Three ancient statues, engraved with a little-understood sub-Saharan language, have been unearthed in Sudan.
The ram statues symbolise the god Amun, and include the first discovery of a complete royal dedication in Meroitic script, only found before in fragments.
It is the oldest written sub-Saharan language and dates from the Meroe period of 300BC to AD450.
Archaeologist Vincent Rondot said it was "an important discovery", but the inscriptions were hard to interpret.
The statues were discovered three weeks ago at el-Hassa, a site close to Sudan's 50-odd Meroe pyramids, about 200 km (120 miles) north of the capital Khartoum.
Mr Rondot said: "It is one of the last antique languages that we still don't understand.
"We can read it. We have no problem pronouncing the letters. But we can't understand it, apart from a few long words and the names of people."
Experts are working on deciphering the inscriptions, using previously found fragments.
"It is absolutely essential to understand it... We only need to read the last words remaining on the inscription," Mr Rondot, was quoted as saying by news agency AFP.
The dig, funded by the French foreign ministry, is also providing more information on the reign of a little-known king, Amanakhareqerem, mentioned in the inscriptions on the rams.
"Before we started the dig we only had four documents in his name. We don't even know where he was buried," he said.
"We are beginning to understand the importance of that king," he said, according to Reuters news agency.
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quote:It is the oldest written sub-Saharan language and dates from the Meroe period of 300BC to AD450.
Of course Egyptian, Semitic(Afro-Asiatic) etc.. is a sub-Saharan language and was written before then.
It's funny because Europeans can just walk around Africa and stumble upon an ancient African civilizations anywhere and everywhere, and they'll still be surprised and amazed. But when they desperately search for their origins in Europe, they come up with zilch, nada. Therefore and hence Eurocentrism and the discrediting of actual African peoples contributions, to African civilizations.
quote: Christopher Ehret Professor of History, African Studies Chair University of California at Los Angeles
The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east.
In the infamous words of Arturo Schomburg to Dr. Clarke
quote: In an interview with Civil Rights Journal, Clarke described his first encounter with the man who "opened up my eyes to the fact that I came from a old people, older than slavery, older than the people who oppressed us."
"He was holding down the desk. I was a teenager then. So I wanted to know the whole history of my people all over the world, henceforth, in the hour þ his lunch hour!
"'Sit down, son,' he said. 'What you're calling African history, Negro history, are the missing pages of World history. Read the history of the people who took you out of history, and you will find out why they were so insecure they had to take you out of history, why they could not stand for your history to compete with theirs'
"Once I began to have some background in European history, I could bring African history into proper focus. But Arthur Schomburg, more than any other single human being, set me in motion in the pursuit of a career as a teacher of history," says the 80-year old Dr. Clarke, Professor Emeritus of African and World History at Hunter College's Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies.
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Of course Egyptian, Semitic(Afro-Asiatic) etc.. is a sub-Saharan language and was written before then.![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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