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Reconstructing History


crystal sage

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University of Chicago returns ancient Persian tablets loaned by Iran

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/0...8.tablets.shtml

The 300 tablets, made of clay and impressed in cuneiform, record administrative details of the Persian heartland from about 500 B.C. They are among a group of tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to the University’s Oriental Institute in 1937 to be studied. A group of 179 complete tablets was returned in 1948, and another group of more than 37,000 tablet fragments was returned in 1951.

The tablets have been difficult to read because information about the Persian Empire had been largely limited to non-Persian sources. That non-Persian information came from Greek writers such as Herodotus and Latin authors, and mostly concerns encounters between the Persian Empire and Greek states, encounters of warfare, and diplomacy. Information from the tablets provided one of the first opportunities to gather data on the empire from Persian sources.

“The Persian Empire was the largest and most durable empire of its time. The empire stretched from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia (modern Turkey), Central Asia and to India,†said Matthew Stolper, the John A. Wilson Professor at the Oriental Institute, an expert on ancient Iran.

In addition to administrative information on the empire and its governance, the texts also contain seal impressions that indicate the existence of some otherwise-unknown administrative offices. The texts identify for the first time leaders of various portions of the empire and expand on material in other non-Persian texts.

“Archaeologists were excited when they found the tablets because of their potential, but the information they contain has exceeded all our expectations,†Stolper said.

“These tablets function much like credit card receipts,†said Charles Jones, Research Associate and Librarian at the Oriental Institute and tablet expert. “They provide an incredibly rich amount of information.†The basic daily ration for an adult male worker was about one and a half quarts of barley and a half-quart of beer or wine. Many workers received two to five times as much. People of very high political or social status received many times more than that.

The tablets are representative of 30 categories of documents produced by a single branch of the Persian administration.

“The texts let us know where the workers came from. Many were from distant parts of the empire, from Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Thrace (north of modern Greece) and from areas that are now part of Turkey as well as Afghanistan, areas that are now part of Pakistan, and Central Asia, †he said. The tablets date from the middle of the reign of Darius I, 509 B.C. to 494 B.C.

Cuneiform writing, the style used on the tablets, was developed to write Sumerian and Akkadian. It also was used to write other languages. One of those other languages was Elamite. People had been writing Elamite language texts in cuneiform since at least 2200 B.C. There are administrative texts in Elamite from about 1000 B.C.

http://www.iranian.com/History/2004/May/Tablets/index.html

http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/oip/oip92.html

The enrolled tablets of Tartaria (located in 1961 in the transilvana locality homónima), were considered by their discoverer (N. Vlassa) an indication of a sacrificial rite. More ahead one thought that they could have a connection with the first examples of mesopotámica writing. But this hypothetical relation is improbable, considering that the Rumanian tablets precede to sumerias in millenia! (These are not the only found rest of calcolítica pre-writing to date: it nótese the “Gradesnica plateâ€, dated between the 4000 and the 5000 aC.)

A thing is clear: the enrolled plates of the call “Vinca culture†of the Balkan Mountains, between which we found the plates of Gradesnica and the mentioned tablet of Tartaria, seem to have a religious meaning, noneconomic (as sumeria is the case of the writing), like the first examples of Chinese writing on bone or tortoise shells. Like these last ones, they could express ceremonial oráculos or messages.

Some students exist who have related these signs to others distributed by the Mediterranean. The egiptólogo Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) got to propose that these could constitute one “lingua frank†of the Mediterranean surroundings, and that (given its formal similarities) could be behind the invention of the first ideográfica writing in the Next East.

Marco Merlini (Italy)

Inscriptions and messages of the Balkan-Danube script

to semiotic approach

Daniela author Bulgarelli is the of the paintings appearing on the study. Images and text plows “Copyright© 2002 Global The Prehistory Consortium AT EURO INNOVANET - www.prehistory.it. All rights reserved World Wide. May not be reproduced without permissionâ€.

(part1) (part2) (part3) (part4) (part 5 and Essential Bibliographic References)

2. Characteristics of the signs of which the script composed

2.a technical The analysis of Winn (1981) there are shown how the individual signs of which the Balkan-Danube script was composed plows easily identifiable. To few have out in a been traced clear-cut to manner, follow needs standard shapes and have well defined outlines. Others plows carelessly made, have less certain silhouettes and plows poorly marked, follow to their model with difficulty and plows superposed by lines resembling ligatures. The information which each one of these actually communicated was, to however, to specific one and had to univocal meaning. The signs of the proto-European script, when compared to to other archaic writings, plows characterised by to high degree of stylisation and by having to rectilinear shape, due to the need of to their being incised mechanically onto terracotta by means of to pointed stone or bone.

