancient Indus Valley civilization and seeks to prove that just like proto-cuneiform administrative tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, or modern fiscal stamps and ration tokens, Indus seals and tablets too were formalized data-carriers that used both document-specific and linguistic syntaxes to convey messages. Analyzing various combinatorial patterns of Indus signs (e.g., typical co-occurrence restrictions present between some signs; tendency of some signs to form collocations; syntactic order(s) maintained between certain signs; strong positional preferences demonstrated by some signs; and the capability of certain signs to occur alone in inscriptions), this paper argues that Indus signs represented different content-morphemes and functional-morphemes—not phonograms used for spelling words—the majority of the inscriptions were logographic. Categorizing several Indus logograms into nine functional classes, it explores the way each sign-class has played unique functional roles for conveying complete messages through the brief inscriptions. By glossing the signs of the inscriptions using the names of their respective functional classes the study unravels the formulaic phrase-structures maintained by the majority of the inscriptions, where signs identified as phrase-final signs typically occur at the terminal positions of the semantic phrases, while signs used as connective-morphemes join semantically autonomous constituents in certain subordinating and coordinating ways, to form longer composite inscriptions. The study identifies certain Indus signs as numerical and metrological signs, which frequently collocate with specific lexemes, and clearly quantifying them in certain ways. This article also analyses the underlying relationships between certain metrological and phrase-final signs; examines the compositional nature of Indus collocations; and argues that some of the repeated sign-sequences were probable examples of linguistic reduplication. Analyzing the occasional occurrences of certain attributive quantifier signs as substantive lexemes, this paper suggests that in some inscriptional contexts those quantifier signs possibly represented certain commonly used metonyms of Indus civilization. Finally, this study explores the compositional semantics of Indus inscriptions without assigning any sound value to the signs and without speculating about whether the script encoded the speech of any specific ancient language.

It turns out that in the literature on the basic structure of the Mesoamerican calendar, a kind of Julian calendar year of 365 days was always assumed, and still is, to be used. Gradually it became questionable how a people on the other side of the world could know in 1000 BC of an artificial European calendar structure that was only invented in 45 BC. During an extensive literature study to the reasons and origin of this assumption, no argument could be found in the relevant literature that could attest to this assumption. In the end, an incorrect text in a well-known historical source of 1566 turned out to be the reason for this assumption, which since then has continued to exist as an established fact. Reason enough to indicate based on verifiable facts and arguments that the applied assumption is based on an incorrect basis; therefore, it has inadvertently been used as a verifiable fact for many years.
With a rectification of two incorrect dates on page 33.  ____________________________________________________________________

Augustine’s fifteenth epistle is a short missive written to Romanianus, his patron and friend from childhood. The letter is essentially bipartite. The first half concerns realia, especially the material upon which the letter itself is written. The second half of the letter is an exhortation to contemplation, including direct quotation from the Aeneid. Romanianus must have shared some good news with his friend, as Augustine encourages him to consider the value and dangers of his earthly success in a paragraph containing Christian, philosophical, and pagan reminiscences. The threat of death looms over this section of the letter, which ends with a curious line about the risk of bees drowning in their own honey. This article offers a philological interpretation of the letter’s first paragraph and examines previous scholarship that has used Ep. 15 as fodder for arguments about late antique letter-writing materials. Augustine’s literary quotations and allusions in the second half of the letter will be analyzed in the context of Romanianus’ personal career, with some speculation as to the content of the trigger letter that prompted Augustine to write Ep. 15. Finally, a source will be suggested for the aphoristic bee story that serves as the letter’s closing image.

