Aramaic — Syria, 900 BC

Posted on January 30, 2011 by ducky

Aramaic "s"

Aramaic script was a very important writing system.  While the Phoenician script spread westward via sea trading, Aramaic script spread eastward via land trading.   It was the major trade language along much of the Silk Road, and was the official language of the Achaemenid Empire in Persia from about 500 BC to 331 BC.

The careful reader will note that I used the same image for this post as I did for yesterday’s Phoenician script post; this is not an accident.  Phoenician script and Aramaic script look practically identical at their beginning.  In addition to the shapes of the letters diverging over time, Aramaic innovated (some) vowels.

Phoenician did not have signs for vowels, only consonants.  Aramaic, however, pressed three of the Phoenician consonant symbols into double-duty as long vowels.  Sometimes those characters would be consonants, sometimes they would be vowels.  This technique is known as matres lectionis.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, History of Aramaic

Posted in Abjad, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 8 Comments

Phoenician — 1050 BC, Lebanon

Posted on January 29, 2011 by ducky

Phoenician "s"

Phoenician descended from Proto-Sinaitic and is the ancestor of the writing systems used by the vast majority of people today.  Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew are its children and grandchildren, with its influence spreading as far as the Pacific Ocean.

There is a saying that “history is written by the winners”, but the writing systems that enabled history was developed by accountants (e.g. in Sumeria) and spread by trade.  The Phoenicians, also called Canaanites, went far and wide from their ancestral home in present-day Lebanon via their sea trading routes, spreading their writing system as they went.  The Phoenicians traded with and colonized essentially all of the North African coast (except for Egypt), Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, and up through Eastern Spain.  They even traded for tin with Britain, and there are accounts in Ireland of a Phoenician colony there.

The Phoenician script made its appearance around 1050 BC.  Phoenicia proper (modern Lebanon) was conquered by the Persians in 539 BC, but the North African colonies hung on until they lost the last of the three Punic wars with Rome in 146 BC.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Abjad, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!" | 8 Comments

Ugaritic — 1400 BC?, Syria

Posted on January 28, 2011 by ducky

Ugaritic "ain"

Have you ever wondered why the English alphabet is ordered “A, B, C…”?  Who decided that A should be first, then B, instead of e.g. S and then D?  Well, we don’t know who came up with that ordering, but we know it wasn’t any later than Ugaritic cuneiform, which dates from around 1400 BC.

There might have been earlier orderings of the alphabet that we just don’t know about (because the order was transmitted orally or the written version was lost), but it seems likely that the Ugarits devised the ordering: two slightly different orderings have been found in Ugaritic cuneiform which seems unlikely if they inherited it from some other writing system.   Both of those orderings have persisted: the “West Semitic ordering” made it into Hebrew, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and thus to most of the modern alphabetic world.  The “South Semitic ordering” was used by South Arabian, which lead to Ge’ez, the language of Ethiopia.  When languages have added letters (e.g. the Å of Swedish), different languages have inserted them into different places, but the order of the core letters has remained amazingly constant over millennia.

It is surprising that the ordering has persisted for ~3400 years, but I guess it is one of those things where there was no advantage to changing it, and a slight disadvantage to changing it (because you had to make some effort to changing it, and a bigger effort to retraining anyone who had learned the old way).

Unusually among abjads, Ugaritic had rudimentary vowels.  There were three different signs for glottal stop, depending on whether an a, i, or u was pronounced after the glottal stop.  If you believe that glottal stops are consonants, then these marks were syllables and not vowels, but it still shows that people were starting to think about vowels.

Like Byblos script and Linear B  Ugaritic used a vertical mark as a word separator, but due to the writing implements, it was a wedge instead of a bar.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

REVISED: Added vowels section; reworded the word separator section.

Posted in Abjad, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!" | 5 Comments

Cypriot — 1500 BC?, Greece

Posted on January 27, 2011 by ducky

Cypriot "ku"

Try to find out when Cypriot script started, and the answer you get differs wildly depending upon the source. In part, this reflects differing opinions about whether they consider the writing system on early artifacts to be Cypriot or not.  There are artifacts from ~1500 BC which haven’t been deciphered — in part because it probably is a different language, but partly because the Cypriot script evolved over time.  (This early version of Cypriot script is sometimes called “Cypro-Minoan”.)  The earliest Cypriot script writings that can be read are from around 800 BC in Cypriot Greek.  Those who see it as one script then place the origin of Cypriot at 1500 BC; those who see it as two scripts place the origin at 800 BC.

The current expert opinion is that Linear B and Cypriot both descended from Linear A.

Like Byblos script, Cypriot used a small vertical mark as to separate words.  However, the dividers don’t always appear where we would expect them.  Sometimes particles and other small bits would be lumped in with nouns; sometimes even verbs and nouns would not be separated.  We cannot know if they thought of those groupings as being “one word”, if they had some different idea of what that grouping meant, or if they just goofed.

