Article also repeats the canard, "Chinese is based on pictures, or logograms, with specific meanings." No, Chinese writing is not logograms.
Chinese writing is a syllabary with redundancy (many ways to write the same syllable) and complicated spelling rules. Chinese developed from logograms, as did Phoenician and cuneiform, but that was left behind thousands of years ago.
Oddly, Chinese students are often taught to call the glyphs logograms, which they happily parrot, despite that they do not use them in that way. Many earnestly believe that users of other Chinese languages, when writing Mandarin, are simply transcribing what they say ("with different pronunciation") and not, as they are in fact, translating to a language as different from their own as German differs from English.
But don't logographic elements remain a major mnemonic device in Chinese? These characters are very different from other syllabic systems, like Japanese kana or Korean hangul.
A fair number of glyphs do look like a picture of one of the words usually spelled with that glyph.
And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs represent the same syllable, and one is preferred for writing this word, and another for that word. So there is an appealing "just so" story to be told for those.
But they are exceptional, and often ad hoc, drifting in and out of fashion.
Chinese languages use about 1200 different syllables (some, a fair few more, e.g. with an extra tone). There is very strong pressure for any new word to be shortened to one syllable so it can be written with one glyph, in a process a little like acronyms become words in English. (E.g. laser, sonar.) This makes for a phenomenally huge overload of homophones. Having different glyphs for the same syllable helps disambiguate when writing. And, people naturally like to try to make things more mnemonic. (You must sometimes pretend to write a glyph on your hand, when talking, to to make sure you are understood, in a technical or legal context.)
But glyphs for syllables, pronunciations of words, and preferred synonyms drift as in all languages. Meanwhile syllables for glyphs change on a completely different schedule. So whatever correspondence maybe once existed, there is very little of it left.
Many Chinese people like to think they can read things written two thousand years ago, because the glyphs are often hardly changed, but they must confabulate because so much else has changed. The huge number of homophones mean you can invent a plausible meaning for practically any sequence of glyphs.
The numbers are instructive. Mandarin has tens of thousands of words, mostly of one syllable, but only ~1200 syllables. Most people can read several thousand glyphs, but write from memory rather fewer. So even if a glyph "should" be used for a word, you might not remember how to write it, and must write one that sounds the same, instead. Imagine this drifting over centuries as different glyphs come in and out of fashion.
Despite all this, even small children have no difficulty understanding and expressing these languages. The fluid meanings make for glorious wordplay like we can never experience.
>As far as my co-authors and I are aware, our ZA paper—which underwent a double-blind peer review—has only received positive reactions. Moreover, the incontrovertible facts and solid arguments presented in support of the decipherment are such that I would not expect there to be much disagreement about our conclusions
You cut off right before it got interesting. It's more than scholars chafing at the notion that their work might be flawed. It's that nobody other than the reviewers had grappled with the paper yet, making this talk of debate entirely manufactured.
> That said, the article in question has only just appeared and begun circulating in the scholarly community. It is too soon for it to have generated the kind of scholarly debate Lawler suggests it has.
Yeah, I had the pleasure of publishing a controversial paper at a conference once. The paper wasn't generally available until the day I presented, and due to IP prior art concerns I didn't circulate it prior to the event. So I personally knew everyone who had read/reviewed it prior to publication. Yet somehow, in the days prior to publication everyone who was anyone in this niche industry had an opinion on this paper, which I KNEW they hadn't read. And most of the "opinions" published were based on their wildly incorrect assumptions of what my work was based on just the abstract, which was on the conference schedule.
I would have assumed that prominent, respected researchers in a field would hold off judgement and getting quotes in media until they had at least had the chance to read the freaking paper. Or at least qualify their statements as such. But nope, I sure was naïve to think so.
The Linear Elamite script has already seen claims of decipherment. But most of it was just circular conjectures. Due to the small corpus, progress is slow and claims rest on little evidence. Desset did contribute a lot to what little is accepted today. Still evaluating the new publication of Desset et al. If it turns out to be solid, we'll include the new sound values they propose.
That's interesting. The decoding of Linear Elamite _may_ help in the decipherment of the Indus Valley Script.
One of the theories behind the Indus Valley Civilization, is that they spoke a Dravidian language, related to modern southern India's Dravidian languages.
There are also some theories (not generally agreed on), that the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian languages.
People also have hypothesized that the IVC script may have at least some relation to Linear Elamite, and if so, it's more of a basis to do generate some hypotheses.
This is my biggest hope. I have a pet conspiracy theory that the Hebrew god was once the same as Brahman and that’s why Jewish (and by extension Christia ) mysticism is often compared to Bramanist theology. The “oneness of god” is one direction this ancient “brahamnism” went while the modern religion is the opposite.
My hope is that deciphering the Indus Valley civilization will allow us to extract a more ancient form of this religion from comparing the two.
Yahweh did not come from Brahma, Brahma did not come from Yahweh. Likewise, Osiris, Odin, what-have-you. The undisciplined Vedic, Norse, and Greek pantheons do trace to proto-Indo-Europeans in the Caucasus. The elevation of a chief god out of the pantheon, whether Marduk, Yahweh, or Brahma, is probably associated with political consolidation. Your king-of-kings naturally wants a god-of-gods, and is in a position to get one. Even the Egyptians dabbled.
It is likely there was an enormous corpus of Harappan literature on media that turned to dust without having being transcribed. Very likely, the oldest Harappan settlements are now deep underwater, offshore of India and Pakistan, inundated by meltwater from ice-age glaciers.
People insisting the Vedas came from the Harappans completely neglect that the Vedas are fundamentally martial, while the Harappans had nothing at all like an army. There is plenty of evidence of Harappan violence -- mostly blunt-force trauma -- but by context it more resembles banditry, civil strife, mob violence, or feuding, anyway without any hint of soldiery.
I don't know anything about this really but I would have thought it would have been the opposite: emperors who hold power over many disparate cultures would want a polytheistic religion so they can subsume other cultures' gods into their own pantheons, therefore saying "all gods are real, we just didn't know about yours until we conquered you"
Which would also fit in with why Jews and Christians were discriminated against: being monotheists isn't conducive to unity across an empire if you have one group of people claiming their god is the real one and all the others are not only fake, but it's actually a sin to believe in them
You have correctly identified where pantheons come from. The term for these religions is "syncretist". Each tribe, village, city-state has its god or gods that join in, or are merged into others already there (some get lots of names).
Then when the emperor wants to solidify his power, he replaces local kings with his own people, and identifies himself with a chief god.
Akhenaten, Tut's father, tried it in Egypt, with Aten as big cheese god. It didn't work out (probably) because the priesthood turned out still too powerful.
But that goal probably is a big part of why Rome went Christian.
I actually have contemplated similar conclusions and have been non-seriously collecting evidence that suggests at something similar. Indeed very interesting relationships nonetheless between “Master of Animals,” shiva, thor, Odin, yahweh, thunderbolt, stormgod, Cernunnos, Gilgamesh.
Not many people have connected Cernunnos to the same culture as the above entities. It is evidently quite certain when looking at the art of these cultures that there is a common thread and history. I think there may be oversight into that aspect compared to the writing and language. The way something is crafted is quite unique and the signatures are there tying the above together.
These are connections that are quite curious indeed.
I’ve brought these things up and usually I just get assaulted as a conspiracy theorist or wanting to rewrite history.
All history is fiction anyway.
The only thing I care about is patterns and patterns have signatures, and to me, there’s a common threading of a specific signature that suggests a significant population and culture of same origin that doesn’t align with the reasoning that exists to explain otherwise disconnected cultures.
Ancient Architects used to be fringy, but has lately strayed a bit too far to orthodoxy, e.g. courting Younger Dryas bolide-strike denialism. Lots of good new material.
UnchartedX is distinctly fringy, exposing facts historians find uncomfortable. Strays to speculation, but does not fabricate evidence. (NB: ignore anything about "scoop marks".) Really gets around!
Israel's religion began its transition to monotheism a very long time after the period when this script was in use. Anyway, I think your approach sounds better suited to languages than to religions.
1) Nothing says they can’t have had a similar religion (at least the early YHWH cultists) where there’s many gods but one overarching force. But also
2. YHWH is not a member of that pantheistic hierarchy. He is a foreign god theorized to have been imported by a merchant class. It is YHWH worship I find connections with not (necessarily) the ancient Levantine religion.
Anyway it’s not my approach, just a playful intuition.
The early Canaanite Yahweh had a wife and equal, Asherah, goddess of cakes, etc. The misogynist Hebrews demoted her to a stick, which they could not eliminate because she was still essential to important rituals, for centuries after. (Evidently a stick sufficed.) They finally managed, but there are still traces in the Torah, hard to scrub out.
After the Temple was razed c.70 CE, none of the rituals could be worked anymore, anyhow.
The idea is that the cult that became Judaism has a shared history with Vedic, or pre-Vedic, religions. Not that ancient Israelites actually believed in that religion.
I think what they're getting at is that as best we know, Vedic religions came to India with the Indo-Aryan migration. So the pre-Vedic religions of the Indus Valley Civilization are unlikely to have had any notion of a Vedic concept like brahman.
Right. There is basically no possibility at all that IVC was Vedic. Vedic was pastoral and martial, IVC sedentary, farming, and wholly non-martial.
BTW, "IVC" is problematic, because it extended hundreds of km east well across the subcontinent. The Hindi majority in that part of its range would prefer it not.
> Cuneiform and hieroglyphics use symbols denoting both sounds and logograms. But Desset argues that Linear Elamite takes an approach more like the modern alphabet. He concludes that the script draws solely on syllables, making it the oldest known writing system to do so. “If the recent decipherment is in all details correct,” notes Krebernik, “the system would indeed be innovative, and similar to the later creation of the alphabet.” The first fully formed, phonetic alphabet is thought to have come into use among Phoenician traders around 1100 B.C.E.
The article exaggerates how unique a syllabary is. The writing system of Akkad and Babylon was almost entirely syllabic, and grew in parallel with Sumerian:
"The writing system of Akkad and Babylon was almost entirely syllabic"
No, they had a relatively standardized syllabary embedded in hundreds of other signs which were used throughout the centuries. Only in contexts outside of Akkadia (Hittite, late Elamite) were the reduced syllabaries used in almost pure form. Dessets argument is that Linear Elamite went through such a reduction first.
It's like saying Egyptian was the first alphabet, whereas similarly to the situation above they had a relatively standardized abjad embedded in hundreds of other signs. It's a bit opposite to English where we have a standardized alphabet extended through myriads of special signs.
Yeah, syllabaries are absolutely the norm, and usual end state for a script, from Japan to Ireland. The Greek innovation of splitting syllables into diphthongs was revolutionary.
Still, one syllabary had to be first.
Logograms evaporate when you want to write foreign names and words.
Well, OK. The world is anyway lousy with syllabaries and abjads, many of which started life as logograms.
And, it is attractive to think there was a first, although it is easy to imagine a pair of neighboring scripts both evolving to syllabaries simultaneously.
To whomever retitled this: thank you. I'm now interested in this post, whereas the earlier title read as generic, un[der]informed clickbait; too much interpretation for the reader, coddling too much. I didn't know of Linear Elamite before, but the language's name evokes the project of studying ancient history, as does the domain.
For Elamite the language we have sources written in the Akkadian script. There are reasons to believe that the few Linear Elam inscriptions discovered today record the same Elamite language. You'd not be writing in a new language, just in a more ancient script of one of the earliest languages where records have been found!
For Linear Elamite pretty much all that is known is inside the new Desset paper and maybe a handful of others. The corpus is less than 100 texts/fragments!
https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/the-deci...