This article focuses on a linked pair of " documents " from mid-17 th century coastal Peru. The analysis first examines a revisita (an administrative " revisit ") carried out in 1670 in settlements around the town of San Pedro de Corongo, in the lower Santa River Valley. The revisit describes a census of the population of what are described as six pachacas (" one-hundreds "), administrative/census units that usually coincided with ayllus (the Andean clan-like socio-political groups). The document identifies 132 tributaries distributed across the six ayllus, all but two of whom are identified by name. Tribute is assessed on this new census count. The information in the revisit is then compared to the organization of a group of six khipus (knotted-string recording devices) that were said to have been recovered from a burial in the Santa Valley. The six khipus are organized into a total of 133 color coded six-cord groups of cords. The knot values on the first cords of the six-cord groups total the same value as the tribute assessed in the revisit document, and it is argued on these grounds that the khipus and the revisit document pertain to the same administrative procedure. The attachment knots of the first cords of the six

I-This course will explore one of the most remarkable, complex, and mysterious artifacts of the ancient Americas: the khipu (or quipu; Quechua-"knot"), the knotted-string devices used for record keeping in the Inca empire of pre-Columbian South America. The Spanish conquistadores and priests described this recording technology and its use in Inka administration in some detail; however, none of the Spanish commentators really understood how khipu recording and reading were performed. Recent studies (using an innovative mix of ethnography, ethnohistory, and computation/databasing) have revealed new insights into this hitherto mysterious system of record keeping, especially its grounding in the principle of binary coding. During the course of the semester, we will investigate such issues as: What were the precursors to Inca cord-keeping technology? Did khipu recording represent a system of writing? What were the principal sign-values used by khipu-keepers (known as khipukamayuqs-"knot makers/animators") to record information in these devices? How standardized were recording methods across the empire? To what extent did the structures and principles of khipu recording mimic the structures and organization of the Inka Empire itself? How did khipu recording compare to the writing/recording systems of other ancient civilizations, such as those of ancient Egypt, Sumeria, China and the Maya? And what became of the practice of recording on knotted cords following the Spanish conquest? Students will have the opportunity to make khipus, in order to understand how these remarkable objects were made and used, and we will study khipu samples in the Peabody Museum. Students will write a research paper on a topic worked out in consultation with the professor.

Sumerian Sumerian was spoken in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (part of modern Iraq) from perhaps the 4th millennium BC, when it was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language, though continued to be used in writing for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes until about the 1st century AD. Sumerian is not related to any other known language so is classified as a language isolate. (Kualo, 1998-2016) Sumerian cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Its origins can be traced back to about 8,000 BC and it developed from the pictographs and other symbols used to represent trade goods and livestock on clay tablets. Originally the Sumerians made small tokens out of clay to represent the items. The tokens were kept together in sealed clay envelopes, and in order to show what was inside the envelopes, they press the tokens into the clay in the outside (Ruhlen, 1994) Lists of words are a common feature among the thousands of Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets which have been discovered by archaeologists. Many are just groupings of common words, while others represent an inventory of the word meanings of the languages used in Mesopotamia. These " lexical lists " , as scholars call them, were indispensable to the 19th century scholars who deciphered the Sumerian and Akkadian texts, for they were used to compile modern dictionaries of these languages. Today all major lexical texts have been published in the multi-volume set, Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon, begun by Benno Landsberger in the 1930s. It is indeed a rare instance where ancient dictionaries of a dead language form the core of the modern dictionaries used by scholars of today. Such is the case for the ancient languages of Sumer and Akkad (Heiser, 2001-2012) Over time they realised that the tokens were not needed as they could make the symbols in the clay. They also developed a numeral system to represent multiple instances of the same symbol rather than just inscribing them all. The symbols became stylised over time and

The Dispilio Tablet may have astronomical significance.
The Dispilio Tablet is a carved wooden tablet with an inscription
found at modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Greece
The Dispilio Tablet inscription appears as inscribed lines between bright stars marking simple line constellations arranged around the celestial pole of 5202 B.C. in this animation.
NEXT
The Dispilio Tablet inscription is shown over the 5202 B.C. northern sky with modern Constellations, Boundaries, and Coordinates.
THEN
The Dispilio Tablet inscription is shown in counter-clockwise rotation over the 5202 B.C. northern night sky.
ABSTRACT
The Dispilio Tablet  inscription appears as if it were written in the stars.
-  Lance Carlyle Carter