2.b. According to Gimbutas (1991), the ancient European script consisted of about thirty Core signs which were originally abstract and arbitrary or had gradually become under (V,/\, X, M, and, N, cross, triangle, lozenge, zigzag, spiral, square…), while the rest of the script consists of derivative signs (formed by adding one, two, or three lines to the Core signs, or by duplicating or inverting two or dwells Core signs). According to Haarmann's inventory (1995) there were 10 individual BASIC signs that created new signs by undergoing simple or complex variations, and to another 131 which remained unaltered. These root-signs express most of the BASIC geometric forms and until they continued to be used the classical Greek period.

Edited by crystal sage
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University of Chicago returns ancient Persian tablets loaned by Iran

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/0...8.tablets.shtml

The 300 tablets, made of clay and impressed in cuneiform, record administrative details of the Persian heartland from about 500 B.C. They are among a group of tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to the University’s Oriental Institute in 1937 to be studied. A group of 179 complete tablets was returned in 1948, and another group of more than 37,000 tablet fragments was returned in 1951.

The tablets have been difficult to read because information about the Persian Empire had been largely limited to non-Persian sources. That non-Persian information came from Greek writers such as Herodotus and Latin authors, and mostly concerns encounters between the Persian Empire and Greek states, encounters of warfare, and diplomacy. Information from the tablets provided one of the first opportunities to gather data on the empire from Persian sources.

“The Persian Empire was the largest and most durable empire of its time. The empire stretched from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia (modern Turkey), Central Asia and to India,” said Matthew Stolper, the John A. Wilson Professor at the Oriental Institute, an expert on ancient Iran.

In addition to administrative information on the empire and its governance, the texts also contain seal impressions that indicate the existence of some otherwise-unknown administrative offices. The texts identify for the first time leaders of various portions of the empire and expand on material in other non-Persian texts.

“Archaeologists were excited when they found the tablets because of their potential, but the information they contain has exceeded all our expectations,” Stolper said.

“These tablets function much like credit card receipts,” said Charles Jones, Research Associate and Librarian at the Oriental Institute and tablet expert. “They provide an incredibly rich amount of information.” The basic daily ration for an adult male worker was about one and a half quarts of barley and a half-quart of beer or wine. Many workers received two to five times as much. People of very high political or social status received many times more than that.

The tablets are representative of 30 categories of documents produced by a single branch of the Persian administration.

“The texts let us know where the workers came from. Many were from distant parts of the empire, from Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Thrace (north of modern Greece) and from areas that are now part of Turkey as well as Afghanistan, areas that are now part of Pakistan, and Central Asia, ” he said. The tablets date from the middle of the reign of Darius I, 509 B.C. to 494 B.C.

Cuneiform writing, the style used on the tablets, was developed to write Sumerian and Akkadian. It also was used to write other languages. One of those other languages was Elamite. People had been writing Elamite language texts in cuneiform since at least 2200 B.C. There are administrative texts in Elamite from about 1000 B.C.

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Then there are the Balkan/Danube tablets.... over 7,000 years old....

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=e...GGL:en%26sa%3DN

http://www.prehistory.it/ftp/tartaria_tabl..._tablets_15.htm

http://www.prehistory.it/ftp/arta_populara01.htm

These three small, inscribed tablets started a debate that is challenging the conventional wisdom of European prehistory, because they have been dated from around 6.500 years ago.¹ Some scholars argue they date even earlier at 7,300 years old.² More prudent researchers, date the stones to 6,000-5,800 years ago. In any case, the astonishing question is did the South-eastern Neolithic Europe develop its own script before Sumeria and Egypt?

Given the context of the finding, the tablets from Tartaria are probably amulets or votive tablets. The clay is grey-reddish and crystallised, to the point of looking like tuff. Careful observation and analysis is needed to ascribe to them their potential value as a written document as they contain much more than ascertained from a cursory examination.

Technical analysis of the Transylvanian tablets that the inscriptions are not simple signs or randomly distributed insignia, rather the inscriptions are characters from some type of writing system. There are three reasons for this conclusion.

Firstly, it is easy to find similar signs also on other artefacts of the Danube civilisation, pointing to the fact that the characters of the Danube Script follow precise standard shapes and that scribes made use of an inventory.

Secondly, the characters of this proto-European script, when compared to other archaic writings, are marked by a high degree of stylisation and a rectilinear shape. Thirdly, we may reasonably assume that the information communicated by each character was a specific one with a univocal meaning.

