Earliest New World Writing

A pattern of insect, ear of corn, inverted fish and other symbols written on a stone tablet seems to be one of the ancient writings of the Western Hemisphere.

The pattern of symbols covering the face of the rectangular block also represents a previously unknown ancient writing system.

The text contains 28 distinct glyphs or symbols, some of which are repeated three and four times. The writing system does not appear to be linked to any known later scripts and may represent a dead end, according to the study.

Other experts not involved in the study agreed with Houston and his colleagues that the horizontally arranged inscription shows patterns that are the hallmarks of true writing, including syntax and language-specific word order.[Mysterious stone slab bears ancient writing]

Not all of these symbols are unfamiliar to archeologists. Mary Pohl at Florida State University is an expert on the Olmec. She’s analyzed Olmec symbols on jewelry and a cylindrical seal that dates almost as far back as the inscribed tablet. She says a few of the symbols are clearly written versions of carved stone objects, like an ear of corn, previously found at Olmec archeological sites.

“One sign looks actually like a corn cob with silk coming out the top,” Pohl says. Other signs are unique, she says, and never before seen, like one of an insect.

Pohl says these objects — and thus probably the writing — had a special value in rituals.

“We see that the writing is very closely connected with ritual and the early religious beliefs, because they are taking the ritual carvings and putting them into glyphs and making writing out of them,” Pohl says. “And all of this is occurring in the context of the emergence of early kings and the development of a centralized power and stratified society.”[Earliest New World Writing Discovered]

This stone tablet found in the Mexican state of Veracruz is believed to have been written by the Olmecs and is believed to be 2900 years old. The Olmec civilization existed from 1200 BC to 400 BC in south-central Mexico and are famous for the giant heads they carved on stone.

See Also: Enlarged image of the stone called Cascajal block

Exodus Decoded (2)

Read Part 1

The final pieces of the puzzle is the location of Mount Sinai, the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Currently it is believed to be in Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai. In the novel, The Last Cato, we saw the protagonists going there to retrieve some ancient parchments. According to Simcha Jacobovici, this place does not fit a single Biblical criteria and is not in any flock grazing distance. Then he identifies it as Gebel Hashem el-Tarif in Egypt because it has a cleft from which Moses could have preached, has the graves of holy men and there is a fresh water spring at the top, a rare thing in Sinai.

According to the Bible, Moses placed the ten commandments in a golden box called the Ark of the Covenant (the same artifact that Nazis and Indiana Jones fight over in The Raiders of the Lost Ark). In the tombs in Mycenae, Simcha Jacobovici finds an image of the Ark of the Covenant carved in gold. The documentary concludes that with all this evidence it is now sure that the Exodus is a historical fact.

This is documentary is filled with stunning graphics which I have not seen in any documentary, except maybe Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. The animations and the visuals are an absolute delight to watch, but still it could not convince Hershel Shanks, the editor of Biblical Archaeological Society.

On the things I know a little about, I tend to disagree with you. Beginning with the Hyksos. This is an old idea. It’s hard to find a scholar today who subscribes to it. Among its many problems: Where were the Israelites for 300 years [from 1500 to 1200 BCE] after the Egyptian expulsion of the Hyksos/Israelites? (Incidentally, you’re not really changing Egyptian chronology, despite what you say. What you are doing is simply dating the Exodus to 1500 BCE.)

Or take the Semitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadem. You use a conjectural translation [“God, save me”] of [William Foxwell] Albright. This decipherment is really not secure. Kyle McCarter thinks he has accurately deciphered this writing. He has not yet published it. But everyone knows that Albright’s efforts are uncertain. But even if correct, “El” is not necessarily the Israelite God. It is the generic word for “God.” Many Semites used it. Everyone accepts the idea that Semites were worker/slaves(?) at Serabit. But you jump to the conclusion that they were Israelites—in the 16th century BCE.

Or take your identification of “Jacob.” This name appears fairly frequently at this time. But that doesn’t mean it refers to the Biblical Jacob. The appearance of the name is appropriately used to give a plausibility to the story, but not to say this is Joseph’s father. [The Exodus Debated]

The first historical reference to the Israelites date from 1207 BCE, which is a date much after the demise of the Harappan Civilization in India (to give a time reference). According to Ronald Hendel of the University of California, Berkeley, if the Exodus represents the expulsion of the Hyksos, then they would have been roaming in the desert for about 300 years, which is the same point Hershel Shanks makes. The entire documentary stands on the basis of this date of 1500 BCE, the time of the Santorini eruption. Also it seems the parallels between the Ahmose Stele and the biblical story of the ten plagues are not that identical.

