Mystery Archaeology Picture #1

Over at the Eruptions blog they have a mystery volcano of the month and I thought it might be a good idea over here in Ancient Scripts but I decided to change it up into Mystery Archaeology Picture of the week.

The game is pretty simple. You comment on what you think is the content of the picture and where it was taken. It shouldn't be too hard since I haven't been to too many exotic locations.

Anyway, this is the inaugural post of mystery picture. What do you think it is (that should be easy) and where do you think this is located.



Enjoy!

Chia

Last night my wife made an enchilada lasagna/casserole, essentially alternating layers of tortillas and stewed chicken and vegetables. Interestingly enough, the tortillas were made with corn and chia seeds. Yes, chia as in Chia Pet, that little 80's ornament that grew green "fur" which were in fact chia sprout. It was actually an important pre-Columbian food source and it's coming into vogue in recent times due to the world's appetite for ancient, supposedly-exotic, nearly-lost grains. Tell that to Mexicans who've been eating it for hundreds of years.

The word chia came directly from its Nahuatl equivalent, namely chian, according to an online Nahuat dictionary. Wikipedia claims it's derived from chian "oily" but according to the dictionary, chiahuac is "oily", which feel like compounds with additional suffixes on top of the chia root. As chia seeds produces 25% to 30% oil, I think words with "oily" meaning in Nahuatl were actually derived from the root meaning the chia plant.

The Nahuatl glyph for chia looks like either a brown triangle or a half circle with dots inside, no doubt representing the dark grey chia seeds. However, there is also a variant in which the dots are replaced by conventional symbols of soil, such as the name Chiapan, which corresponds to Chiapas in modern times. Chiapas in fact means "above the river of chias" (http://geography.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate12/Chiapan.html). However, a similar toponym, Teochiapan, does use the regular dotted variant (http://geography.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate26/Teochiapan.html).

The chia glyph can also be used as a phonetic sign to write the chi syllable. One example of this usage comes from the Codex Xolotl, a book from the Texcoco region of Central Mexico written right after the Spanish conquest. It details the history of the Aztecs and especially the city of Texcoco, one of the three "allies" that made up the Triple Alliance aka the Aztec Empire. Like most Nahuatl manuscripts it is highly pictorial but a surprising amount of texts with phonetic spelling is used. A character named Achitometl, who was the king of the Tepanecs, has his name spelled out nearly phonetically as a-chi-(to)-me-e. For some reason the to syllable is missing, possibly because it served no grammatical function.

Also, take note of the syllabic glyph e, which is the black oval with a white smaller oval inside. Here it serves as a phonetic complement to reinforce the vowel of the last syllable. However, of interest is the fact that the syllabic glyph e is also the bean glyph, as "bean" in Nahuatl is etl. In fact, my wife said that's what's for dinner tomorrow, our approximation of the Costa Rican gallo pinto. However, instead of going into the wonderful world of beans, I shall stop here, and leave the exploration of another ancient staple for another day.

References/Links:

• Nahuatl Dictionary
• Byrne, Roger, et al, Nombres Geográficos de México, 1999
• Lacadena, Alfonso and Wichmann, Søren, Longitud vocálica y glotalización en la escritura náhuatl, Revista Española de Antropología Americana 38.2: 121-150, 2008

Fun with Akkadian

UPDATE: After this was posted on March 20th, a long-time reader argued that my final result is in fact incorrect. Scroll to bottom to see the debate and the new translation.

Recently a reader asked me how to translate "heart of lion" into Akkadian. More often than not I have to refuse requests to translate something into an ancient script because frankly (a) I can't possibly know every ancient language, and (b) I don't have the time to look it up and translate as a I learn. In this case I really knew little-to-nothing of Akkadian but since the phrase was fairly simple I took it on as a way to learn a bit more about Akkadian.

First, I looked up the words in the expression, namely "heart" and "lion". I also know that Akkadian was an inflectional language which means that the words change form depending on their function in a sentence. In particular, "of lion" is what is called the genitive case, and unlike English where this concept is expressed as a phrase, Akkadian would have it as a derivation of the root of "lion". In other words, I need to find the word for "lion" in Akkadian and then figure out how to modify it into the equivalent of "of lion".

I found this online dictionary which seems to be pretty good.

http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/cuneiform.languages/dictionary/index_en.php

From this, I found libbu to be "heart; belly, tummy; wish, mind; center, inside". Since the first definition is "heart", my guess is that the rest are metaphoric extensions of the original meaning. Next I found lābu to be "lion". This seems to be pretty straightforward.

Now there is an extra wrinkle in that the Akkadian dictionary states that "mimmation is omitted". This reflects a historical change in the Akkadian language itself that during the Old Babylonian period (20th to 16th century BCE) many words ended in -m, so "heart" would've been libbum. However, the last -m is lost after that time, and the word would be libbu in later dialects like Assyrian. You can see http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/words.html#mimmation for more information. I personally prefer to use mimmation form.

