{"id":60,"date":"2011-01-12T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T08:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=60"},"modified":"2011-04-03T22:01:17","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T05:01:17","slug":"epi-olmec-mexico-900bc-450-bc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/12\/epi-olmec-mexico-900bc-450-bc\/","title":{"rendered":"Epi-Olmec — 900BC? ~450 BC?, Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Epi-Olmec<\/p><\/div>\n

How many independently-developed writing systems have there been?\u00a0 One hundred years ago, educated people would have told you without hesitation, “three: Sumerian<\/a> or Egyptian<\/a> in the Middle East, Chinese<\/a> in China, and Mayan in Central America”.\u00a0 Very well-educated people would say four, including Indus<\/a> script.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, archaeologists keep messing up the picture.\u00a0 In addition to finding Vinca<\/a> and eight Chinese maybe-they-are-writing-maybe-they-aren’t symbols afterwards, in 1986 people fished a big slab of rock out of a stream that with symbols on it that is clearly writing.\u00a0 This is recent enough that the academics haven’t settled on a name, but “Epi-Olmec”, “Isthmian”, and “La Mojarra” script are all names used for this script.<\/p>\n

They have also found fragments of script which appears to be Zapotec, which might predate Epi-Olmec by a bit, but that dating is disputed.<\/p>\n

Then in the early 1990s, some road builders in an area that had been inhabited by Olmecs stumbled over a smaller stone slab, now called the Cascajal block<\/a>, with symbols on it.\u00a0 The block has been dated to around 900 BC, and sure looks like writing to me: it has 28 unique symbols in a string that is 62 characters long.\u00a0 The block is rather large and the characters are on a side of the block that has been deliberately flattened\/smoothed.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough characters or an obvious enough relationship to other scripts to be able to decipher the Cascajal glyphs.\u00a0 Thus, Cascajal will have to stay in the maybe-writing-maybe-not category.<\/p>\n

Epi-Olmec, on the other hand, is clearly writing, and is clearly related to the other mesoamerican writing systems.\u00a0 In addition to artistic similarities, all of the mesoamerican writing systems use the same notations for numbers and for dates.\u00a0 So regardless of whether or not the Cascajal block was writing or not, Mayan was not the first mesoamerican writing system.\u00a0 Sorry, Mayan.<\/p>\n

However, the good news for hemispheral pride is that writing was clearly independently invented in the New World.\u00a0 While one can imagine scenarios where at least the idea<\/em> of writing travelled from the Middle East to East and South Asia, camel caravans are highly unlikely to have reached Mexico.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>.\u00a0 I also highly recommend the Ancient Scripts article on mesoamerican writing systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How many independently-developed writing systems have there been?\u00a0 One hundred years ago, educated people would have told you without hesitation, “three: Sumerian or Egyptian in the Middle East, Chinese in China, and Mayan in Central America”.\u00a0 Very well-educated people would … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,28,7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logograms-language-types","category-interesting","category-syllabaries-language-types","category-undeciphered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}