In his defence Simcha writes that the basis of the date of 1207 BCE for first reference to the Israelites comes from the Merneptah stele which records Pharaoh Merneptah’s battles with the Israelites. If the Israelites were strong enough for the Pharoah to brag about it, then they would have been a strong force in 1207 and this can happen only in a time period of about 2-300 years after the Exodus.

The interesting part in this whole debate is the assumption that the Biblical text is a perfect historical document and all the details mentioned actually happened as told. Hershel questions this very basis.

You, on the other hand, start out with the assumption that your Bible is historically accurate, including the miracles, unless you can find some archaeological problem with doing so; and also accepting as proof anything archaeological that seems to confirm the historicity of the text, including the miracles.

You may deny this, but you do do it. As a kind of test, let me ask you if you would apply the same presumption of historicity to other ancient texts, such as Homer and Gilgamesh? Would you accept all the details in Homer as historically accurate, even the miracles and the acts of the gods? Do you accept as a historical fact that the wildman Gilgamesh was acculturated by a prostitute? How about his refusal of a marriage proposal by Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk? Do you believe that Utnapishtim is immortal (as the text says), perhaps still living in disguise somewhere in war-torn Baghdad?[The Exodus Debated]

The response for this from Simcha is that the Torah has been transmitted for over 2700 years without any errors, which makes it very credible. If during Sabbath Torah reading, a single letter is found smudged, the Torah is declared un-Kosher and removed. He says that no other text has such disciplined chain of transmission.

Probably Simcha has never heard of the Vedas which were transmitted exactly the same way. The largest surviving body of ancient literature has been passed down orally for over thousands of years. This Vedic lore, considered to be divine revelation was painstakingly memorized and even when the original meaning of the words were lost, the brahmins remembered and recited the hymns with the utmost fidelity[2]. Will scholars then give the same historical validity to the Vedas which they give the Torah and the Bible?

See Also: Exodus Decoded, Virtual Museum which shows all the evidence, Transcript of the program

Exodus Decoded (1)

The story of Exodus, the escape of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt to the promised land has all the ingredients of a fairy tale. The reason for the disbelief is due to various super natural elements of the story such as the ten plagues which includes the Nile turning blood red and all the first Egyptian male children dying. There is also the parting of the Red Sea and the swallowing of the Pharoah’s army by the same sea. In a new documentary, Exodus Decoded, which premiered on the History Channel about a week back, film maker Simcha Jacobovici and Executive Producer James Cameron (the same guy who made Titanic) prove that there is a scientific explanation for the Exodus.

Ahmose I was a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who reigned from 1550 to 1525 BCE . During his time the Hyksos, a group of Semites who were the rulers of lower Egypt rebelled and were expelled from Egypt. The documentary starts with a look at the Ahmose Stele stored in the Cairo Museum which records a tremendous catastrophe that struck Egypt which involved rain, thunder and storm. Usually all these do not happen in north-west Africa and was unusual. The Bible says that there was storm during the time of Exodus, so does the Stele. The Bible says there was darkness, so does the Stele. It is from this Stele that we get the name of the Pharoah as Ahmose which means brother of Moses in Hebrew. Simcha then goes to the museum and locates the mummy of Ahmose from among many mummies lying in various boxes.

Scholars have dated the Exodus to 1200 BCE, to the time of Ramesses II and the Hyksos were expelled hundreds of years before Moses. Simcha suggests a new date for the Exodus of around 1500 BCE to the time of Ahmose. He suggests that the Hyksos who were expelled were the Israelites and an expert suggests that the story in the Ahmose Stele and the Exodus refer to the same event.

The Hyksos ruled from the capital city called Avaris. Simcha films there, being the first film maker to do so. Then they find a tomb at Beni Hasan which shows evidence for the entry of Western Semitic people into Egypt. The hieroglyphs call them Amo, which means Gods people. It also records that one of the migrants rose to the highest power and his name was Joseph, son of Yakov (Jacob). Joseph wore on his fingers the seal of royal authority and Simcha shows such seals which were found through archeology. They also find a slave inscription in a cave which reads, “El, save me” which was a plea to the God of the Israelites.

About 3500 years ago, the Greek island of Santorini, located about 700 KM from the Egyptian coast had one of the largest volcanic eruptions believed to have led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete.This same eruption according to the documentary explains the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea.

