There is a fascinating short essay ‘Ancient History and Pseudoscholarship‘ over at Livius.org. I don’t share the author’s belief that most laypeople are able to distinguish pseudoscholarship from professional work, nor that there is an absolute decline in pseudoscience over the past few decades. I do absolutely agree that the prevalence of faulty reasoning and uncritical use of evidence by scholars in the historical and social sciences is far more problematic than the more outlandish pseudoscientific beliefs such as the ancient astronaut hypothesis. And it will come as no surprise to you that I share the author’s conviction that a robust and broad training (in my work, that would include linguistics, archaeology, history, anthropology, and cognitive science) in order to allow professionals to avoid pseudoscientific errors in their own research and teaching.
Category: Archaeology
Ysteriousmay esselvay
Archaeologists working at Mount Zion in Israel have uncovered a stone vessel (dated between 37 BCE and 70 CE by archaeological association) bearing a cryptic script. The vessel, which is around 13 cm high, bears ten lines of writing scratched into the stone, but the inscription, which appears to be a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic (we are not told on what grounds), but has not yet been deciphered.
Now that’s interesting. Let’s think about that for a minute. The article claims that “the cup’s script appears to be a secret code, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the two written languages used in Jerusalem at the time”. Both Hebrew and Aramaic are well-understood scripts that represent well-understood languages. So what on earth is going on here?
We don’t have a transcription at all, and I’ve been unable to find any further information yet, but what I suspect is going on is that some of the characters on the vessel are in Hebrew script, and others in Aramaic script, but that the translation of these doesn’t yet reveal a meaningful interpretation in either the Hebrew or Aramaic languages. It’s possible that the inscription records a third language (oh, let’s say … Phrygian, just to be obscure yet controversial), or that it is some sort of linguistic code (think ‘Pig Aramaic’, if you will) or even a substitution cipher. We just don’t know what the language is yet – and that’s really the most likely way we could get a text like this in two well-known scripts that we can’t read.
This is often a problem in media reporting in paleography and epigraphy – no distinction is made between the writing system (script) and the language of the inscription. The good news is that the research team is “sharing pictures of the cup with experts on the writing of the period. The researchers also plan to post detailed photos of the cup and its inscriptions online soon.” Now that’s going to make progress a lot faster.
Levantine hieroglyphs in the Early Bronze Age
A 4cm fragment of a carved stone plaque (photo here) has been found in northern Israel at the site of Tel Bet Yerah, depicting an arm bearing a scepter and an early form of the Egyptian ankh symbol. It appears to date to the First Dynasty of Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE) – by some centuries, this is the earliest evidence of Egyptian writing outside of Egypt proper – although it isn’t a text that could be understood linguistically, and in fact is very small. The press release from Tel Aviv University isn’t clear how it was dated (whether contextually by association with other material, or paleographically/iconographically from the style of the inscription), but notes that it is “the first artifact of its type ever found in an archaeological context outside Egypt”, whatever ‘of its type’ means. Either way, this is strong evidence that Egyptian representational traditions were known in the Levant in the Early Bronze Age, 1500 years before the New Kingdom, when Egypt first exercised direct political authority in the region.
Zapotec decipherment on the horizon
Artdaily.org reports on a major new initiative to compile an epigraphic corpus and eventually (it is hoped) decipher the Zapotec hieroglyphic writing system. Unfortunately the article has been poorly translated, and I am at a loss as to the meaning of the sentence, “During that age, numeral system began, which would reach a great sophistication towards 7th century.” But that’s not the point. Most people who think of Mesoamerican writing think of the Maya hieroglyphs, or maybe, maybe the Aztec manuscript tradition. But the earliest inscriptions of the Valley of Oaxaca (the Zapotec homeland) are very early (500 BCE) – as early or earlier than any other Mesoamerican writing (with the exception of the enigmatic Cascajal Block) and (debatably) centuries earlier than any writing in the Maya languages. Monument 3 from San José Mogote is the earliest clear evidence for Mesoamerican numeration (used in the name ‘1 Earthquake’).
But we really don’t know as much as we would like about the Zapotec script (of which there are hundreds of examples dating from 500 BCE to 850 CE, although many are short or fragmentary). Our state of knowledge about the script is roughly where we were with Mayan writing forty years ago: we can read the numbers and the calendar, and we can ‘interpret’ a few other glyphs contextually, but that’s about it. There has been important recent work on Zapotec, particularly by Javier Urcid, whose excellent book, Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing (2001), represents a major step forward, but it isn’t a decipherment nor does it claim to be. If a Zapotec decipherment or even a partial decipherment were to emerge from this new initiative, it would clearly help sort out many thorny phylogenetic issues in lowland Mesoamerican linguistic history and culture. But the script may not be highly phonetic, and certainly is not an excellent candidate for a Linear-B-Michael-Ventris style decipherment. Still, one can hope.
Copper Scroll mania
Check out a remarkable piece of popular science writing and pseudoscience debunking: Pseudo-Science and Sensationalist Archaeology: An Exposé of Jimmy Barfield and the Copper Scroll Project. It is an accessible point-by-point refutation of a set of claims regarding the Copper Scroll, an aberrant (but still fully comprehensible) text among the Dead Sea Scrolls, one written on copper rather than parchment or papyrus. Those of you who have followed my posts on archaeolinguistics will find Robert Cargill’s debunking of Jim Barfield’s ‘discovery’ to be a telling example of how both archaeological and linguistic expertise are essential when dealing with ancient texts.
Glossographia 
