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[QUOTE]Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova: [QB] But mothers do give birth to men.. :) [b]EGYPT'S PIONEERING DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING- NON-ALPHABETICAL AND ALPHABETICAL[/b] [IMG]https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bdn4y5o6Jj8/V-_p6Xds74I/AAAAAAAACpc/WapZaoSimjkllaht4LVHbz9NSldTG0vZQCLcB/s1600/egyptian_writing_pioneering.jpg[/IMG] [b]Egypt a pioneer of writing before Mesopotamia[/b] [i]"The earliest known Sumerian writings date back to 3000BC while the German team's find shows that Abydos inscriptions date to 3400BC. The first Pharaonic dynasty began in 2920BC with King Menes. The earliest known writing in Dynasty Zero is much earlier than the oldest writing discovered in Mesopotamia." [/i] --[b]Gaballa Ali Gaballa, Secretary-General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities:[/b] 1999. IN: Nevine El-Aref, "Did writing originate in Egypt?" Al-Ahram Weekly: 1 - 7 April 1999, Issue No. 423 [b]Certain writing forms in Mesopotamia and only understandable from Egyptian perspective [/b] [i]"[Archaeologist] Dreyer asserted that the obsidian used to make this bowl came from Ethiopia suggesting significant cultural contacts among Nile Valley populations. He concluded his presentation by noting similarities between specific Egyptian and Mesopotamian objects and suggesting that perhaps there is an initial influence of Egyptian writing on Mesopotamia because there are signs on Mesopotamian objects that are only "readable" from the standpoint of the Egyptian language, but not the Mesopotamian language."[/i] -- German archaeologist Gunther Dreyer. 2000. "Beginnings of Writing in Ancient Egypt" IN: - "Recent Finds in Predynastic Egypt." ANKH Journal 8/9: 1999-2000. [IMG]http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/trade/images/shop.jpg[/IMG] [b]Africa's Nile Valley shares in creation of the historic alphabet[/b] [i]"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."[/i] --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] [b]The Egyptian Western Desert- location of Egyptian military scripts adopted by both Egyptian scribes and Semitic speakers into alphabetic forms[/b] http://www.codex99.com/typography/11.html [i]"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).."[/i] --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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