Category: Archaeology

Early Hebrew writing

Over the past couple of weeks there have been a number of news stories about the discovery of a new ostracon (pottery shard) from the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa southwest of Jerusalem, bearing five lines of text that have been identified as ‘Hebrew’. The ostracon was dated (through association with burnt olive pits that could be radiocarbon dated) to around 1050-970 BCE, right around where the traditional timeline puts the Biblical King David. The site is a large fortified urban one, and is located in the Valley of Elah, where it is said that David slew Goliath. If the date holds, and if the claim that this is ‘Hebrew’ writing is confirmed, then this would represent the earliest Hebrew writing known to date.

As a teacher I’ve often found it useful to present news reports to students, and ask them how they would evaluate evidence like this in light of what they already know, or to ask what further questions they would want answered before being satisfied. Because most of us (including most scholars) never go any further than the news reports, and because these reports often precede by months or even years the publication of peer-reviewed material, it’s vital to be able to evaluate this material in terms of its implications for archaeology and epigraphy. So what do we know, and how do we evaluate it?

To start with, let’s collect some articles on the subject, which will constitute our body of evidence:
BBC News, 10/30/2008
Associated Press, 10/30/2008
Mail Online, 10/31/2008
Reuters, 10/30/2008
Telegraph, 10/31/2008
New York Times, 10/30/2008

– There are no published results yet, but that’s not unusual in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, which has a fairly conservative perspective on the pace of peer review, but this is a situation where one could get scooped at any moment, so announcing a find early, to be followed up by potentially years of peer review, is not unusual in this area.

– Dating by association is a well-established archaeological technique: if two artifacts are found in the same layer, they are likely of similar age. I have no reason to think the date is off in this case, but we need to recognize right off the top that if the olive pits and the shard ended up in the same layer for reasons other than that they were deposited at around the same time, the date could be way off.

– It is true that this ostracon predates the Dead Sea Scrolls by up to 1000 years, if the dating is right. True, but irrelevant. The Dead Sea Scrolls are frequently invoked in reporting on biblical archaeology as a benchmark for ‘really old Bible stuff’, but in this case, it gives the misleading impression that what has been found is a lot older than other paleo-Hebrew writings, which is simply not the case. The Gezer calendar, which dates to perhaps 925-900 BCE (based on the paleographic style of the text), is the next oldest well-attested Hebrew inscription and is one of many, many paleo-Hebrew texts from the Iron Age in the Levant. This new find extends the history of the script back another 50-75 years, which is interesting – but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the DSS.

– The claim that this would be the ‘earliest Hebrew writing’ is true but isn’t exactly saying what you think. There are any number of other inscriptions in Semitic languages from this period – for instance, there are Phoenician inscriptions from Byblos dating to around 1000 BCE. The text on the ostracon is apparently in Proto-Canaanite script, of which most of our exemplars are from the late Bronze Age (i.e., around 1500-1000 BCE), used to write any number of ancient Semitic languages, as the BBC article notes. So the script itself is not particularly unusual for the period, and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

– And this brings us to a significant issue: the ostracon hasn’t been deciphered yet. So how do we know it’s Hebrew? Well, the BBC tells us, “Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king.” and that “Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel identified it as Hebrew because of a three-letter verb meaning “to do” which he said was only used in Hebrew.” This is significant because it identifies the language as Hebrew as opposed to something earlier. This one word on an as-yet incompletely-deciphered ostracon is being used to assert that the writer was a speaker of Hebrew, therefore an Israelite, and therefore that this provides evidence for the Kingdom of Israel in David’s time (e.g. the early 10th century BCE). But we would do well to remember that this is very preliminary stuff. Also bear in mind that our corpus of proto-Canaanite writings is small enough that it is impossible to know whether this form of “to do” was only used in Hebrew, or whether it could have been used in earlier Semitic languages as well.

