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The Two Basic Definitions
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Orthography: (Greek orthos
= "straight" + graphein = "to write".) The
"art or practice of spelling words correctly" (Chambers
Dictionary). Hence (a) an orthography, a writing system in
particular, or (b) comparative orthography, the comparative study of
writing systems in general, or (c) the orthography of a language, the
fine detail of the signs themselves.
Writing System: A system of
"graphic-linguistic correspondence" (Goody, 1981:110). An orthography.
A means of communicating using two-dimensional symbols or shallow
three-dimensional reliefs written on or into some durable medium such as
paper, wood, cloth, clay or stone, but excluding art per se, which - whilst
graphic and whilst frequently for communication - does not have a linguistic
structure (for more on this at times vague distinction, see pictogram).
Lecours (1995) dates the very first human writing system to the Sumerians
around 3300 BC. This was then closely followed by the hieroglyphic
form of Egyptian around 3100 BC, and then progressively by Akkadian,
Cretan, Proto-Canaanite, and Chinese. From
Proto-Canaanite developed a wide variety of European and Middle Eastern
systems, including Greek, Latin, and Arabian. It is
customary to classify writing systems into three basic types, according to
the relationship between the individual signs and the individual words of the
spoken language. Where each sign identifies and is to be read as a single
word the system is known as logographic, where each sign identifies a
syllable the system is known as a syllabary, and where each sign
identifies a single phoneme the system is known as an alphabet.
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The Geography
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Fertile Crescent and Nile Valley: These are two of the
areas of easily irrigated fertile land where human civilisation first
developed. The fertile crescent is the arc of land saddling the northern half
of the Syrian Desert, and the Nile Valley forms the eastern border of the
Sahara Desert. The western part of the crescent comprises the Levant,
whilst the northern and eastern parts follow the lands between the rivers
Tigris and Euphrates (the famed "Rivers of Babylon"), between which
lies the area known as Mesopotamia. The area was originally populated
by a nomadic culture known as the Kebarans, but was then settled
perhaps 11,500 years ago by an essentially static culture known as the Natufians.
The essence of this dramatic change of lifestyle was that the Natufians
preferred to cultivate their own crops rather than go foraging for what grew naturally.
This, in turn, is the key to increasing population density, and thus to a
village-based existence. Smith (1995) actually lists seven areas of the world
where agriculture developed independently, and the fertile crescent appears
to have been the earliest of them all. Then, in the millenia which followed,
the villages gradually grew into the first cities, the cities into kingdoms,
and the kingdoms into empires. The individual civilisations have come and
gone, of course, and the "juiciest" bits of territory have changed
hands many times (Mesopotamia, for example, has "belonged" to at
least seven non-indigenous empires in the last 5000 years). To begin with,
however, the empires were home-grown, namely the Assyrians to the
north of the crescent (based on the cities of Ashur and Ninevah), the Babylonians
to the east of it (based on the cities of Ur - the birthplace of Abraham,
Akkad, Uruk, and Babylon itself), and the Egyptians along the equally
fertile Nile Valley. These civilisations emerged in the fourth millenium BC,
flourished in the third, and then exhausted each other squabbling in the
second and the first.
Six of the most famous sites are explicitly named,
but the dispersion of many unnamed others (from a variety of sources,
including Smith 1995:50) is shown for general effect. The use of tokens
as trading aids arose in the area indicated, and this practice is believed to
have led to the first writing system. Map (b) shows the cities and the
empires. These then fought amongst themselves, taking it in turns to prevail
until initially Alexander the Great and subsequently the Romans brought a
whole new dimension to the game of conqueror. And in the middle of all the
military comings and goings, smaller tribal peoples such as the Canaanites,
the Israelites, and the Philistines managed to maintain a
somewhat fragile and repeatedly disrupted presence. Indeed, it is far from
inappropriate that the tiny Levantine corridor settlement of Megiddo, which
sat astride the political faultline between the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian
civilisations and which was in about 1460 BC the site of a decisive victory
by the Egyptians under Tuthmose III over the Syrians, has gone on - albeit
with its name modernised as Armageddon - to become the very symbol of
human intercontinental destructiveness (and an Israeli tourist park into the
bargain)!