We also cannot know how the concept of “a word” has been affected over time by use of word dividers.  We English-speakers tend to think that a word is “something surrounded by spaces”, so “beekeeper” is one word, not two.  If we didn’t have spaces, how would we know what “one word” was?  (Also, in English, it is relatively common for a two-word phrase to turn into a hyphenated phrase, and then later to lose its hyphen.  For example, “ear splitting” to “ear-splitting” to “earsplitting”.)  Thus, I suggest that the concept of “one word” is fuzzy even for people in a highly literate culture with a 1200 year old tradition of separating words with spaces.

Some linguists believe that children do not learn words, but rather whole phrases.  It might be that before humans got around to seeing dividers between words on a regular basis, that they would not have had the concept of “a word” so clearly.

Cypriot is also interesting for being (as near as I can tell) the first writing system to not use logograms.  It is possible that Byblos script does not use logograms, but it has about 100 characters in it, which is a bit large for a pure syllabary.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries | 2 Comments

Luwian hieroglyphics — 1400 BC, Turkey

Posted on January 26, 2011 by ducky

Luwian hieroglyph

Luwian hieroglyphics — also called Anatolian hieroglyphics or (incorrectly) Hittite hieroglyphics — do not seem to be stylistically related to any other language, so it is likely this writing system was invented by the Luwians, although they pretty certainly knew of writing, given the Hittite cuneiform in the same region.

There is some evidence that although Luwian hieroglphyics are used to write the Luwian language, the writing system was influenced by the Hittite language.  For example, some of the syllabic characters have pronunciation similar to the Hittite word for the object they look like, instead of from the Luwian word for the object they look like.  (It would be as if English were written with a syllabary that has a symbol that looked like a bull, but that symbol was pronounced “toh” like the first sound in Spanish “torro” instead of “buh” like the English “bull”.)  This is sort of backwards from the relationship of Proto-Sinaitic to Egyptian hieratic.

Luwian hieroglyphics were frequently written boustrophedonically — left-to-right on one line, then right-to-left on the next line.  It is easy to see which direction you are supposed to go because the characters always “face into” the direction of reading.  For example, if there is a donkey facing left, the reading direction is left-to-right.  If there is a bull facing right, the reading direction is right-to-left.

Luwian hieroglypics look “jumbled” to me, with each line of text having two or three glyphs stacked one-on-top of each other, except that “stacked” implies more order than they really have:

Luwian hieroglyphics

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, bigger picture of “jumbled” text

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries | Leave a comment

Linear B — 1400BC?, Greece

Posted on January 25, 2011 by ducky

Linear B "wheel"

Ancient Crete had not one but three writing systems at roughly the same time: the Cretan hieroglyphics, Linear A, and Linear B.  Linear A and the Cretan hieroglyphics have not been deciphered, but Linear B has.

Linear B has about 200 glyphs, about half syllables and half logograms.  It was used almost exclusively for administrative records.   Most of the logograms have to do with food somehow — meat animals, staples, and vessels — as would make sense for record-keeping in an era when commercial transactions would mostly revolve around food.

The first evidence of Linear B was on engraved gemstones that caught the eye of a British archeologist, Arthur J. Evans.  He scoured Crete looking for more evidence of that script, and found it in a big way at the palace of Knossos in 1900.  Several people tried but failed to decipher the script, but in the early 1950s, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick succeeded in deciphering the script.  They were quite surprised to discover that the language was Greek — this put the earliest date of Greek to 600 years earlier than anyone had thought.

Part of how they managed to decipher Linear B was through prior work by Alice Kober.  Kober recognized that there were common patterns of starting glyphs, and common patterns of ending glyphs, and surmised that the starting glyphs were roots and the ending glyphs were suffixes.  There were some glyphs that would appear in the middle of words which didn’t belong to either the common roots or to the common suffixes.  She correctly surmised that those were bridging syllables (which appear in some other languages: the beginning consonant of the bridge syllable belongs to the root and the ending vowel belonging to the suffix).  From that, she was able to make a table of consonant identifiers on one axis and vowel identifiers on the other axis, with the appropriate syllable glyphs in each cell — despite not knowing how any of the consonants or vowels were pronounced!

Ventris and Chadwick then matched up the written syllables with some words in Greek (place names, as it turned out), and from there were able to build and build until they had the whole syllabary.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 3 "I did not know that", Syllabaries | 1 Comment

Cretan hieroglyphics — 1500 BC?, Greece

Posted on January 24, 2011 by ducky

Symbol from Phaistos disc

There is an artifact, a clay tablet called the Phaistos disc, that was found in Crete with unusual signs on it.  The signs have not been deciphered, but they look logographic in that each symbol is easy to recognize as a common object.  Some artifacts with similar symbols have been found, but very very few.