During the time of the wrath of God, besides the Nile turning blood red, the Egyptian statues were toppled and there was a hail of ice and fire. Locusts swarmed the place and there was darkness among other things. The explanation offered is that Egypt is located in a region filled with fault lines. The rift between the African and Asian plates go under Santorini. The gas released by the earthquake caused the Nile to turn red and the same phenomenon was seen in Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1984. The ash from the Santorini explosion caused the skies to turn dark.

While most of these plagues can be explained due to natural phenomena, the one most difficult to explain is the death of every first born Egyptian child one night. The documentary offers an explanation for this as well. It was the night of the first passover and all the Israelites were awake and celebrating it. The Egyptians slept at that time. In Egyptian society, the first born male had special privileges and slept in a low bed which was close to the ground, while most adults slept in the roof tops. The Carbon di-Oxide which rose due to the seismic activity fogged the land and affected the people who were sleeping low to the ground, which was the first born male children of Egypt. The same incident happened in Lake Nyos as well.

Then comes the major event of the parting of the Red Sea. It seems the Hebrew word, Yam Suf was mistranslated as Red Sea while it actually means Reed Sea. Instead of looking for the sea scholars should have been looking for a lake. Based on the new evidence, the film makers find the location of the Reed Sea, a lake currently dried up, due to the Suez Canal. Again, the parting of the lake is attributed to the seismic activity.

While most people followed Moses to the promised land, some people in fact boarded ships to Greece. In 1972, in Santorini they found Minoan style wall paintings depicting a journey from Egypt to Greece with a picture of Avaris. In Mycenae in Greece they have found 3500 year old tombs with tombstones depicting sequences which show the parting of the sea and people escaping through it. Actually one expert in the museum where the tomb stones are located says the depictions are too abstract to make such an interpretation.

Tomorrow: Mt. Sinai, Ark of the Covenant, and doubts on the evidence.

Zoroastrian temple in Kurdistan

The main protagonist of Gore Vidal’s novel Creation was Cyrus Spitama, the grandson of Zoroaster. Though the novel was set in the 6th century BCE, current scholarly consensus places Zoroaster’s time at 1400 –1000 BCE making him the founder of one of the earliest religions based on revealed scripture. Other dates place him in the time of the Axial age, the time of Vidal’s novel. Zoroaster lived in Bactria in present day Afghanistan and his religion was adopted by the Persian emperor Darius, whose empire at that time included modern day Iraq as well.

Now a Zoroastrian temple has been discovered in Kurdistan, Iraq.

Duhok’s Director of Antiquities, Hasan Ahmed Qassim, has announced the discovery of a Zoroastrian temple near Jar Ston Cave, a famous ancient site. The temple is believed to be the most complete to have been unearthed in the region. It is also said that it was a Metherani temple.”

The temple was dedicated to the deity Anna Hita, indicated by the discovery of Anna Hita’s holy star, and evidence of fires, as well as fireplaces and Zoroastrian holy sand stores have been found nearby,” Qassim revealed. He further described the temple as being made up of five sanctuaries, three of which were carved into rock, with the remaining two having been constructed from stone blocks.This discovery is being hailed as the most significant archaeological development in the region in recent times.

.”This new discovery will alter the history of the region due to its unique architectural style, which differs considerably from Zoroastrian temples previously discovered,” explained the Director of Antiquities.

“The temple’s style which looks toward the four-directions is a unique style ever discovered in the area; thus it becomes an entry to studying Zarathustrian arts and archeology.”At present archaeology teams are continuing work at the site to find out more about the temple’s history.[Kurdistan: Zoroastrian Temple discovered in Duhok]

Let Us Repeat It: Learning History from Indian Blogosphere

During· school days, history was not my favorite topic due to the simple reason that history books were boring. For example, the chapter on Mughal Emperors would read like this:

Akbar ruled India from 1560 to 1605. His full name was Jalaluddin Mohammed Akbar Padshah Ghazi. He built many roads (from 1561-1563), planted trees (1564 -1567) and dug wells for travelers (1570 -1571). Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir. He planted trees (1606), dug wells (1609 -1610) and built roads (1611 -1623). Test question: What was Akbar doing in 1567?

When you find history books outside the school book realm, you find that they are mostly written by

Tamil-Brahmi in Thailand

Even though the Harappas had a script it still remains undeciphered. Brāhmī, the script in which the Asokan edicts were written is considered to be one of the earliest known scripts in India. While some Indian authorities maintain that it was derived from the Harappan script [13], the popular notion is that it was derived from a Semitic script like the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. Indo-Greek bi-lingual coins usually had the name of the King in Greek on one side and in Brāhmī on the other side.