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Additional Definitions and Background Information
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Akkadian: Northern Babylonian during the
third and early second millenia BC. The ancient Semitic civilisation
of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, north of modern Baghdad. In what Lecours
(1995:221) describes as "the Akkadian implement", the Akkadians
added a partial syllabary to Sumerian cuneiform to make a more
powerful version of this system of their own. They did this using
cuneiform-phoneme and phoneme-cuneiform "convertors", thus creating
a written language which had a small stock of phonograms. The
principal benefit of this, of course, was that "one who speaks Akkadian
and has learned the new code can now read and write words which one does not
understand" (Lecours, 1995:222). The empire peaked around 1850 BC, after
which it is best treated as part of the Babylonian empire. The writing
system eventually evolved into Proto-Canaanite. See under cuneiform
for examples of the lettering.
Allograph: The written equivalent of the
phonetician's allophone. The intended shape of a written sign an
instant before it is written. An intermediate between the final physical
expression of a grapheme as a graph. A "quasi-spatial
description of the shape of each letter-form [but not yet specifying]
the sequence of strokes required to create [it] on paper" (Ellis
and Young, 1988:180). (For an example, see grapheme.)
Alphabet: The repertoire of signs used in a
particular phonographic writing system. (See next.)
Alphabet, Modern Western: The main writing
system of the western world. Taking its numbering system from the Arabic,
it started to emerge from Church Latin towards the end of the Dark
Ages, and became fully established with the development of printing in the
15th century. It now forms the basis of English, French, German, Italian,
Scandinavian, and Spanish. In addition, some of the Slavic languages (eg.
Czech and Croatian) have switched to it in preference to Cyrillic. The
English alphabet, of course, reads from left to right, and consists of only
26 letters. However, since the English sound system consists of 44 separate
phonemes, there are too few letters to "go around". This makes for
irregularities in mapping the text onto the spoken word. In fact, there are
577 distinct grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English, some of which are very
idiosyncratic - how, for example, can you reconcile the pronunciation
"fish" to the spelling "ghoti"? (Answer at end of
chapter.) In Czech and German, by contrast, the use of diacritics
allows more letters in the alphabet (ä, í, ö, ü, š, é, etc.), but the
pronunciation of each is much more consistent from one word to another,
allowing you safely to adopt a "say what you see" approach. Here is
the Czech alphabet with and without the diacritics:
Arabic: The writing system of the ethnic
Arab. It started to emerge out of Nabatean, an Aramaic
derivative, around 150 AD, flourished as the language of the Koran in the
seventh century, and survives in a variety of regional variations as the
modern Arabic alphabet. Modern Arabic reads from right to left, and consists
of 28 letters. By virtue of its Phoenician ancestry, it remains an
essentially consonantal system. As such, it is rich in word families based
upon simple three-consonant "roots". Thus Ö drs is the root for
the concept of teaching and learning (the borrowing of the square root
notation from mathematics is from Sampson, 1985). This is then subjected to a
variety of vowel and other changes, each of which produces a variant of the
core concept. Thus darasa = "to study", darrasa =
"to teach", dars = "class"; durus =
"lessons", mudaaris(a) = "teacher" (male/female),
and madrasa = "school". Here is the full alphabet in its
"single letter" form (as with English "joined up
writing", there are a number of differences in word-initial, word-medial,
and word-final occurrences in the full script version):
Aramaic: The common root language of modern
Middle Eastern peoples, originating in Syria around 900 BC and widely spread
thanks to the success of the Assyrian empire. Its writing system
derived from Phoenician, and was therefore a consonantal system. It
then in turn progressively divided into Arabic (via Nabatean), Hebrew,
Armenian-Georgian, and the modern Indian alphabets. Survives to this day in
some Syrian rural dialects. (Example in Goody, 1981.)
Assyrian: (See firstly fertile crescent.)