– The claim is being made by several sources that this ostracon provides evidence for the historicity of King David. Not so. Rather, the claim is that the fact that there is such early writing demonstrates a high level of social complexity and a system of scribal education at the period. If true, this would tend to confirm that there was a large state in Israel in the 10th century BCE, and if one wished to associate that with the Biblical David, one could choose to do so without contradicting the evidence. The presence of words like ‘judge’ and ‘king’ in the text (if confirmed) would provide support for this position from within the text. This stands in opposition to the theory that the Israelites were more egalitarian and disunified at this period, as suggested by the heretofore pretty scanty record from the 10th century. If the latter were true, the Old Testament account would be open to more serious scrutiny; this new find doesn’t confirm the validity of anything Biblical, but rather doesn’t disconfirm it. And remember, this is one ostracon only, not an archive or even a small collection – so we have little idea of what it means. Rollston (2006), who is generally supportive of the argument that there was significant scribal education in Iron Age Israel, discusses many of the complexities behind inferring widespread literacy from the epigraphic/paleographic record.

– On the same topic: Hello, journalists? Could I make a suggestion? Just because you are writing an article about Iron Age Israel and a purported connection with King David does not mean you have to invoke Goliath. Seriously. Especially you, Daily Mail, for citing this undeciphered clay shard as evidence that David actually slew Goliath. At least the Telegraph just presents the theory that the David-Goliath story is a metaphor for Israelite-Philistine conflict at the period.

– One thing that is hardly mentioned is that the ostracon is the longest text in proto-Canaanite script yet attested. This could have important implications for our understanding of the script, once the inscription is read completely. Moreover, once it is read thoroughly, the paleographic letter-forms may actually tell us quite a bit about the date of the inscription, which could tend to confirm or refute the radiocarbon date.

– It would be a mistake to ignore the implications for the historicity of the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel for modern national conceptions and ethnic identity in contemporary Israel. The idea that 3000 years ago, there was a strong, militarily powerful unified kingdom of Israelites in that area has enormous symbolic appeal, and is one of the more controversial issues in contemporary Levantine archaeology. This issue was behind the debate over the tenure case of Nadia Abu El Haj at Barnard/Columbia a couple of years back, centrally concerned with her book, Facts on the Ground (Abu el Haj 2001).

In general, though, the presentation of the data is pretty good and the context of the discussion is generally sane. We have a lot still to learn, and I look forward to seeing the publication of the text in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

Nadia Abu El Haj (2001). Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rollston, Christopher A. 2006. Scribal education in ancient Israel: the Old Hebrew epigraphic evidence. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344: 47-74.

Genes, languages, and archaeology

John Hawks has a new blog entry entitled ‘Gene-culture models and reductionism‘, which is a thoughtful response to a 2004 letter in American Anthropologist. The letter adopts a highly skeptical view towards the possibility that genetic information can tell us much about prehistoric population history and specifically that it can tell us much about cultural and linguistic prehistory. Hawks, in contrast, takes a more moderate view that leaves open the possibility that we can use genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in tandem, while acknowledging that naively using one as a proxy for the other two is a serious error. Read it, then come back here. It’s short, and I’ll wait.

This is a subject of some interest to me, as a historically and prehistorically-minded linguistic anthropologist (or a linguistically-minded archaeological anthropologist, I don’t care which). The late Bruce Trigger and I published a chapter in 2004 (perhaps we could have found a better venue for it) in which we talk about the naive ways in which Iroquoian studies have used archaeological evidence to attribute ethnic identification (esp. ‘Iroquoian’ vs. ‘Algonkian’) to sites, and linked this problematic issue to broader problems in the use of archaeology to reconstruct language and ethnicity (Chrisomalis and Trigger 2004). The AA letter rightly points out that identifications of tribes or fixed social structures that correlate with genetic populations – or, unmentioned, languages – is problematic, and the notion that any of these must correspond with overarching ethnic identities is doubly problematic, as Barth (1969) argued persuasively decades ago. And yet …

It has long been recognized (since the 19th century at least) that language families are organized phylogenetically and that biological taxa are phylogenetic. This is partly a reflection of reality, and partly a reflection of the mutual reinforcement of phylogenetic models in linguistics and biology through academic interdisciplinary discourse over the past couple hundred years. But the problem noted by Hawks (and which no one interested in the subject can ignore) is that biological transmission (excepting some viruses) is vertical – you get all your genetic material from your parents alone – whereas cultural and linguistic transmission is both vertical and horizontal – that is, you get a lot of your culture from non-kin, including people who may not be part of your ‘tribe’. This is the sort of work that people like Steve Shennan (2002) are doing, and while I am not always convinced by the answers he reaches (particularly, I remain unconvinced that vertical, parent-child linguistic and cultural transmission is as important as he thinks it is), the research deserves more attention than it is getting.

On Tuesday, I am introducing my class to this subject through Colin Renfrew’s (2000) paper ‘At the edge of knowability: towards a prehistory of languages’. Again, I’m not always in agreement with Renfrew (I’m more of a skeptic than he is), but I’m thrilled that people are asking these questions. As social scientists and humanists, linguists and archaeologists need to forcefully assert the relevance of their data, and not let themselves be run roughshod by geneticists who treat their apex of the triad as the cornerstone of all knowledge in the field. One of my hopes for this blog, and for my research in general, is to be able to contribute to ongoing discussions on this issue. This post is, at best, a preliminary introduction to a topic which I suspect you will see here very often in the months (dare I hope for years?) to come.

Works cited

Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Chrisomalis, S. and B.G. Trigger. 2004. Reconstructing prehistoric ethnicity: problems and possibilities. In In J. V. Wight and J.-L. Pilon (eds), A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, pp. 419-433. Mercury Series, Paper No 164. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Renfrew, C. 2000. At the Edge of Knowability: Towards a Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10(1): 7-34.
Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, memes and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames & Hudson.
Wildcat, D., I. Sumi and V. Deloria Jr. 2004. Commentary: A Response to Doug Jones. American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 641.

Doorworks 2: Columna rostrata

Elogium of Gaius Duilius, Rome, Pal. dei Cons, CIL 12.125, 6.1300

The Columna rostrata was originally erected in Rome in 260 BC, commemorating the naval victory of the Roman consul Gaius Duilius over the Carthaginian fleet. The inscription boasted that over two million aes of loot were plundered. Rather than expressing the amount in numeral words, it was written using at least 22 (and possibly as many as 32 – the inscription is fragmentary) repeated Roman numeral signs for 100,000, seen towards the bottom of the inscription. The effect of this ‘conspicuous computation’ was to impress the reader with the vastness of the quantity, serving as an indexical sign of Rome’s military might.

Back in business

Apologies for the recent lack of posting; I was out of town in Montreal last week for meetings with co-editors and contributors to two edited volumes, as well as a reception for a teaching award I won last year.  But I’m back now!

Anyone who ever knew or worked with Bruce Trigger also was exposed, by proxy, to the work of the archaeologist and social theorist V. Gordon Childe, and in particular to his popular book, Society and Knowledge (Childe 1956).  This is as close to epistemology as I can normally bear to get; Childe is aiming to reconcile the imperfection and imperfectibility of human knowledge with the fact that we, as individuals and as societies and as species, have survived and thrived.

Childe begins with the notion that we adapt to the world not as it is, but as we imagine it to be.  This is idealism, at least in its moderate form, and Childe freely acknowledges the influence of Kant and Hegel in his thinking.  All perception is mediated through cognitive construction.  But then, following Hegel’s principle, “The Real is rational and the Rational is real”, Childe insists that there must be some fairly robust correspondence between imagined reality and external reality, or else we would not have survived (Childe 1956: 64).  Childe asserts that, “In fact mankind’s biological success in surviving and multiplying affords empirical evidence that useful knowledge of the external world – of man’s environment – is attainable.” (Childe 1956: 64).  If it were otherwise, we would not have survived.   Controversially (today though not in the 50s) Childe goes still further, linking this notion to cultural change, arguing that the intergenerational transmission and accumulation of knowledge, such as the ‘cumulative accretion of the world of science’, plays into this, ensuring that what is learned is retained in some way (Childe 1956: 66).

For me, this is not just an epistemological argument, but also an evolutionary one.  It explains why we have the sorts of thinking brains we have, why we have the sorts of concepts we have, without falling either into pure idealism and presuming either that our thoughts are all that is knowable, or a naive realism that presumes that reality is just as we perceive it to be.  And it is in the interstices of cognitive error: those neat little places where we misconstrue the world just enough to tell us about how our minds work, but not enough so that our minds don’t survive – that I see real hope and interest for a cognitive, linguistic, and evolutionary science of anthropology and archaeology.

But enough from me. What do you think?

Works cited

Childe, V. Gordon. 1956. Society and Knowledge: The Growth of Human Traditions. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Is there an alphabet gene?

I’ve been ruminating for the past couple of weeks about a little speculative article by Peter Frost, a Canadian evolutionary anthropologist whose primary work is on human sexual dimorphism.  In ‘The spread of alphabetical writing may have favored the latest variant of the ASPM gene’ (Frost 2008), Frost makes the remarkable assertion that there is a gene variant whose distribution is best explained by its use for cognitive tasks relating to alphabetic literacy (and specifically not non-alphabetic literacy).

This is a non-peer-reviewed paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses, which publishes papers that its editors (all medical scientists) decide are worthy of note, even when (or especially when) they challenge conventional wisdom.  I really like the publish-then-review model, but I do wonder whether in this case what is really needed is a journal (let’s call it, hypothetically, Social Hypotheses) to allow social scientists have a role in determining what is likely to be important or interesting.  Because, while the genetic evidence is fairly straightforward, the cognitive and more importantly the historical evidence are the truly controversial elements of Frost’s paper.  It rests initially on the following facts, which, not being an expert on human genetics, I’m just going to grant for the sake of argument:

– There is a gene, ASPM, that regulates brain growth, and that has evolved many variants, the latest of which emerged around 6000 years ago in the Middle East.

– It is much more common today in populations in Europe and the Middle East than in East Asia.

– While it relates to brain growth, it does not correlate with increased IQ, suggesting that its cognitive function is subtle.

Frost argues from this, quite plausibly, that this latest variant assists performance on some task relating to cognition and that expanded from a Middle Eastern origin starting around 6000 years ago.   He then moves on to the evidence I am more familiar with, to argue that that task was alphabetic writing.

– Writing developed in the Middle East around 3000 BCE, and phonetic alphabets around 2000-1000 BCE. This is sort of true; there is increased phoneticity in Near Eastern scripts over time, and purely phonetic scripts (like Ugaritic and Proto-Sinaitic) emerged as early as the 18th-15th centuries BCE (Lemaire 2008).    However, this is in the range of 3500-4000 years ago, not 6000, which makes the emergence of the ASPM variant at 6000 years ago rather early for his timeframe.

– Literacy levels in the ancient world range from 10% – 33% of adult males. False: this may have been true of Roman citizens (which is where Frost’s data come from), but was decidedly not true in the ancient Near East including both Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant.  Literacy rates certainly varied, but were probably in the 5-7% range at most in the period under consideration (van der Toom 2007: 10).

– East Asian writing is pictorial or ‘ideographic’. False; although there are logographic (word-writing) and ideographic (idea-writing) elements to the Shang Dynasty script (the earliest East Asian writing), just as with modern Chinese writing, there are phonetic complements, rebuses, and other linguistic aspects to the script from an early date.  John DeFrancis has essentially demolished the myth of Chinese picture-writing, showing it to be factually inaccurate and often marshalled for derogatory purposes (Defrancis 1989). It is true, however, that there was no ancient alphabetic writing in East Asia.  However, Japanese syllabic writing (kana) has been around since the 6th-7th centuries AD.