The script used in the earliest inscriptions in Tamil were in Tamil Brahmi or Tamili script and it varied from the Asokan Brahmi. The Brāhmī script, originally was believed to be bought to South India by Buddhist and Jain monks in the post-Asokan period. Tamil Brahmi scripts dating to 3rd century BCE have been found in the caves of Jain monks in Tamil Nadu. Last year, urns containing human skeletons were found in Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu and those urns dating to 500 BCE were found to have Tamil Brāhmī inscriptions which means that the script reached Tamil Nadu during the time of the Buddha. In fact, there has been evidence that the script reached Sri Lanka also around the same time.

Now in an exciting discovery, Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions dating to second century AD have been found in pottery in Thailand.

At the request of the archaeologists, Iravatham Mahadevan, an expert in Tamil Epigraphy, has examined the inscription. He has confirmed that the pottery inscription is in Tamil and written in Tamil-Brahmi characters of about the second century AD. Only three letters have survived on the pottery fragment. They read tu Ra o… , possibly part of the Tamil word turavon meaning `monk.’

The presence of the characteristic letter Ra confirms that the language is Tamil and the script is Tamil-Brahmi. It is possible that the inscription recorded the name of a Buddhist monk who travelled to Thailand from Tamil Nadu. This is the earliest Tamil inscription found so far in South East Asia and attests to the maritime contacts of the Tamils with the Far East even in the early centuries AD.

Prof. Richard Salomon of the University of Washington, U.S., an expert in Indian Epigraphy, has made the following comment on the inscription:

“I am happy to hear that the inscription in question is in fact Tamil-Brahmi, as I had suspected. This is important, among other reasons, because it presents a parallel with the situation with Indian inscriptions in Egypt and the Red Sea area. There we find both Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and standard-Brahmi insciptions; and we now see the same in Vietnam and South-East Asia. This indicates that the overseas trade between India to both the West and the East involved people from the Tamil country and also other regions.” [Tamil-Brahmi inscription on pottery found in Thailand]

A new date for Exodus

According to the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and received the Ten Commandments from God. There are sceptics who suggest that Moses never existed as a historical figure and that the Exodus too is mythical. Now in a new documentary titled The Exodus Decoded, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici suggests that the Exodus did happen, and it happened around 1500 BCE.

Jacobovici set out on his Exodus quest after doing a documentary in the 1990s on a group of people on the Indian-Burma border who claim to be the lost Israelite tribe of Menashe. That film was met with widespread criticism by people Jacobovici branded as “so-called experts.” Jacobovici said he himself was skeptical of the tribe’s Israelite claims until he researched the subject.

Similarly with the new Exodus documentary, he asserted that with his hefty $3.5 million budget, a lack of preconceptions, and none of the restrictions of conventional archeological wisdom, he was free to reach what he insists are credible conclusions about the Exodus. The 55-year-old director, whose original claim to fame was his first-ever documentary Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews, made two and half decades ago and which focused on Ethiopian Jewry, said his research for the lost tribes film spurred him to question the widely accepted assumptions about what he called “the founding story of Western civilization” – the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

Six years later, mixing science, religion and a variety of archeological findings, Jacobovici is convinced that he has seen the light. Most of the archeological findings cited come from Egypt, with others from Greece. He said he researched in six countries, including Israel and the UK.

The 10 plagues that smote the Egyptians, according to the Bible, are explained in the documentary to be the result of a volcanic eruption on a Greek island that occurred 3,500 years ago. [Documentary sets new date for Exodus]

What was happening in the world at that time? In the middle of the second millennium BCE, Hittites , Egyptians and Mitannians were struggling for supremacy in the Levant. Myceneans of mainland Greece had taken control of Crete and the Aegean, and the Olmec of Mesoamerica had begun to build their massive ceremonial centers. In China, the Shang state had assumed control.

This time frame coincides with the time the Indus Valley civilization was on the decline probably due to the disappearance of the Ghaggar-Hakra river system, tectonic activity or a failure in monsoons. After the demise of the Indus civilization, the main cultural and political focus shifted to the east, to the Ganges valley. It was a thousand years before the Buddha was born.

This documentary also identifies an image of that time frame, 1500 BCE, of the Ark of the Covenant in an Egyptian museum, that according to film makers is proof of Exodus. The Ark of the Covenant, the sacred container which contains the stone tablets having the Ten Commandments is the same thing which the Nazis and Indiana Jones were searching for in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The documentary also identifies the real location in Mount Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Currently, Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai, built around the Chapel of the Burning Bush is considered to be the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush. When the documentary is shown on The History Channel on August 20th, we might know more details.