Reputedly named after Ashur, grandson of Noah. The ancient Semitic
civilisation which created the Assyrian Empire (see Map (b)). It started to
expand towards the end of the second millenium BC under such emperors as
Tilgat-Pileser (r. 1116-1090 BC), defeated the Israelites in 721 BC,
peaked under Sennacherib (r. 714-681 BC), and died away with the fall of
Ninevah to the Medes in 612 BC. It was the principal Babylonian power
during this period. The spoken language was Aramaic, which had its own Phoenician-derived
writing system, but the much older cuneiform was also retained.
The 30,000 clay tablets discovered in the ruins of Ashurbanipal's (r. 668-626
BC) library at Ninevah are an archaeological resource of the first
importance.
Babylonian: A group name for the lesser empires of
the Akkadians, Chaldeans, and Sumerians, and, sometimes,
the Assyrians, that is to say, any Mesopotamian empire which took
Babylon (50 miles south of modern Baghdad) as its common capital city. The
Babylonians were therefore an early "United Kingdom", in which the
partners, though originally racially distinct enemies, found marginally
greater value in cooperation. The empire developed during the third millenium
BC under such emperors as the Akkadian, Sargon I, flourished in the early
second millenium BC under such as Hammurabi, went through a period of
Assyrian dominance between 1200 and 612 BC, peaked again under Nebuchadnezzar
II (r. 605-565 BC), and finally fell to Alexander the Great in 330 BC to
become a province of the Hellenistic Empire.
Boustrophedon: Writing alternating
lines of text from a different direction, from left to right on one line, and
then from right to left on the next. Sometimes seen in examples of early Greek.
Byzantium (1): Ancient town on the
Bosphorus. Chosen in 330 AD by the Emperor Constantine as the eastern capital
of the Roman Empire, and then renamed Constantinople in his honour.
Modern Istanbul.
Byzantium (2): The Eastern Roman -
or Byzantine - Empire, controlled from Byzantium (1) after the
fall of the Western Roman Empire (the one based in Rome) in 376 AD. The home
of the "orthodox" form of Christianity (as still practised in
Greece and Russia), and the source of the Cyrillic script. The
Byzantines continued to govern Egypt and the fertile crescent until
those lands were overrun during the Islamic conquests of 622-642 AD. However,
they retained a smaller empire centred on Greece and Turkey until the time of
the crusades.
Canaanites: An ancient Semitic race,
occupants of Canaan - the southern Levant - during the second
millenium BC. Defeated and displaced by the Israelites under Joshuah
some time after the biblical Exodus (perhaps 1290 BC) and before 1050 BC.
Cave Art: (Alternatively, parietal or rupestral
art.) The static art of our Upper Palaeolithic ancestors. It started
to emerge around 50,000 years ago, was fully established at least 32,000
years ago, and survives until the present day in certain aboriginal
populations. The signs used may be classified as either figurative,
where there is a direct representation of (usually) an animal or (less
frequently) a human, or non-figurative, where the markings are more
abstract and make no clear reference. Among the most commonly seen figurative
signs are bison, horses, deer, and reindeer, and among the most commonly seen
non-figurative signs are roughly collarbone-shaped claviforms, roughly
oblong quadrilaterals, and roughly house-shaped tectiforms.
There are also triangles, ovals, circles, crosses, points. (See also pictogram
and mythogram.) Here are some examples:
Chaldeans: An ancient Semitic race,
occupants of Chaldea, the area of Babylonia situated south of the
River Euphrates. Abraham, patriarch of the Israelite tribes, came from
the Chaldean city of Ur (see Map (b)) in the early years of the second
millenium BC.
Chinese: The language of China. Its writing
system started to emerge around 1500 BC, was fully established by 1000
BC, and survives as modern Mandarin. It also spawned Japanese and
Korean. It holds the record for the world's oldest living writing system, and
shares (with hieroglyphics) the record for the longest continuously
used system. It is almost totally logographic in nature, with each
sign derived from one or more ancestral pictograms. There are around
5000 - 6000 signs in common usage, but these are easily compounded to cope
with more complex concepts when necessary (see Exercise 4.6.2). Here,
selected from Sampson (1985:151), are some examples:
Coptic: A variant of Greek, retained in
Egypt between the Roman era and the coming of Islam in the seventh
century. Its writing system included seven additional characters
derived from hieroglyphics (Gardiner, 1957). It remains to this day
the ritual language of the Orthodox Coptic Church.
Cretan: (Alternatively Minoan.) The
language of the Cretan civilisation. Its writing system developed
around 1900 BC, influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics. It evolved by
around 1500 BC into the still undeciphered Linear A script, and died
away around 1100 BC as the Cretan civilisation became overshadowed by the Mycenean
from the north and Phoenician from the east.
Cuneiform: The writing system developed
initially by the Sumerians and then improved upon by the Akkadians,
Assyrians, and Babylonians. A wedge-shaped script written by
pressing the tip of a stylus into clay tablets. Flourished in the third,
second, and early first millenia BC, but then fell suddenly from use after
the fall of Assyria (being replaced initially by Phoenician-Aramaic
and then by Greek). Here, redrawn from Coulmas (1989:76), is how the
sign for "sky" evolved over the millenia (see Heise, 1995, for
further examples):
Cursive: Free-flowing. Of writing, "joined
up". Text which is written in a hurried hand rather than with copybook
accuracy. (Compare hieroglyphics with hieratic, or hieratic
with demotic, the latter both cursive variants of the former. See also
ligature.)
Cyrillic: Variant of the Greek alphabet
which spread into the Slavic countries under the influence of Byzantium
(2). Named after St Cyril, who did the necessary missionary work. Here is
the modern Russian alphabet (in upper case):
Demotic: The third of the writing systems
used in Ancient Egypt. A cursive variant of hieratic (and
therefore a doubly cursive form of hieroglyphics). It started to
emerge around 700 BC, and survived as the writing system for everyday
Egyptian life until 452 AD (Gardiner, 1957).
Determinative: A type of ideogram
used in hieroglyphics. A "silent sign" attached to a common phonetic
root and denoting the general semantic category of the preceding
character(s). This allowed homophones in the spoken language to be clearly
differentiated in the written - as though, in English, we were allowed to
write "mine¯ " (hole in the
ground) to distinguish it from "mine " (to blow
something up) and "mine¬ " (that which I
own). (Compare ideogram.) Here, from Gardiner (1957) are some
examples:
Diacritic: A mark capable of varying the
pronunciation of the letters in an alphabet. Includes the accents
found in French (é, è, ê), German (ä, ü), Spanish (ç, ñ), and Czech (í, á,
š), and taken to the extreme in the 31-accent set found in the International
Phonetic Alphabet.
Egyptian: The civilisation of the Nile valley.
Arose in the fourth millenium BC and survived relatively unchallenged until
the first millenium BC when it fell under a succession of foreign rulers,
including the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the
Romans. Developed the world's second important writing system, the hieroglyphic
system, around 3100 BC. This developed, in turn, into the hieratic and
demotic systems. The civilisation itself peaked under the pharaoh
Amenhotep III (r. 1382-1344 BC).
Etruscan: The language of Pre-Roman Italy. Its writing
system emerged out of Mycenean and Phoenician in the early
part of the first millenium BC, and had evolved in turn into Latin by
550 BC. It is also believed to have influenced the runic (1) alphabet
adopted by the Germanic peoples of northern Europe.
Gematria: Letters with an additional number value,
usually - as with the infamous 666, the "Number of the Beast" -
with a secret or mystical purpose. See Exercise 4.7.
Graph: The written equivalent of the
phonetician's phone. The final physical shape produced on the writing
medium when expressing a particular allograph.
Grapheme: The written equivalent of the
phonetician's phoneme. The mind's conceptualisation of the items in an
orthography. A letter's abstract identity rather than its shape.
Sampson (1985:25) explains that the lower case letter "g", for
example, has a single conceptual representation in the mind which is then
capable of several intended outputs (font, italic, bold, etc.). These are the
allographs < g g g g
g > etc of the grapheme < g >,
and - for handwritten text, at least - each allograph is then capable of an
almost infinite number of fine detail variants - the graphs - when it
hits the paper (for typewritten text, the range of allographs is no less
wide, but the graphs are more consistent).