– Alphabetic writing has different cognitive advantages and demands than non-alphabetic writing. Yes, true, but not in simple or easily understandable ways (Olson 1995).  Frost is asserting on the basis of some experimental evidence that information is processed differently by Chinese literates reading in Chinese.  But Chinese is only one non-alphabetic script, and it has only been compared cognitively to the Latin alphabet we have no systematic comparative idea of how differently structured scripts affect cognition.  Frost’s reasoning certainly implies that Japanese writing should have similar effects to alphabetic writing, despite the near-absence of the ASPM variant there.

– Scribes were prestigious individuals who were highly valued, and those who excelled at scribal tasks would have been better-nourished and wealthier, thus more equipped to have greater reproductive success. Possibly true.  However, we have no evidence that they actually did have such success to a greater degree than non-literate elites, or indeed that they enjoyed such success at all.  Frost reasons from their social value to their reproductive success, which is plausible but unverified.

– Thus, if the ASPM variant did aid in the processing of alphabetic information, then it would be selected for among scribes and indeed among their offspring, some of whom would be literate but others of whom would not.

It will be clear, I should hope, that my difficulties with the points of evidence above render me highly skeptical of Frost’s conclusion.

As Frost notes, we would expect to find higher rates of the ASPM variant among societies that have long histories of alphabetic writing, if his theory is correct, and lower rates among societies that lack such histories. Good evidence for his position would be, as he notes, if African groups like Hausa and Fulani (long-term alphabetic scribal traditions) had high levels of the variant but other groups didn’t (similarly, if there were contrasts between Chinese and Japanese, or between Georgian and Chechen, this would tend to be confirmatory).

But he does not mention another important prediction that I think has been tested and refuted:  If the new ASPM variant plays the role he says it does, then East Asians should have difficulty learning alphabetic writing, even if raised using only alphabetic scripts.   There simply is no evidence that this is the case, and if it were true, would have incredible implications for public policy.  Moreover, the widespread use of purely phonetic scripts like the Japanese syllabaries, which really ought to have the same cognitive consequences as alphabets, should be problematic for East Asians.  It isn’t, and this is serious disconfirmatory evidence against the hypothesis.

Frost is right, though, that whatever factor selected for this ASPM variant must have been present / emerged around 6000 years in the Near East but should not have emerged or been significant in East Asia, and factors such as ‘food domestication’ and ‘urbanization’, which emerged in both regions, won’t suffice.

But what about the possibility that the ASPM variant helps promote encephalization with respect to particular plant  domesticates – e.g., wheat / barley, the classic Near Eastern domesticates, as opposed to rice and millet (the ancient East Asian domesticates)?  Here, the explanation is that individuals with the ASPM variant in the Near East had greater reproductive success because they were better able to use local domesticates to promote encephalization.  Individuals who lacked the variant still derived nutrition from these foods, but not in a way that contributed to brain growth. Obviously, I’m not a nutritional anthropologist or a dietician or even an expert on human evolution.  I’m not proposing this simply as a plausible alternative, given the complete insufficiency of the alphabetic hypothesis.  It is also testable – one would expect that grain-eating societies would have higher levels of the variant than non-grain-eaters in the same general geographic areas, all other things being equal.  But now we are back in the realm of Medical Hypotheses and outside anything to which I could claim to be anything more than an interested nonspecialist.

Works cited

DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese language: fact and fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Frost, Peter. 2008. The spread of alphabetical writing may have favored the latest variant of the ASPM gene.  Medical Hypotheses 70(1): 17-20.

Lemaire, Andre. 2008. The spread of alphabetic scripts (c. 1700 – 500 BCE). Diogenes 55(2): 45-58.

Olson, David R. 1995. Towards a psychology of literacy: on the relations between speech and writing. Cognition 60(1): 83-104.

van der Toom, Karel. 2007. Scribal culture and the making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.