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[QUOTE]Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova: [QB] [IMG]https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cKzJe6X59qI/V1N6wJzAXpI/AAAAAAAACeo/LrvtoL8IL7s2bK-EuibZbChlC9avu_QvQCLcB/s1600/nsibidi_chart_big_schillingford_isichei_dathorne_mcgregor.jpg[/IMG] "The use of nsibidi is that of ordinary writing. I have in my possession a copy of the record of a court case from a town of Enion [Enyong] taken down in it, and every detail, except the evidence, is most graphically described- the parties in the case, the witnesses, the dilemma of the chief who tried it, his sending out messengers to call other chiefs to help him, the finding of the court and the joy of the successful litigants and of their friends.." --J. K., Macgregor (January-June 1909). "Some Notes on Nsibidi.". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 39: 209-219. “Elphinstone Daryell, however argues that "many of the signs reproduced are connected with one another and form short stories. He gives several examples of how this is done and one folktale in particular is worthy of mention- the story of the miracle child, born from his mother's knee, who is disowned by his father. In this version the child kills his father with a spear and disappears up a long rope into the sky. This is all skilfullly narrated by the clever assembling of four geometrically patterned symbols, each one representing a section of the story.. As has been shown, writing existed- writing that was not unrelated to literature, and that was pictographic. Side by side with this existed highly developed forms of writing which were in some cases applied to literature.“ -- The Black Mind: A History of African Literature. 1974. O.R. Dathorne, Professor of English, University of Kentucky, University of Minnesota Press. Cite- [Dayrell, Elphinstone (July-December 1911). "Further Notes on 'Nsibidi Signs with Their Meanings from the Ikom District, Southern Nigeria". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 41: 521-540] "Nsidibi was a script found among a number of Cross River peoples which owed nothing to foreign exemplars- each symbol is an ideograph, as in Chinese. Because each symbol represented a concept, it could be used between peopes speaking different anguages; over 500 signs are recorded, and there is reason to believe that they were only a small partof the whole. There are suggestions that it was used by the Ekpe society but there is a record of a school where children were taught signs. A curious aspect of Nsibidi, as recorded by three separate observers in the early twentieth century, was that many of the signs dealth with love affairs! It seems likely that ideographs dealing with religion and war were kept secret- and that the choice of signs to explain to European officials were an elaborate joke, as well as a way of protecting the realm of the secret/sacred from outsiders." --A History of African Societies to 1870. Elizabeth Isichei, 1997. Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand. Cambridge University Press. “The Nsibidi signs used by secret societies in various language groups in southern Nigeria, e.g. the Igbo, Efik, and Ekoi have been considered by some to be of a similar pictographic nature, but others have maintained it to be true writing, based on a logographic or syllabary system." -- Gregersen, Edgar A. (1977). Language in Africa: An introductory survey. p. 176. "However, such systems are also found in areas where Muslim influence has been less strong or is unlikely. Thus, among the Ashanti and other Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana and Cote D'Ivorie, where gold was of great political, economic and symbolic significance, many goldweights bore signs that indicated their precise ponderal value; other signs corresponded to proverbs, while others represented concepts (for example, certain aspects of the Supreme Being). The nsibidi system of the Ekoi, Igbo and Ibibio peoples of the Cross River area of present-day Nigeria used over a thousand signs to represent a considerable number of concepts as well as some sounds. Nsibidi was used to record court cases and convey complex messages, including warnings in wartime, and for summarizing folktales and personal narratives; its pictograms thus constituted a true writing system. As with the Malian systems of graphic signs, knowledge of nsibidi was often acquired within the initiation societies, but unlike the Malian ones, nsibidi signs were often tattooed on the body or dramatically enacted through gestures." --Kevin Shllingford (2004) "Literacy and Indigenous Scripts: Pre-colonial West Africa" - Encyclopedia of African History ====================================================================== [b]Nsibidi is linked not with some Arabs that showed up, but with ancient cultural artifacts and traditions in place for millennia.[/b] [IMG]https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EYhUoiSQ-q0/V1XnxHQHY4I/AAAAAAAACfM/tATtETGwzC0Eml7saYE4aUusFC369TUkACLcB/s1600/egypt_alphabetgenesis_nsibidi2_ancientcontinuity.jpg[/IMG] The Ikom monoliths in Nigeria for example, frequently show several nsibidi designs such as carefully rendered concentric circles, spirals, lozenges, and other discrete figures. These have been dated by some scholars to 120-220 AD. (Source: Alok and Emangabe stone monoliths: Ikom, Cross River State of Nigeria,-Ezio Bassani, Arte in Africa (Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1986), 103. ) [IMG]http://raai.library.yale.edu/web/art/1/1/9078_images_image_1162_medium.jpg[/IMG] Stone monoliths with Nsibidi designs- Nigeria- From Ross Archive-Yale University. http://raai.library.yale.edu/site/index.php?globalnav=image_detail&image_id=1162 [b]Other objects such as terra cotta carvings and pottery yield similarly early date ranges corresponding to the monoliths- stretching from 450AD- showing a long thread of ancient continuity into the modern era- again pointing to their ancient indigenous West African provenance long before any Europeans or Arabs appeared. [/b] [i] "The Calabar terracottas, found at the other end of the Cross River basin, offer additional early evidence of nsibidi... there are now five radiocarbon dates from Calabar and two from the nearby village of Okang Mbang that generally corroborate each other, and which are associated with hundreds of terracottas that display a considerable range of designs. Combined, the dates encompass the period ca. 450 A.D - 1440 A.D (Fig. 1.5)... When considered together, the individual Calabar results overlap significantly. For example, all five urban Calabar dates overlap in the eighth century, while two of them extend into the eleventh century, where the two Okang Mbang dates begin. Both Okang Mbang dates then correspond until the turn of the fourteenth century. Thus, if what the archaeological evidence strongly suggests-that nsibidi is indeed a modern iteration of the iconography found on the terracottas-then nsibidi is much older, even more complex, and was distributed over a broader area than previously considered. In short, there is now physical evidence that nsibidi was already a sophisticated phenomenon fifteen hundred years ago! This is remarkable in light of what is currently known about indigenous scripts in sub-Saharan Africa and, therefore, these objects further (and strongly) refute the idea that Africans had no writing until the arrival of Europeans. If modern practices are anything to go by, these signs were not just found on ceramics, but also appeared on wood sculptures, calabashes, textiles, earthen architecture, and the human body, to name just a few examples that would not be expected to survive in the archaeological record of a tropical area such as Calabar.. it is telling that Amanda Carlson, [2003- Nsibiri, gender, and literacy] in her doctoral dissertation on the implications of nsibidi usage among the Ejagham, describes fluency with such signs as literacy." [/i] --Slogar C. 2005. ICONOGRAPHY AND CONTINUITY IN WEST AFRICA- CALABAR TERRACOTTAS AND THE ARTS OF THE CROSS RIVER REGION OF NIGERIA/CAMEROON. University of Maryland. 2005. [IMG]http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/DynamicContent/ImagesBooks/9780806133423.jpg[/IMG] [b]Africa's Nile Valley shares in creation of the historic alphabet[/b] "Discoveries by Gunter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute suggest that the origin of Egyptian writing needs to be reexamined, offering the possibility that the idea of writing was developed in Egypt several centuries before it occurred in the Near East. Inscriptions from hundreds of pots and labels found at the royal cemetery at Abydos show some hieroglyphic writing as far back as 3400 BCE, with most occurring about 3200 BCE. Sumerian writing seems to have begun about 3100 BCE. The Egyptians formed and used writing in a different way than the Asians. The linguistic pictographs of Sumer were rudimentary were used primarily used for commerce. Those of Egypt were more representational of real objects and were primarily employed to identify kings, tombs and the like. A remarkable find involving early experiments with alphabetic writing in Egypt has been recently made by John C. Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, and his wife Deborah. Inscriptions discovered in the limestone cliffs on an ancient road between Thebes and Abydos, a route once heavily traveled by Asian traders and mercenaries in the Egyptian desert, are in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences. Dated between 1900 and 1000 BCE, they are two or three centuries older than previous evidence of an alphabet in the Semitic-speaking territory of the Sinai Peninsula or in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the Canaanites. While there have always been indications that Semites were inventors of the alphabet, researchers had heretofore assumed that it was developed in their own lands by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead Darnell's discovery now suggests that, working with Semitic speakers in Egypt, native scribes simplified formal pictographic Egyptian writing and modified the symbols into an early alphabet using a semi-cursive form commonly used in the Middle Kingdom." --Martin Isler (2001). Sticks, stones, and shadows: building the Egyptian pyramids. Univ of Oklahoma PRess. p. 56 [IMG]http://www.codex99.com/typography/images/ancient/wadi_al_hol_lg.jpg[/IMG] [i]The Egyptian Western Desert- location of Egyptian military scripts adopted by both Egyptian scribes and Semitic speakers into alphabetic forms[/i] http://www.codex99.com/typography/11.html "However, now with the recovery of alphabetic writing from the Egyptian Western Desert, the fairly high degree of literacy in Egyptian (knowledge of hieratic, and a hybrid of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts as well) presumed by these texts, and the well known Asiatic pres-ence within Egypt proper from the early Dynastic periods onwards, strongly suggest that it is to Egypt itself that we must look for the geographi-cal home of alphabetic writing. More specifically, the Bebi inscription and its immediate neighbors offer tantalizing clues about the context in which Semitic-speaking Asiatics adopted and adapted certain aspects of the Egyptian writing system for the needs of their own language(s). The Egyptian military, known both to have employed Asiatics (as the Bebi inscription so wonderfully attests) and to have included scribes, would provide one likely context in which Western Asiatic Semitic language speakers could have learned and eventually adapted the Egyptian writing system. Indeed, the prominence of lapidary hieratic, the form of hieratic utilized by army scribes, as models for alphabetic forms at the Wadi el-Hõl (and at Serabit).." --J. Darnell et al. 2005. Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of Egypt, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2005. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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