Greek: (See firstly Mycenean.) The
language of Classical Greece. Its writing system started to emerge out
of Phoenician around 750 BC, thus drawing in turn on the earlier Sumerian
and Egyptian writing systems. Unlike its parent systems, however, Greek
recorded the vowel sounds as well as the consonants (compare Aramaic
and its derivatives), for which innovation Lecours (1995:223) describes it as
the world's first "fully fledged" alphabet. It is the source of the
letters alpha and beta (and therefore of the word alphabet
itself), as well as of the mathematician's favourites delta, omega, pi,
rho, sigma, lambda, chi, etc. It was also one of the major scholastic
languages, being the language of documents such as the Bible. It survives as
the modern Greek alphabet and has heavily influenced the Cyrillic
script used in modern Russia. Here are the 24 characters of the modern Greek
alphabet (in lower case):
Hebrew (1) - Early: (See firstly Israelite.)
The writing system of the Israelites. Reputedly named after Heber,
great-great-grandson of Noah, it started to emerge out of Phoenician
around 900 BC, and was therefore a consonant-only phonographic system,
reading from right to left. It died away following the Assyrian
conquest in 721 BC, although some ritual usage survives to this day amongst
the Samaritans of Nablas (Goody, 1981).
Hebrew (2) - Square: The writing
system of the ethnic Jew. It started to emerge out of Aramaic
around 150 BC, and was a 22-character consonant-only phonographic
system reading from right to left. It died away following the Roman massacres
of the Jews in 66-73 and 132-135 AD.
Hebrew (3) - Modern: The writing
system of the modern state of Israel. A nineteenth century revival
of Hebrew (2), which had fallen from use after the Roman dispersion
(Sampson, 1985). The system reads from right to left, and consists of 27
letters. As with Hebrew (1/2), it is a consonant-only phonographic
system. There is, however, a supplementary system of diacritic dots
which indicate the supporting vowels. Here is the full alphabet:
Hieratic: The second of the writing systems
used in Ancient Egypt. A cursive version of hieroglyphics,
which, because it was quicker to write, became the language of traders rather
than of priests and scribes. It started to emerge with a "relatively
consistent orthography of its own" (Gardiner, 1957:10) around 2000 BC,
and was fully established by around 1500 BC. However, with the rise of demotic
after 700 BC, hieratic became restricted to use by the priesthood. Contains
many examples of ligatures.
Hieroglyphics: (Greek hieros
= "sacred" + glyphos = "sculptured".) The earliest
and longest lasting of the writing systems used in Ancient Egypt.
Consists of a basic consonantal phonetic alphabet, supplemented
firstly by a syllabary, and secondly by a rich variety of logograms,
determinatives, and ideograms. The system appeared around 3100
BC and lasted with natural evolution but no fundamental change until around
the fall of the Roman Empire three and a half thousand years later.
During this time, it gave rise to two other forms of Egyptian - hieratic
and demotic - and also heavily influenced the development of systems
such as Proto-Canaanite in surrounding lands. The last known hieroglyphic
inscription was not until 394 AD (Gardiner, 1957), whereupon the system
remained undeciphered until its principles were rediscovered in the
nineteenth century. Here, from Gardiner (1957) is the basic 24-character
Middle Egyptian alphabet, plus a selection of supporting characters from the
syllabary (all oriented for reading right-to-left). See under transliteration
for the steps required to translate.
Hittite: (See firstly fertile crescent.)
The language of the western Assyrian Empire (roughly modern Turkey)
during the second millenium BC. They developed a mix of cuneiform and hieroglyphic
signs around 1500 BC. The system finally died away around 700 BC.