Prambanan temple damaged

The Indian influence over South-East Asia expanded a lot during the time of Pallavas between the fifth and seventh centuries and the influence was mainly seen in Cambodia. In Indonesia, Srivijaya, a maritime power and dynasty which controlled the empire stretching from Sumatra to Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam arose from obscurity in the 8th century. Srivijaya was an Indianised polity, more Buddhist than Brahminical with its capital near Palembang in South Eastern Sumatra.
Rival to the Srivijaya dynasty was the joint kingdoms of Sailendra and Sanjaya based in central Java. It was during their time (after 780 CE) that the temple building activity flourished in the island. These temples were based on the layout and elevation of the Pallavan and Chalukyan temples. An exception to this style of construction is the colossal temple at Borobudur, which apparently started as a Hindu temple and was converted to a Buddhist place of worship.
One of the largest Hindu temples in the region is Prambanan, located in central Java. This temple, which was built around 850 CE during the time of the Sanjaya dynasty is dedicated to the Trimurtis. There are about 200 temples in this complex and the bas-relief of the temple depicts the story of Ramayana. Parts of this temple was damaged in the recent earthquake that hit Indonesia.

Brahma temple, one of the ancient shrines in the Prambanan compound in Klaten, Central Java,has been seriously damaged by the earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale which struck Yogyakarta city and environs early Saturday morning, a tourism official said.
“In the Prambanan complex, Brahma Temple sustained serious damage in the earthquake,” Soeroso, director of archalogical heritages at the Tourism, ArtS and Culture Ministry , said here on Saturday.
Damage was also done to Plaosan Lor and Sejiwan temples but not to serious extent. Sejiwan Temple was actually in the process of being repaired and the quake undid some of the complete repairs. The Brahma Temple must now be rehabilitated totally because its basic structre had been damaged, he said. [Brahma Temple in Prambanan Complex seriously damaged]

Jiroft

Even though Subhash Kak et al wrote a book asserting that India is the Cradle of Civilization, still Mesopotamia is though to be the one. Now some new discoveries in Iran may change all that.

Archaeological excavations in the lower layers of a cemetery in Jiroft have revealed that its history goes back to the fouth millennium B.C, much before Mesopotamia. Some inscriptions were also found which proves that the writing language of Jiroft was older than that of Mesopotamia.

As the author of a three-volume history of Mesopotamia and a leading Iranian authority on the third millennium BC, Madjidzadeh has long hypothesized that Jiroft is the legendary land of Aratta, a

The Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts

Remember the Dead Sea Scrolls , the 2000 year old manuscripts that tell us that everything attributed to Jesus–and Christianity–is borrowed from an extremist Jewish sect that existed in the Qumran region of Palestine on the west shore of the Dead Sea. Now, some manuscripts which are called the Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism have been dated to between the first and fifth centuries A.D.

The majority of the manuscripts were found in Bamiyan in Afghanistan and were smuggled out to a collector.

It was in 1996 that the first group of manuscripts was discovered. The finders set off towards Pakistan, and after being chased by the Taliban in the Hindu Kush they managed to cross the Khyber Pass, eventually reaching Islamabad. There the manuscripts passed through dealers before being acquired by London specialist Sam Fogg, who sold the 108 fragments to Mr Schøyen. This was followed by further batches, which were considerably larger and usually included hundreds of folios and the occasional complete manuscript. Altogether around 15 separate consignments of Bamiyan material have been acquired by Mr Schøyen.[Buddhism’s “Dead Sea Scrolls” for sale to Norway]

The antiquity of the manuscripts make it an important link in the history of Buddhism.

“Buddhism was originally an oral tradition but little is known about how it developed from spoken word to written word, so the discovery and date confirmation will give us a unique insight into the development of Buddhist literature,” he said. The new manuscripts are therefore the missing link in the historical chain.[‘Dead Sea scrolls’ may be missing link in Buddhism]

One article in the line says

“The Senior collection dating is of particular importance as this result makes a major contribution to Indian chronology in showing that an early date of 78 AD for a key historical figure, the Kushan emperor Kanishka, is no longer tenable.” ‘Dead Sea scrolls’ may be missing link in Buddhism]

There is no explanation on how this conclusion was reached. After reading all this, I am confused as to why these manuscripts are called the equivalent of Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls challenge the origin of Christianity while so far we have not seen anything similar in the Buddhist documents. The only similarity between them is that both are old, which is nothing new in the field of archaeology. So why not just call it ancient Buddhist documents without any reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls.