Category: Archaeology

For several years I have been deeply concerned with the proliferation of pseudoscience in anthropology. In 2007 I had the remarkable opportunity to teach a seminar on pseudoarchaeology, leading to the Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive. Of particular interest and concern to me is the use and misuse of inscriptional evidence in pseudoarchaeology, because few archaeologists have any expertise in linguistics, and few linguists have any expertise in archaeology. For instance, it is impossible to deal adequately with the work of the late Barry Fell without the ability to work with both sets of methods and data. Given this blog’s focus on the intersection of linguistic and archaeological anthropology, you should expect to read quite a bit about this subject here. Perhaps someday I’ll even write that article on Barry Fell’s cult of masculinity that I’d been meaning to put together.

There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque. As a language isolate, the ongoing quest to understand the origins and possible cultural affiliations of the Basques, so thoroughly European and yet so foreign, has attracted incredible scholarly attention over the past century and more, with molecular genetics now added to the mix of material culture and historical linguistics as part of the often-misemployed ‘race-language-culture’ triad. One of the more popular theories among some scholars (particularly the geneticists) is that the Basques are the remnants of Paleolithic peoples in Europe who were largely replaced by the Indo-Europeans. This basically relies on the fact that the Basques have higher percentages of certain genetic markers than their neighbours, but there is no other reason to believe that it is true.

Yet there is very minimal textual evidence for the Basque language prior to the eleventh century CE, making it very hard to trace Basque history (and, a fortiori, its prehistory). There are several hundred personal, deity and place-names recorded in Roman inscriptions in a probably-related language called Aquitainian, dating to the 2nd century CE, but no full texts or even phrases. Until 2006, that is, when reports surfaced that a group of 270 inscribed pieces of 3rd and 4th century CE pottery, glass, and brick had been found at the site of Iruña-Veleia in the Basque country with what was clearly Basque(oid) language (see articles here and here).

You will note that the response was not exactly enthusiastic from the academic community. I recall reading the blog post at Language Hat (the second link) and thinking, “Huh, yeah, probably fakes.” This is quite simply the only rational strategy in a field that has been riddled with pseudoscientific language comparison, through the late Dr. Fell’s Epigraphic Society and its claims for widespread pre-Roman transatlantic commerce, through the pseudoarchaeologist Marija Gimbutas’ pseudo-feminist Indo-Europeanism, and many others. And the find was so perfect – evidence not only that Basque was written in the 3rd century CE in quantity, but that the Basques were Christians at a time when most of Western Europe was not. And so when nothing was published following this ‘finding’, and no photos given anywhere (not even in the media) of any of the artifacts, I was neither surprised nor overly disappointed, and presumed that the initial reports were exaggerated and at best, that some new Aquitanian names had been found.

And indeed, word has come out this week in the Guardian that the whole thing is not only a fraud, but a hoax of the most preposterous degree. For instance:

– The glue used on some of the artifacts is apparently modern.
– The Calvary scene depicting the crucified Jesus apparently contains the inscription ‘R.I.P.’, essentially endorsing the heresy that Jesus did not rise from the dead but in fact was dead.
– The presence of (purportedly) Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (essentially extinct by the time) alongside the expected texts in Latin script (recording both Latin and Basque language). This leads to the claim that “The hieroglyphics caused speculation about the existence of third century Egyptologists who might have created the inscriptions to teach children.”
– References to the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and to the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes (!!!).

Now, this is not the first time that a preposterous hoax has been perpetrated. The Davenport tablets ‘excavated’ in Iowa in 1877 exhibit similarly ridiculous characteristics. But given the degree of scrutiny to which archaeological finds are exposed these days, and given the demands for publication, and the risk to the professional reputation of the excavator, such a shoddy hoax is difficult to explain. For his part, the excavator, Eliseo Gil, is maintaining that the finds are genuine (article in Spanish), although if even half of what has come to light is true, this is an utter hoax. Could we have a new affaire Glozel in the making? Not unless things are much muddier than they now seem to be.

After my complaining yesterday, my wife Julia Pope pointed me in the direction of a fascinating article by John Noble Wilford in the New York Times yesterday about the discovery of a stele (inscribed monument) at the site of Zincirli (known as Sam’al in antiquity) in southeastern Turkey. It was found this past summer during the excavations at Zincirli directed by David Schloen at the Oriental Institute, and will be discussed at the American Schools of Oriental Research / Society for Biblical Literature meetings which begin tomorrow in Boston.

The stele dates to the 8th century BCE, and suggests the existence of cultural hybridization between Luwians (Anatolian Indo-Europeans, speakers of a language related to Hittite) and Aramaeans (Semitic-speakers from the Levant). The stele contains Luwian personal names, but the script is Phoenician-Aramaic and records a language that the translator calls Sam’alian, but which is basically an archaic form of Aramaic. We have known for over a century that Zincirli was a major border region where cultural contact took place, but this is pretty good textual evidence that shows that speakers of Indo-European languages were using Semitic languages and writing systems for mortuary purposes (rather than merely for trading purposes, for instance).

And unlike the Shaanxi oracle bones or the paleo-Hebrew ostracon, in this news article we have a very interesting partial translation by Dennis Pardee at Chicago: “I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.” One of the more interesting features is the use of the phrase ‘my soul that is in this stele’ – this is decidedly unusual for the Near East, to conceive of a soul separate from the body, entombed in stone. No tomb and no mortuary remains have been found at or near the stele, but its iconography depicts a man receiving offerings of food and drink, as is further suggested from the inscription. Whether this actually represents a previously-unidentified religious tradition, no one can say for sure, but the evidence is suggestive.

Although there are no numerals on the stele, I am quite enthused about this find as it relates to my research. I have thought for some years that the Hittite-Luwian written numerals may have played some role in inspiring the Aramaic-Phoenician numerical system that emerged in the 8th century BCE. The earliest numerical inscription ever described as Aramaic is on an 8th century ostracon from Tell Qasile, in which the numeral 30 is expressed as three horizontal strokes ( ≡ ), each stroke with the value of 10 (Lemaire 1977: 280). This is the representation found regularly in Luwian inscriptions (Hawkins 1986). However, it is not the normal form used in later Aramaic inscriptions, where the standard representation would be two horizontal strokes followed by a single stroke: written right to left, roughly -=).

But this isn’t a particularly strong argument, and I don’t make a great deal of this similarity in my forthcoming book – one artifact does not make an absolute case for a cultural borrowing, especially not when the ‘borrowing’ is simply the use of horizontal strokes for 10. The traditional wisdom is that while Anatolian Indo-European speakers received a lot of cultural influence from Mesopotamia and the Levant, their representational systems (writing systems, numerals, etc.) were quite distinct. However, given this new stele, if it turns out that contact between Anatolia and the Levant was greater than we previously anticipated, a Luwian borrowing becomes more strongly supported. I look forward to seeing the publication that will surely emerge from this work, and will keep you updated.

Works cited
Hawkins, J.D. 1986. Writing in Anatolia: imported and indigenous systems. World Archaeology 17(3): 363-375.
Lemaire, André. 1977. Inscriptions hébraiques, vol. 1. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

A recent China Daily news story reports on the discovery of inscribed oracle bones (jiǎgǔpiàn) in Shaanxi province, dating to the Zhou dynasty (11th – 7th centuries BCE). Over the past few months inscriptions have been found comprising over 1100 characters in total. (As in modern Chinese writing, each character is roughly the equivalent of a single lexical unit, most often what we would call a word).

Apparently 1100 characters is a ‘new record’, whatever that means. Does anyone else find it odd that so much attention is being paid to the number of characters found? It’s reminiscent of the sort of student (thankfully, rare) who uses word count as a proxy for paper quality when arguing a grade: “But sir, I have 5000 words! How did I get a C?”

I’m also struck by the similarity between this report and my last post on the 10th century BCE Israelite (Hebrew?) inscription. In both cases, the presence of writing (and in this case, the quantity) is seen as being informative on the nature and context of literacy, and the presence of the word for ‘king’ is seen as particularly noteworthy. In this case, however, the Zhou dynasty is several centuries (at minimum) into the history of Chinese writing, and there is no question that the Zhou state was politically and socially complex, featuring high degrees of social stratification. Hey, I understand that archaeologists spend a lot of time looking for exciting stuff like this, and inevitably you want to tell us all about it. But just once, couldn’t we have a news report that talks in detail about the content of the writing and the context of the inscription?