Tuesday, April 8 John Darnell, Yale University / The Illustrated Desert: the origins of writing in the Egyptian Desert /612 Schermerhorn, 6:30 pm Co-sponsored by the New York Society of the Archaeological Institute of America
Although the Western Desert of Egypt is now-apart from the oases that lie island-like within its great expanse-a marginal and uninhabited area, the region was once a hub of international trade and interaction between widely dispersed human populations. Interacting both with other groups and with their environment, the early inhabitants of the Western Desert employed an increasingly complex system of rock art images to create places in the desert expanse, and began to communicate with other people separated from them by both space and time. These early images, cosmographs that described and thereby supported the solar cycle and cosmic order, ultimately gave birth to the hieroglyphic writing system.
During a later period of increased desert activity, non-Egyptian auxiliaries of the Egyptian military borrowed Egyptian signs and rock art techniques and created their own writing system, the earliest precursor of the alphabet as we know it. The precursor of Egyptian scripts, the earliest proto-hieroglyphic inscription, and the oldest alphabetic inscription, are located in the West Desert, and developed out of activities in that hinterland of points of contact between different cultures, and places of intense human interaction with a harsh environment: these qualities of Egypt's deserts make them of pivotal importance for understanding the origins and development of pharaonic civilization, and reveal the importance of looking outside of the traditional center of a civilization to find the origins of important cultural development.
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