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Post by ninurta2008 on Feb 26, 2012 8:03:57 GMT -5
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Post by ninurta2008 on Mar 16, 2012 15:19:55 GMT -5
Normally, I would favor independant developement as well, but it seemed like the two might've been related. They seem to have similar styles and are very close to eachother geographically.
Not a problem, seldom do I have time to get on here and post anything substantive either. I wish I did. There are a few articles I've wanted to respond to, but haven't yet. I either keep forgetting or just haven't had the time to think of something worth posting.
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Post by ninurta2008 on Mar 20, 2012 6:42:50 GMT -5
I meant that the Sumerian script developed from the pictographic writing such as that found at Jerf Al-ahmar, not Egypt. I don't think that the hieroglyphic script nor the sumerian pictographic one could've come from eachother, though whether or not they developed from a similar source I'm doubtful of as well.
Jerf al-Ahmar is in northern mesopotamia, it's one of the earlier neolithic sites.
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darkl2030
dubĝal (scribes assistent)
Posts: 54
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Post by darkl2030 on Mar 20, 2012 17:59:59 GMT -5
There is no possibility that the "pictograms" found at Jerf al-Ahmar has any relation to the Uruk script. Not only is the distance in time involved is far too great, there are no significant internal links, and we don't even really know what these designs found on objects were used for at all. They are just as likely, perhaps even more likely, to have had some sort of magical, religious, or divinatory purpose as they are to have been related to administration.
There can be no doubt that writing was invented in mesopotamia for administrative purposes, though some of the images of the actual pictograms of course were borrowed from other symbolic realms. A perfect example is found in the standards of deities, which were an independent way of representing a deities and associated cities with a specially shaped and designed pole, which had some religious significance related to the deity in question. Drawings of these objects became the way to represent the gods and their associated cities. But there is absolutely no reason to beleive writing itself was invented for religious or cultic purposes, or to write down literature, as may have been the case, for example, among the Maya peoples. The use of writing for these purposes was a much later development.
A compelling case for the evolution of writing out from methods of accounting involving tokens can be found in the logogram SHID. This symbol appears to have been a representation of an accounting board, or box with several different cases or compartments into which tokens could be placed. This logogram was used to write the name of the sanga-priest, who functioned as a chief temple accountant, as well as in the compound nig2-SHID-ak, "balanced account" (of items on hand, expenditures, and end balance plus or minus). Indeed, the earliest tablets seem to be essentially drawings of these accounting boards filled with tokens/symbols. They are divided up into a grid, with individual "cases" into which symbols are "placed." Furthermore, in the earliest period the order of the individual symbols is haphazard, just like in an accounting board there is no real fixed "order" or syntax to the tokens contained within. Lexical lists mention a GISH-SHID, so unfortunately none of these boards would have survived.
Para-writing methods of accounting continued to be utilized throughout mesopotamian history. Some have interpreted a "spindle" mentioned in a list of scribal tools from the UR III period to actually represent an abacus, and given how complex some of the mathematical calculations were going on in these texts this does not seem far fetched. There has been found a Nuzi in the late second millenium a recording of a transaction of sheep, and right next to it a sealed bullae containing an amount of tokens corresponding exactly to the number of sheep mentioned in the tablet, presumably for the benefit of the illiterate shepherd. Also, recently as the Neo-Assyrian site of Ziyeret Tepe have been found many distinctly shaped clay tokens (I prefer for these the term "calculi") in an administrative context.
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