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Originally posted by Ebony Allen:
The Near East did develop writing before Egypt. The ancient Near Eastern people were black people anyway.

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^^i THINK THIS IS AT LEAST DEBATABLE AS DISCUSSED ABOVE,
WHERE SYSTEMATIC WRITING IN THE NILE VALLEY SEEMS TO APPEAR
BEFORE MESOPOTAMIA. UPDATES FOR NEW DATA WELCOME.


AND SOME DATA ALSO SHOWS THAT ANCIENT EGYPTIAN
WRITING HELPED CREATE MODERN ALPHABETS- NOT 100%
BUT THERE ARE CLEAR LINKS TO EGYPTIAN EFFORTS


FROM THE BOOK "LANGUAGE VISIBLE" - INSPIRATION FOR MODERN ALPHABET FLOWED FROM EGYPT



[quote]


"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took their cur from the Canaanite evidence. Your local library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around 1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors were looking at imported Egyptian scrolls and artwork...

By 1998, Darnell and others had reached a couple of dramatic conclusions. First, the two inscriptions are probably the oldest alphabetic writing yet discovered, certainly the oldest that can be dated confidently: They were carved in about 1800 B.C., give or take a century. More important, the inscriptions can be viewed as signposts that point directly back to the alphabet's invention. On the basis of the Wadi el-Hol evidence, that invention is now assigned to around 2000 B.C. in Egypt - about three centuries earlier (and in a different country) than previously thought. "Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era.: announced the front-page New York Times headline of a November 1999 piece reporting on the work.

The evidence is in the letter shapes, Darnell explains. Study has confirmed that every letter of the two inscriptions is copied from some preexisting symbol in Egyptian rock-writing and/or hieroglyphics. This is where the inventors and early users of the alphabet found their letter shapes.

Certain Wadi el-Hol letter shapes suggest a particular moment in time when that copying occurred. We know enough about Egyptian rock writing to track the evolution of its symbols, and several Wadi el-Hol letters clearly reflect Egyptian symbol forms of the early, Middle Kingdom, around 2000 B.C. Yet the Wadi el-Hol writing preserves letter shapes bequeathed from the alphabet's invention, around 2000 B.C."

"Who were the inventors? Darnell believes they may have been in the Egyptian army: Semitic mercenaries or similar, whom the Egyptians would have called Amu (Asiatics). These peoples were illiterate originally. But the army that they joined happened to have a vigorous writing method for themselves. Perhaps the inventors were junior officers among the Amu, individuals who had learned some standard Egyptian rock-writing and were able to work from there. Perhaps, Darnell theorizes, they got help from Egyptian army scribes, who sought to improve the foreigner’s organization with the gift of literacy.

As to who might have carved the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, same answer as above. Not the inventors themselves, of course, but their great-great-great-grandnephews, serving in Egypt’s camel corps. It was the army that did most of the writing along desert roads."

--David Sacks (2003). Language visible: unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z. Random House. pp. 34-37


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http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/14/world/finds-in-egypt-date-alphabet-in-earlier-era.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm




Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet In Earlier Era
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: November 14, 1999

On the track of an ancient road in the desert west of the Nile, where soldiers, couriers and traders once traveled from Thebes to Abydos, Egyptologists have found limestone inscriptions that they say are the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.

Their discovery is expected to help fix the time and place for the origin of the alphabet, one of the foremost innovations of civilization.

Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 B.C., two or three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of a nascent alphabet. The first experiments with alphabet thus appeared to be the work of Semitic people living deep in Egypt, not in their homelands in the Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought.

Although the two inscriptions have yet to be translated, other evidence at the discovery site supports the idea of the alphabet as an invention by workaday people that simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the elite hands of official scribes. As such, alphabetic writing was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press much later.

Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand by which fewer than 30 symbols, each one representing a single sound, could be combined to form words for a wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually replaced writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics in which hundreds of pictographs, or idea pictures, had to be mastered.

''These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, considerably earlier than anyone had thought likely,'' Dr. John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said last week in an interview about the discovery.

''They seem to provide us with evidence to tell us when the alphabet itself was invented, and just how.''

Dr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah, a Ph.D. student in Egyptology, made the find while conducting a survey of ancient travel routes in the desert of southern Egypt, across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the 1993-94 season, they came upon walls of limestone marked with graffiti at the forlorn Wadi el-Hol, roughly translated as Gulch of Terror.