I have mostly stopped granting full posts to undeciphered scripts which only have a few known examples, instead finding a way to mention them in passing.  However, the glyphs on the Phaistos disc appear to have been pressed into the clay with some sort of seals or stamps.  This makes the Phaistos disc perhaps the very first example of movable type printing — 3000 years before Gutenberg’s printing press, and thus intrinsically interesting.

The layout of the Phaistos disc is also unusual.  The script is linear, but the line of the text is in a spiral.

NB: There are several scripts that I have or will mark as being developed around 1500BC.  Those scripts have been hard to date, and it’s not clear which one came first, so take all these dates with a grain of salt.  Partly there are so many scripts around that time because there was just a lot of activity around Greece, Turkey, and the Levant in that time period.

For reference, note that it is around this time period — 1500BC — that the Chinese Oracle Bone script appeared.

UPDATE: Someone asked me if the glyph at the top was a shower head or what.  The Linear B experts call it a shield.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts

Posted in Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Undeciphered | 3 Comments

Hittite — 1700 BC?, Turkey

Posted on January 23, 2011 by ducky

Hittite cuneiform "ya"

In around 1700BC, the Hittites adapted Assyrian cuneiform (which was basically just Akkadian cuneiform which had been around long enough to evolve slightly) to their language.  They only took about half of the symbols from Assyrian cuneiform, of which roughly half were syllables and half logograms.

Hittite used determinatives, all of which were Sumerian logograms that the Akkadians/Assyrians had incorporated into their own writing.  Yes, 1500 years after the development of Sumerian cuneiform, after three different changes in language (Sumerian->Akkadian->Assyrian->Hittite), the Sumerian maintained a recognizable identity.

One interesting thing about Hittite cuneiform is that there were words that the Hittites borrowed from Assyrian which the Assyrians spelled phonetically, but which the Hittites used as logograms.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting", Syllabaries, technology influenced | 2 Comments

Byblos — 1800 BC, Lebanon

Posted on January 22, 2011 by ducky

Byblos script (undeciphered)

Byblos was a city in Phoenicia (now Ǧubayl, Lebanon) that has been inhabited since about 5000BC — perhaps is the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world.  Byblos was a centre of publishing for a very very long time: the name Byblos in fact comes from the Greek word for papyrus.

In around 1800BC, a script was used in Byblos with 90 to 120 glyphs — about the right number for a syllabary.  There are few enough examples of the script that it has not been conclusively deciphered.  (A few people think that they have succeeded, but the deciphered text sounds so clunky that many experts are unconvinced.)

One thing that is distinctive about this writing system is that Byblos script had short vertical bars between words.  As far as I can tell, this was the first writing system which marked word boundaries.  Other writings systems had determinatives (which could act to demarcate some of the words), but I have not seen interword separators in older scripts.  (NB: most people don’t find those interesting or important, so it just might not have been mentioned.)

It is possible that the Phaistos Disk uses boxes to separate its words, but the Phaistos disk script is even more poorly understood than Byblos script, and its age is unclear.

In the modern, Latin-script world, we take interword separation for granted, but it is not at all obvious that words need separation.  Normal speech is a succession of continuous sounds; there is no pause between words.  It takes some effort to teach Latin-script-using children to insert spaces into their writing.  Many languages in use today do not use any form of interword separation, including Chinese, Japanese, and some of the Indic languages.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts

Posted in Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Undeciphered | 1 Comment

Proto-Sinaitic — 1900 BC, Egypt

Posted on January 21, 2011 by ducky

Proto-Sinaitic "heth"

Proto-Sinaitic — also called Proto-Canaanite — was probably the very first writing system that was purely phonetic, i.e. that did not use logograms.  It did not include all the vowels (so is classified as an abjad and not an alphabet) but this still was a significant conceptual achievement.

Proto-Sinaitic is the ancestor of many (if not most) of the European and Asian writing systems, including the Latin script that I am currently typing.   As such, Proto-Sinaitic must be counted as one of the most “successful” scripts ever.

The earliest examples of Proto-Sinaitic were found on the Sinai Peninsula in Modern Egypt, near some old turquoise mines that were worked in antiquity, presumably by slaves. The shape of the glyphs came from the shapes of some of the hieratic glyphs.

While this writing system was sound-oriented and not picture-oriented, there was still a slight connection between pictures and sounds.  The glyphs represented the leading consonant in the name of that object the glyph looked like.  For example, the word for “fence” was “heth”, and the glyph that looked like a fence represented the consonant “h”.

The words they got the sounds from were from the proto-Sinaitic words for objects, not the Egyptian words for the objects.  For example, “beth” was the proto-Sinaitic word for “house” and “para” was the Egyptian word for “house”; the symbol that looked like a house represented the “b” sound, not the “p” sound.

NB: We don’t actually know which vowels went into “beth” and “para” because they didn’t write the vowels.  Really, I should say that “b-th” and “p-r” were the words for “house”.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts

Posted in Abjad, Rating: 3 "I did not know that" | 4 Comments