Finally, whilst the inscriptions have varied patterns (in horizontal, vertical or circular rows), this variety has a clear structure, evidenced by the specific sequencing of the signs. In the majority of the cases, the Danube Script had a linear organisation, a feature shared with other pre-classic writings (Minoan Linear A, Cypriot-Minoan and Cypriot Syllabic).³

Today, village life and its visual art and folk memory, has the capacity to reveal the heritage from Neolithic times through the importance of Tartaria signs, created thousands of years ago but of continued authenticity. As CriÅŸan's article documents, in some Balkan-Carpathian rural areas, the Danube Script characters occasionally revived to enjoy a popularity they originally possessed in the early period of Danube civilisation.

(The article translation from Romanian is by Doina MureÅŸan)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

and the Dispilio tablet also over 7000 years of age...

The Dispilio Tablet (also known as the Dispilio Scripture or Disk) is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings (charagmata), Carbon 14-dated to about 7300 years b.p. (5260 BC). It was discovered in 1993 in a Neolithic lakeside settlement near the modern village of Dispilio in Kastoria Prefecture, Greece.

http://www.answers.com/topic/dispilio-tablet

http://web.auth.gr/dispilio/

The Dispilio Tablet (also known as the Dispilio Scripture or Disk) is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed symbols (charagmata), dated (according to the carbon 14 method) to about 7300 years before present. The Dispilio Tablet, discovered in 1993, is among numerous archaeological findings located in the Neolithic lake settlement of Dispilio in the northern Greek prefecture of Kastoria. The lake settlement of Dispilio was accidentally discovered in 1932 by Antonios Keramopoulos, a Greek university professor. In 1992, archaeological excavations began at the site, with a team led by the professor of prehistoric archaeology from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, George Chourmouziadis.

At the Dispilio lake settlement a number of items were found, including ceramics, structural elements, fruits, bones, figurines, the first Neolithic flute found in Europe and the most significant finding, the Dispilio Tablet, its discovery first made public by Dr. Chourmouziadis at an annual archaeological symposium in February 1994 at the University of Thessaloniki. The findings were extensivley published in the June 2000 issue of Eptakyklos with almost 150 pages of articles, sketches and photographs. These included articles by Professor Chourmouziadis and members of his team, concerning lake dwellings in general and on the site's paleoenvironment, botany, fishing techniques, tools and ceramics.

Moreover, the age of the lake settlement in Kastoria was developed between 5,500 B.C. and 5,000 B.C. There was some damage to the tablet when it was abruptly exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water it was immersed in for a long period of time. A recreation of the lake dwellers' settlement has been erected near the site.

Edited by crystal sage
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... :tu: ... so just the discovery and translating of these tablets are going to have to have some effect on the history books we use for learning at school..if we want some accuracy.... just think of all the students who have been spoon fed all the old accepted versions of the complete history of the world ... to find out that it has all been vastly outdated for quite some time...!!!

that there were whole other civilizations.. going on that they'd been left ignorant of!!!!

I think it is the duty of care of all educational systems to provide the best updated versions of history they can at all times...or like law books have supplimentary updates provided each year....

...any opinions here???

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I don't want you to feel all alone in this thread so I will just chime in with a little comment.

No matter what "ancient record" is discovered I'm guessing the establishment will not change their current beliefs without multiple discoveries that force a change.

Interesting posts though, it is going to take me a couple hours to read through it all!

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"NEW" finds always take a while to filter down to the classroom, cos theyve gotta be tested, verified, backed up, written down, queried, and finaly sent to politicians who then try and decide which are the important bits that kids should learn....

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just like Torchwood said. it would take sometime ( actually quite a long time ) before everyone will believe even thought the evidences are there. but probably in the next generation it will be taken into account.

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... :tu: ... so just the discovery and translating of these tablets are going to have to have some effect on the history books we use for learning at school..if we want some accuracy.... just think of all the students who have been spoon fed all the old accepted versions of the complete history of the world ... to find out that it has all been vastly outdated for quite some time...!!!

that there were whole other civilizations.. going on that they'd been left ignorant of!!!!

I think it is the duty of care of all educational systems to provide the best updated versions of history they can at all times...or like law books have supplimentary updates provided each year....

...any opinions here???

Oh man, CS this is good stuff, thanks. I am sure this kind changes our perception of history, but it takes a long time to change educational institutions. The lack of money is the cause of the slow response. Also people in charge of education don't like change. It screws with their brains.

Children and adults shouldn't allow people to spoon feed them knowledge, take the time to do some research for yourself. Question everything. Great job CS. :tu:

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