Next we want to create the construction "heart of a lion". Naively, we can see that "heart" is the main subject of the phase, the so called nominative case, which would be libbum in Old Babylonian. The expression "of a lion" is the genitive case that we discussed earlier, which would be lābim in Akkadian. So the entire translation should be libbum lābim, right? Wrong!

Turns out that when putting two nouns together in Akkadian there's a special case called the construct state in which the nominative case is shortened down to the bone. The entire nominative ending of -um is omitted, and in this case the double consonant -bb- is reduced to a single consonant, so the final form becomes lib lābim.

See http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/noun.html#declension for more details.

Next we move onto how to write the translated expression in Akkadian cuneiform. To write lib, we use the signs li-ib, so that we can indicate the final -b consonant. . Next up is lābim, where ā is a long vowel, and so we double the vowel [a] like so la-a-bi-im.

And here it is:



And yes, in a geeky way, it was fun.

I highly recommend the Akkadian Language site (http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/) which touches on Mesopotamian history, cuneiform script, Akkadian grammar, and sample texts. Sometimes I've gotten lost in it for hours!

UPDATE: A friend Twitter disagreed with this conclusion of mine. This was followed by much tweeting back and forth and some more research on my part.



Specifically I found "A structural grammar of Babylonian" by Giorgio Buccellati on Google Books and it provided example of what I am looking for. Particularly I found the phrase libbi ālim which means "heart of the city" which is similarly enough to what I'm looking for, although lib ālim might still be correct in a more obscure way.

Here is the new translation in cuneiform:



Don't you just love this new social network thingy?

Reference:

• Akkadian Language, John Heise, http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/
• Akkadian Dictionary, Association Assyrophile de France, http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/cuneiform.languages/dictionary/index_en.php
  
• A structural grammar of Babylonian, Giorgio Buccellati, http://books.google.com/books?id=_Of_CeS5JRUC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=libbum+construct+state&source=bl&ots=ccO6FdKi-2&sig=3whMSTkMWAd8nJMl5IpOWnlSSro&hl=en&ei=zveHTejRI4bmsQO-hMmODA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=heart&f=false

A grab bag of wiggling thoughts

It's March 2011 already? My last post was in November 2010 and to be honest I haven't had any ideas on what to talk about. There are, however, updates over at the very Web 1.0 Ancient Scripts website, including new page on Cretan Hieroglyphs and an update on Linear A.

For the next writing system I am going to jump across the globe and work on Rongo Rongo, the mysterious scripts of Easter Island. It's going to be fun to read about all the looney crackpot theories about this script. However, aside from dubious claims with the aliens, supernatural beings, and even wandering Greeks/Egyptians/Phoenicians, there are actually solid research but with various degrees of convincibility. I've done a bit of reading already and it's quite fascinating!

Another subproject that I really want to get started is bibliography on each page. Right now all my sources are available on the Reference page (http://www.ancientscripts.com/reference.html), and I meticulously keep that updated. However, what would be really nice is to have each page lists its own source materials. It would be a bit of an undertaking, but it will really help one of my goals of Ancient Scripts which is to enable readers to go deeper (pardon the Inception reference) into a subject by providing both online and offline resources.

Writing of a Different Mind

Wow it's November. I didn't post any entries for the entire month of October. Me bad. So I figure I return to this long-neglected blog and writing about something different for a change.

I am a huge science fiction fan. I especially like topics related to space and space exploration, and the news of more and more rocky exoplanets had me thinking about astrobiology or perhaps even xenolinguistics. If there are intelligent and sentient species out there, would they have writing systems, and if so, how would they look like?

For one I am a huge skeptic of UFO's as alien crafts so I am tossing out right away all the claims of "hieroglyphs" on supposed artifacts recovered in various Roswell-like incidents. Instead this is going to be a purely theoretical discussion and exploration.

Before we even start to think about alien languages and writing systems, we need to think about, well, how the aliens think and communicate. Here on Earth, humans communicate using sounds, primarily consonants and vowels but also pitch and clicks. Therefore all human writing systems always encode sound in various degrees. Even writing systems claimed as "ideographic" or "logographic" like Chinese do have roots in phonetic representation.

Now, imagine a species that communicates using non-sonic means. One possibility is communication via light. In that scenario, this species would have a light-emitting organ that generate light pulses in a certain range in the electromagnetic spectrum. Each recognizable frequency would represent a basic unit in their "language". Writing system is a way to record ephemeral communication into a more permanent form by a certain encoding scheme, so in the case of this species, their writing will encode light. Instead of "phonograms" (glyphs that represent sounds), maybe they'll employ "photoglyphs" (fyi the word "photograms" already mean something in photography) which would represent frequencies considered to have meaning in their language.

Polarization, the direction of the light wave oscillation, is also another property of light, and might also be encoded in this system. However, like tones among humans, perhaps some cultures of this species would use polarization to distinguish words while others might use it as a extra-linguistic information such as emphasis or subtext.

Another species might have echolocation capabilities and communicate via sonic means like songs or clicks like cetaceans (dolphins, whales, etc). This means that just be focusing their sound "beams" they can visualize three-dimension structures. So it is possible that signs in their writing is three-dimensional. To human eyes, their writing would appear to be abstract sculptures. Like our two-dimensional scripts, shape and position will carry certain meanings or sounds, but depth of indentation or protrusions can also carry linguistic values as well.

The material on which this species's writing system is inscribed might also affect how information is presented. For example, texture of the surface might encode information. Some beams can even penetrate certain materials so there might be nested levels or "shells" of writing inside one another. Echo might also come into play in this writing system, as certain materials might generate echoes that would represent yet another level of meaning, a phenomenon perhaps exploited by the poets of this species.

Another possibility could be a purely chemical-based language. Because chemicals are less transient than light or sound, it is possible that instead of encoding the language in a stable medium, the species could invent a technology to capture the communication chemicals that can be released later by replicating the compounds from the captured ones. Therefore in this scenario, the writing system is not an encoding mechanism, but a purely record/replay mechanism. It might not even be a writing system at all.

While it was a lot of fun coming up with this crazy stuff, whatever imagined species and their languages I can come up with will no doubt be nowhere near as amazing as real extraterrestrial species that we encounter in the future. However, I kind of doubt we'll have any alien contact in my life time. I'll just be happy with some bacteria on Mars or Europa. Just to know there's life out there.

Surat Batak

A few weeks ago I received an email from Indonesia, from someone named Andre Samosir who said that he was a member of the Batak tribe, and that he had emailed me years ago about writing a paper on the Batak script but hadn't gotten the chance to complete it until recently.

Remarkably I actually remembered that email conversation from 2007. So I opened the attachment and read through the paper on the Batak script, or Surat Batak. I thought that it was pretty well-written, especially about the script's changes through time from the earliest stage to the modern age. And since I haven't gotten a chance to write a page on Batak yet, I figured that I would share it here on the blog.

Here is a quick preview:



The full paper can be downloaded through this link. Also, the bibliography is separately listed below:

• Sihombing, T.M. (1986). Filsafat Batak: Tentang Kebiasaan-kebiasaan & Adat-istiadat. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka.

And here is a little about Andre as written by himself:

I am Andre Somba Gugun Samosir, a 28-year-old guy from the Batak tribe in Indonesia. Andre means "man". The "Somba Gugun" in my name is a wordplay from Batak words meaning "asked/prayed for fervently". Samosir is just a family name (albeit being also the name of the island in the center of Lake Toba in Indonesia) of hundreds of people in Batak Toba. Batak clans zealously keep track of their family trees, so for that matter, I am the 15th Samosir in my line of genealogy. I graduated from the medical school of Padjadjaran University, Bandung, West Java in early 2007, and now worked as a general practitioner in a small hospital in Palembang (South Sumatra). In my leisure time among the tiring weeks, I am a passionate reader of just about everything except economy and political stuff. Supercars, gems, quantum physics, linguistics, Esperanto studies, world writing systems, philosophy, and Walt Whitman and Michael Crichton to name a few interests.

To contact Andre, you can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/k273

Inspirations

Over at Archaeology magazine there's a blog post titled "How Henry VIII’s Racy Sex Life Turned Me into An Archaeological Writer" that talks about how archaeologist Heather Pringle got inspired for her choice of career by reading popular historical fiction.

This got me thinking why I'm so interested in archaeology and linguistics and all things old that I've been working on Ancient Scripts on and off for almost 15 years now. I can think of a few different reasons why.

When I was a kid way back in the early 80's there was this French/Japanese cartoon/anime called "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" which a mash-up of various legends including El Dorado and Atlantis set among the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century. I was more fascinated by this anime more than big giant mecha or kung-fu superheroes or Ultramen. It didn't take me long to figure out all the Atlantis stuff was fluff, but the fascination with Aztecs and Mayas and Incas stayed to this day.

Another thing that really caught my eye when I was growing up in Hong Kong was the front of my Chinese class workbook at 1st grade (I think). It had ten simple Chinese characters like 山 (mountain), 月 (moon), 水 (water), etc, and their evolution from pictograms and Oracle Bone script through the seal and calligraphic scripts to modern types. I recalled being fascinated by the fact that the pictograms are stylized but recognizable natural objects. I didn't know how far back in time the pictograms were, but I understood that writing systems are not static but fluid and changing. Most of all, I think I developed an understanding of the time scales of human history.

I also have to credit my excellent education in St Francis College in Moravia, Costa Rica ("college" or "colegio" is actually secondary school in Costa Rica, sort of equivalent to middle school and high school together in USA), for inspiring my interests in all things ancient. First in 7th grade there was Maya arithmetic in math class. Learning to do math in base-20 is fun! Then there was units on ancient history and for some reason I got really interested in Ancient Egypt. I even did a project on Pre-Dynastic Egyptian art for Art class. The teacher took a look at my giant tome and promptly gave me 100%.

Then there was Linguistics 11 at UC Berkeley. While I was pursuing a computer science degree in university, I also took a lot of archaeology and linguistics classes. I even tried to figure out if there was an anthropology minor, but they didn't have that at the time. Linguistics 11 was Writing Systems. In other words, that was the beginning of Ancient Scripts. I started the website shortly afterwards, around 1996, and it's been alive ever since.