Ideogram: One of the types of signs used in writing
systems (compare determinative). A "silent sign"
attached to a word's phonetic root, and acting as an incorporated pictogram
to convey a general idea. Presumably a considerable aid to those having to
remember what a given word meant. Thus, in Egyptian hieroglyphics
"the hawk symbolises [] everything which happens quickly, because this
creature is just about the fastest of winged animals and the idea is
transferred through the appropriate metaphor to all swift things"
(Diodurus Siculus, 1st Century BC; cited in Andrews, 1981:7). Here are some
examples, all of which include the sparrow ideogram - the "bad
bird" sign. Note the negative nature of all the concepts involved. Note
also that the anglicised pronunciation is merely for the convenience of
Western scholars - the actual pronunciation can only be guessed at,
and would certainly have used a totally different phonology:
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): This is the
notational standard developed and maintained by the International Phonetic
Association to allow the written representation of all the world's languages regardless
of their particular phonology. The latest version of this
"super-alphabet" was published in 1993, with amendments in 1996.
The IPA is a 111-character alphabet, supplemented by a 31-character
set of accents and symbols known as diacritics. These are placed
under, over, or by the side of the symbol to which they relate, and vary its
normal pronunciation in a specified way. Each transliteration is
conventionally enclosed in square brackets, thus [fIS ], pronounced
"fish". Here are a few of the symbols used (see the Phonetics
course notes for a full character listing):
Israel, Modern State of: See Levant.
Israelites: An ancient Semitic race,
descended from the Chaldean patriarch, Abraham, around 2000 BC. Spent
much of that millenium in bondage to the Egyptians, until led away by
Moses in perhaps 1290 BC. Thereafter, conquered and settled in the land of Canaan
(see Map (b)) perhaps by around 1230 BC. Flourished initially as individual
tribes under non-dynastic leaders called judges (eg. Joshiah), and
then from around 1050 BC as a united kingdom under kings like Saul, David,
and Solomon. In 928 BC squabbled and split into the northern and southern
kingdoms of Israel and Judah respectively, and so remained
until defeated by the Assyrians in 721 BC, whereupon many of their
number - the "ten lost tribes" - were forcibly exiled to nobody
knows where (being replaced by Samaritans forcibly imported from
Persia). Those allowed to remain were predominantly from the southern parts
of the kingdom, the land of Judah. See now Jews.
Japanese: The writing system of Japan. It
started to emerge from Chinese during the first millenium AD, becoming
fully established by around 700 AD. It exists today in two forms, namely Kana
and Kanji. For an introduction to these, see Morton, Sasanuma,
Patterson, and Sakuma (1992) or Kishioka (1997); for a full description, see
Coulmas (1989).
Jews: The inhabitants of Judah (see Map (c))
after the dispersal of the Israelites in 721 BC. Were defeated in
their turn by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II in 597 BC, and
themselves exiled to Mesopotamia, not being allowed to return until after 538
BC, whereupon they reinstated their former kingdom. Subsequently incorporated
into the Alexandrian and post-Alexandrian empires until conquered by the
Romans in 63 BC and renamed Judea. Relations with the Romans were generally
poor, however, and Judea was largely destroyed as a nation following
unsuccessful armed uprisings in 66-73 and 132-135 AD. The surviving Jews were
then dispersed yet again, and concentrated into enclaves - ghettos - in lands
as far apart as Spain and Russia, where they remained - persecution and the
holocaust permitting - until the creation of the modern state of Israel
in 1948. See now Hebrew (1/2/3).
Kana: The non-logographic form of the
two Japanese writing systems (compare Kanji). A 49-character syllabary.
Used for creating inflectional morphemes and for building up words adopted
from other languages. Here, redrawn from Kishioka (1997), is the complete repertoire:
Kanji: The logographic form of the two Japanese
writing systems (compare Kana). It contains some 50,000 discrete
characters, of which 3000 are needed for everyday purposes (newspapers, etc)
(Yamazaki, Ellis, Morrison, and Ralph, 1997). Although there are many single
character words, the "great majority" are compounds of two or more
simpler characters (Morton, Sasanuma, Patterson, and Sakuma, 1992:517). Here
are some examples:
Latin: The language of post-Etruscan Italy. Its
writing system started to emerge out of Etruscan around 700 BC,
and was fully established by around 550 BC. It was then admirably placed to
become the official system of the Roman Empire, and eventually of the western
parts of the Roman Christian Church (those based in Rome, rather than Byzantium).
It survives with only minor modifications as the modern Western alphabet
(although our numbering system comes from the Arabic).