Last summer, the Darnells returned to the wadi with several specialists in early writing. A report on their findings will be given in Boston on Nov. 22 at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Working in the baking June heat ''about as far out in the middle of nowhere as I ever want to be,'' Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California, assisted the investigation by taking detailed pictures of the inscriptions for analysis using computerized photointerpretation techniques. ''This is fresh meat for the alphabet people,'' he said.

''Because of the early date of the two inscriptions and the place they were found,'' said Dr. P. Kyle McCarter Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University. ''it forces us to reconsider a lot of questions having to do with the early history of the alphabet. Things I wrote only two years ago I now consider out of date.''

Dr. Frank M. Cross, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern languages and culture at Harvard University, who was not a member of the research team but who has examined the evidence, judged the inscriptions ''clearly the oldest of alphabetic writing and very important.'' He said that enough of the symbols in the inscriptions were identical or similar to later Semitic alphabetic writing to conclude that ''this belongs to a single evolution of the alphabet.''

The previously oldest evidence for an alphabet, dated about 1600 B.C., was found near or in Semitic-speaking territory, in the Sinai Peninsula and farther north in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the ancient Canaanites. These examples, known as Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions, were the basis for scholars' assuming that Semites developed the alphabet by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs, but doing this in their own lands and not in Egypt itself.

From other, nonalphabetic writing at the site, the Egyptologists determined that the inscriptions were made during Egypt's Middle Kingdom in the first two centuries of the second millennium B.C. And another discovery in June by the Darnells seemed to establish the presence of Semitic people at the wadi at the time of the inscriptions.

Surveying a few hundred yards from the site, the Darnells found an inscription in nonalphabetic Egyptian that started with the name of a certain Bebi, who called himself ''general of the Asiatics.'' This was a term used for nearly all foreigners, most of whom were Semites, and many of them served as mercenary soldiers for Egyptian rulers at a time of raging civil strife or came as miners and merchants. Another reference to this Bebi has been found in papyrus records.

''This gives us 99.9 percent certainty,'' Dr. Darnell said of the conclusion that early alphabetic writing was developed by Semitic-speaking people in an Egyptian context. He surmised that scribes in the troops of mercenaries probably developed the simplified writing along the lines of a semicursive form of Egyptian commonly used in the Middle Kingdom in graffiti. Working with Semitic speakers, the scribes simplified the pictographs of formal writing and modified the symbols into an early form of alphabet.

''It was the accidental genius of these Semitic people who were at first illiterate, living in a very literate society,'' Dr. McCarter said, interpreting how the alphabet may have arisen. ''Only a scribe trained over a lifetime could handle the many different types of signs in the formal writing. So these people adopted a crude system of writing within the Egyptian system, something they could learn in hours, instead of a lifetime. It was a utilitarian invention for soldiers, traders, merchants.''

The scholars who have examined the short Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are having trouble deciphering the messages, though they think they are close to understanding some letters and words. ''A few of these signs just jump out at you, at anyone familiar with proto-Sinaitic material,'' said Dr. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and history of the Middle East. ''They look just like one would expect.''

The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line derived from the hieroglyphic sign for water and almost identical to the symbol for M in later Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is less certain. The figure of a stick man, with arms raised, appears to have developed into an H in the alphabet, for reasons unknown.

Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that eventually evolved from the image of an ox head into A and from a house, which looks more like a 9 here, into the Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and transitions of A and B are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites, was passed to the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th century B.C. and certainly by the 9th century B.C. From the Greeks the simplified writing system entered Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination word for the Greek A and B, alpha and beta.

The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think they understand are, reading right to left, the title for a chief in the beginning and a reference to a god at the end.

If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins of alphabetic writing well before the probable time of the biblical story of Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars said. The Semites involved in the alphabet invention would have been part of an earlier population of alien workers in Egypt.

Although it is still possible that the Semites took the alphabet idea with them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary writing of a similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely.

The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely pictographic until about 1400 B.C. The Sumerians are generally credited with the first invention of writing, around 3200 B.C., but some recent findings at Abydos in Egypt suggest a possibly earlier origin there. The issue is still controversial.

For Dr. Darnell, though, it is exciting enough to learn that in a forsaken place like Wadi el-Hol, along an old desert road, people showed they had taken a major step in written communication. He is returning to the site next month for further exploration.

==================================================

Ancient Egyptian writing a distinctly African development says conservative Egyptologist F. Yurco.

{QUOTE}

"Vestigial traces of the dynastic race theory still linger in the writings of some scholars, who hint at a "Mesopotamian stimulus" to Egyptian culture through writing or other cultural aspects. But it has now been definitely shown that Mesopotamian writing arose from clay tokens used in early invoices for livestock transshipments (Schmandt-Besserat 1992, 1-13, 93-1298, 120-65, 184-99). Later, indeed scribes in Mesopotamia predominated in the temple and palace economies; but kings and royalty were rarely literate. In Egypt, by contrast, writing arose from the deisre of early chieftains and kings to commemorate their deeds and accomplishments (Arnett 1982; Hassan 1983, 1, 7-8; Williams and Logan 1987, 245-85). Its roots lay in the painted buffware of Naqada II, whose totemic emblems for divinities show forms recognizable in later hieroglyphic script (Hoffman 1991, 31, fig. 7; Arnett 1982).

Thus Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing systems have totally disparate origins. In later Egyptian Dynastic times literacy extended from the top of society downward. Egyptian kings and royalty had to be literacy- in sharp contrast to those in Mesopotamia- and the bureaucracy that arose around the early Dynastic rulers encouraged in spread of writing, as did the religious needs of lower-ranked Egyptians (Baines 1983; Ray 1986). A scribal class evolved from the Archaic Period to the Old Kingdom, basically as account keepers for the elite and as bureaucrats for the government's taxing and documentary functions. During all periods the means of social advancement to the elite was through literacy (Baines 1983).

The ancient Egyptian writing system was therefore a distinctly African development, and the evidence for this does indeed contradict some of the diffusionist reasoning that grew out of the Aryan Model, as well as the prominent position ascribed to Mesopotamian influence."

-- Yurco, F "An Egyptological Review" IN Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 1996, Univ of North Carolina Press, p. 62-100

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Data from Malta confirms that Egyptian hieroglyphics used as basis for modern alphabets
{QUOTE}


"In the ancient Middle East the earliest civilizations to develop
writing were Egypt and Mesopotamia with both jockeying for
position as to which came first. The Egyptian writing system is
of particular interest to us as it was the one copied and developed
through the ages by different subsequent civilizations into the
alphabet we use today...

The Peleset/Philistines did not possess a
writing system of their own and borrowed very
heavily from Egyptian hieroglyphics. The
Phonecian writing system was adapted from this
Philistine/Caananite script around 1100BC. Their
writing system composed an alphabet which like
hieroglyphics consisted only of consonants.. To
conclude, it can be said that Egyptian hieroglyphics
survive today in two forms. One is through a
handful of demotic glyphs which have been incorporated
into the living Coptic alphabet. The other is as
the precursor for the Phonecian alphabet which
evolved into our present Indo-European English
writing."


--- Egyptologist Adrian Kerr in: Kerr, Adrian (2008) Ancient Egypt and Us:
The Impact of Ancient Egypt on the Modern World. Ferniehirst p. 95

Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

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Originally posted by mena7:
Great post Doug.According to the book The African Origin of Classical Civilization by GJK Campbell-Dunn The Mande and Yoruba created Minoan and Greek civilization.The Etruscan were Mande and they peopled the Italian peninsula until the rise of Rome.The Yoruba, Akan and Kongo created Roman civilization.The evidence is in the Niger-Congo language those people are speaking.The evidence is in the African name of Italian and Greek cities.The evidence is in their culture and religion that originated and are still being practice in Africa.European classical civilization was created by black African and black Phoenician/Carthage.Black people and their mulato descendant ruled European classical civilisation.White people played a minimal role in classic civilization.

The Empire of Ghana and Empire of Mali gold trade via the Moors of Spain enriched Europe.Moorish schools, universities and libraries with worldwide books reeducated the European who were dumbdown by the Catholic Church and created a European renaissance in science, business and military power.The European also received knowledge from the black Canaanite/Arab when they occupied Palestine during the crusade era.The silk trade from China that started in the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire brought eastern knowledge to Europe.

Doug you are right in the age of discovery the European stole the Atlantic trade to America from the West African.The European stole the Indian ocean trade of East Africa to India from the Swahili traders.In the 19 cent the Euro stole all the world sea trade routes.

The open society and integration system is a fraud to empower white European.Black inventor and businessman are not publicized or exposed to the media like the white professional.Euro Academia erased black people from Ancient history(Egypt, Sumeria, Canaan) and classical history(Greece, Rome, Persia) to denied them the respect of the anteriority of black civilization.

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Posts: 8897 | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged |