Category: Archaeology

Belatedly, I note that Numerical Notation features prominently in the annual report of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project published online last month (the section on my book is near the end). Matt Stolper, the head of the project, graciously gave me permission to reprint the Old Persian cuneiform tablet Fort. 1208-101 in my book, as it features the first evidence of the Old Persian numerals for the higher hundreds (in the numeral phrase ‘604’), and is the only known Old Persian document that serves an administrative function. Ultimately, the tablet was chosen by my editors to grace the extremely attractive cover.

Stolper alludes indirectly in the report to the serendipitous inclusion of this tablet in my research. I’ll be more direct: online publication and open access to the research findings of the Archive are the only reason I was able to integrate this important artifact into my research, at what was a fairly advanced stage of publication. If Stolper and his co-author Jan Tavernier had not published their findings directly online (Stolper and Tavernier 2007), enabling me to rapidly track it down once the media began to report on the tablet’s analysis, I could never have discussed it. (I should also give full credit to my wife, who first alerted me to the news articles on Fort. 1208-101). There are other arguments, such as cost, in favour of this model of publication, but access and speed – especially in fields like this, where data can lie unpublished for decades – are absolutely critical.

Marc Zender of the Peabody Museum (I’ve written about his Tolkien anthropology course before) emailed me the other day to let me know about an article in the new American Anthropologist written by Jeff Quilter, Zender, and several additional co-authors, documenting a lost language from northern coastal Peru (you can read the press release here, with a link at the bottom to the full article for those with access). In the course of archaeological work led by Quilter, a letter was discovered, written by a Spaniard in the early 17th century, on whose obverse is a series of numerals in this otherwise unidentified language, as follows:

uno—chari
dos—marian
tres—apar
4—tau
5—himic [?]
6.—sut [?]
7—canchen
8.—mata
9—yucan
10—bencor
21. maribencor chari tayac
30 apar bencor
100 chari pachac
200 mari pachac

From this, we can see that this language apparently had a fairly regular decimal numeral system. The one intriguing feature is the word tayac at the end of the phrase for 21, which the authors sensibly interpret as meaning ‘and/plus’. The words for 4, 6, 7, and 100 are all related to Quechua (the major Inka language, imposed on large parts of the precolonial Andes in the 15th and 16th centuries), but the others are (so far as anyone has been able to tell) unrelated to any other documented language. While the borrowing of ‘100’ is quite typical in cases of imperial conquest – but my suspicion is that what we have here is a record of a bilingual Quechua speaker engaged in a little bit of numerical code-switching – it wouldn’t be typical (though not impossible) for just three numerals for 4, 6, and 7 to be borrowed, leaving the rest intact. Of course, given this one text, there’s no way to tell for sure. A further minor mystery is why the writer chose to write the first three numerals in Spanish, then switched to Western numerals thereafter – possibly just to save time.

Because the pre-colonial local languages of the Andes are extremely poorly documented, this find sheds a little light on the range of linguistic variability that existed in the Americas at and just after the time of the early European conquests. No doubt the historical linguists will attempt to go further with this, comparing these numerals with other documented languages. The article is a great little piece of holistic linguistic, historical, archaeological anthropology and deserves all the attention that it will no doubt be getting in the near future.

I don’t normally get too uptight about the names that archaeologists give to ancient humans: Lucy, Otzi, ‘hobbit’, whatever. However, I have a quibble about “Inuk”, the 4000-year old Paleo-Eskimo found in Greenland in the 1980s, and whose DNA was recently sequenced (see the article here from today’s Nature, and a good news story about the discovery here).

The main discovery of this paper (confirming decades-old archaeological thinking about Paleo-Eskimo peoples), derived from DNA taken from strands of hair found in Greenland is that “Inuk” is certainly not Inuit. In fact, he is only very distantly related to the modern peoples of the North American Arctic, and is in fact genetically more closely related to the modern Chukchi, Koryak, and Nganasan of northeastern Siberia. And hence my quibble: “Inuk” is the Inuktitut word for “person” (its plural, Inuit ‘people’, is the well-known ethnonym), and thus they’ve given him a name that doesn’t fit with his ethnolinguistic heritage, and indeed runs counter to the core argument of the study. Given that many Yupik (Alaskan natives, speakers of Eskimo-Aleut languages) find the label “Inuit” inappropriate, one could argue that it’s even more inappropriate to give it to this poor fellow who almost certainly spoke a completely unrelated language. Of course, no one spoke Chukchi 4000 years ago either.

Anyway, anyone want to bet how long it takes before someone starts talking about the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis in relation to this find?