Levant: A politically neutral collective term
for the western horn of the fertile crescent. The lands along the
Middle East's Mediterranean seaboard, from Antioch in the north to Gaza in
the south, and including the ancient cities of Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre on
the coast, and Damascus, Jerusalem, and Jericho inland. The southern Levant
is taken herein as synonymous with the biblical Canaan, and as
approximating since 1948 to the modern state of Israel. The northern
Levant is taken as synonymous with ancient Phoenicia, and as
approximating to the modern states of Lebanon and (coastal) Syria. Here, with
the writing system(s) prevailing at the time shown in square brackets (ruling
system first), is a summary timeline for the southern Levant:
Pre-Conquest (1500 - 1230 BC): The tribal lands of
the Canaanites until their defeat by the Israelites on their
way out of Sinai. [Proto-Canaanite becoming Phoenician]
Israelite (1230 - 928 BC): The "promised
land", self-ruled from Jerusalem. [?Egyptian-Phoenician
mix]
Israelite (928 - 721 BC): The "promised
land", divided within itself. The northern and southern kingdoms of Israel
and Judah respectively, ruled from Samaria and Jerusalem respectively.
[Hebrew (1)]
Assyrian (721 - 612 BC): Rule from Ninevah as
part of the Assyrian Empire. [Cuneiform, Aramaic]
Babylonian (597 - 539 BC): Rule from Babylon as
part of the Babylonian Empire. [Aramaic]
Persian (539 - 332 BC): Jews returned to
Judah. Rule from Susa and Persepolis as part of the Persian Empire. [Aramaic,
Hebrew (1)]
Alexandrian (332 - 323 BC): Rule from Athens as
part of Alexander the Great's Macedonian Empire. [Greek, Aramaic,
Hebrew (1)]
Ptolemaic (323 - 188 BC): Rule from Alexandria
by one half of Alexander's heirs, "the Ptolemies" of Egypt, the
last dynasty of pharaohs. [Egyptian-Greek mix, Hebrew (1)]
Seleucid (188 - 165
BC): Rule from Damascus by the other half of Alexander's heirs,
"the Seleucids" of Syria. [Aramaic, Hebrew (1)]
Maccabean (165 - 63 BC): Rome-supported
self-rule under the Jewish Maccabean dynasty. [Hebrew (2), Aramaic]
Roman (63 - 41 BC):
Divided into lesser provinces - Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Batanea, and Perea -
and ruled from or on behalf of Rome as part of the Roman Empire. [Latin,
Hebrew (2), Aramaic]
Roman (41 BC - 6
AD): Judea ruled by the Roman vassal king Herod the Great and his son
Achelaus. [Hebrew (2), Latin, Aramaic]
Roman (6 - 135 AD):
Period of rebellions. For most of the time, Judea had its own Roman governor
(eg. Pontius Pilate), whilst the remaining areas were sometimes vassal
kingdoms and other times provinces. [Latin, Hebrew (2), Aramaic]
Late Roman (135 BC - 313
AD): Rule from or on behalf of Rome. [Latin, Arabic]
Byzantine (313 - 636
AD): Rule from Istanbul as part of Christian Byzantium (2). [Greek,
Arabic]
Islamic (636 - 934
AD): Rule from Damascus or Baghdad as part of the Arab Islamic caliphates.
[Arabic]
Fatimid (934 - 1099
AD): Rule alternately by Turks or Fatimid Egyptians. [Arabic]
Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099 - 1291
AD): War zone during the Crusades. Rule alternately from or on behalf
of the Vatican or by Islamic leaders such as Saladin. [Alternately Arabic
or Western]
Mameluke (1291 - 1516 AD): Rule from Cairo as
part of the Mameluke Islamic Sultanates. [Arabic]
Ottoman (1516 - 1917
AD): Rule from Istanbul again as part of the Turkish Islamic empire.
[Arabic]
British (1917 - 1948 AD): Military occupation
1917-1923, followed by rule from London under League of Nations mandate.
Period of Jewish resettlement. [English, Arabic, Hebrew (3)]
Modern (1948 to date): The modern state of Israel.
Set up by order of the United Nations, originally as Arab Palestine and
Jewish Palestine, but amended de facto by military action in 1948, 1967 and
1973. [Hebrew (3), Arabic]
Ligature: A cursive fusion of originally
separate signs into what is then effectively a new single sign, thus allowing
the desired meaning to be expressed more quickly. A common occurrence, but
also a frequent cause of corruption and gradual change to the writing
systems concerned.
Logogram: One of the types of signs used in writing
systems. One where there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sign
and a complete spoken word (and therefore a one-to-many correspondence
between the sign and the phonemes making up that word). See under Chinese
for examples.
Logographic: A type of writing
system. One based primarily on logograms, and therefore lacking an
alphabet. A system where the written symbol represents and must be
pronounced as a complete spoken word. Chinese is the closest
surviving approximation to a fully logographic language, although even it
falls slightly short of having a separate sign for every word in the spoken
lexicon. The Japanese Kanji system is another.
Minoan: See Cretan.
Mycenean: The language of Homeric - that is to
say, pre-Classical - Greece during the second half of the second millenium
BC. Devised the Linear B writing system, possibly a derivative
of Minoan Linear A or early Phoenician. Died away in the
Greek dark ages (1100 - 800 BC) and then replaced by Classical Greek.
Linear B consisted of a 73-character syllabary, for details of which
see Sampson (1985:65).
Mythogram: Leroi-Gourhan's (1968) term for the sort
of complex scenes found in cave art. These are conventionally believed
to have had some sort of mystic or ritual value to their perpetrators, just
as the dove still symbolises the Holy Spirit in Christian iconography. Lawson
(1991) explains that much cave art is located deep underground and would
therefore have been both difficult and dangerous to get at. "It was
obviously not done purely for amusement", he says (p57). For more detail
of the competing explanations, see Exercise 4.2 and Callahan (1997).
Nabatean: The writing system of the Arabian
peninsular around the time of Christ. It emerged out of Aramaic around
150 BC and evolved in turn into the Arabic alphabet by around 150 AD.
Palestine, Modern: See Levant.
Palestine, Historic: See Levant.
Generally, the land of the Philistines.
Philistines: A non-Semitic
people (Greek = palestini) who settled the southern coastal Levant
during the twelfth century BC, perhaps from Crete or beyond (Ragozin, 1888), and
from whom the geographical term "Palestine" derives. Enemies of the
Israelites in King David's time, of the Jews in Roman times,
and - although the intervening history is woefully confused - of the Israelis
today.
Phoenician: The Semitic civilisation of the
northern Levant after the demise of the Cretans. The Phoenician
writing system started to emerge from Proto-Canaanite around
1500 BC, and was fully established by around 1200 BC. It was a 22-character
consonantal system, that is to say, it had no symbols for the spoken vowels.
It is nevertheless historically very important because it was the
"parent script" of Greek, Etruscan, Latin, and
Aramaic, and thus of all modern European and Middle Eastern writing
systems (Coulmas, 1989:141). The system fell from use in favour of Greek
after the success of Alexander the Great's Macedonian Empire in the fourth
century BC.
Phonogram: One of the types of signs used in writing
systems. One where there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sign
and its sound. In practice, this means (a) that the signs are the individual
letters of the alphabet, and (b) that several of them are needed to
represent all but the simplest words. First invented by the Akkadians
and partly present in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Phonographic: A writing system
based on phonograms. That is to say, one which has an alphabet.
The most comprehensive and consistent phonographic system - because it was
explicitly designed to be so - is the artificial International Phonetic
Alphabet.
Pictogram: One of the types of signs used in writing
systems. A pictorial representation of an object, person, or scene in the
outside world, but rendered different from a picture per se by being
drawn as part of a linguistically structured communication rather than for any
artistic merit. A picture as a word, therefore, but not as a sentence!
Arguably the second stage in developing an alphabet from a system of tokens.
Also the source of the logograms used in logographic writing
systems such as Chinese. See Exercise at end.
Pictographic: A writing system
based primarily on pictograms.
Proto-Canaanite: (Alternatively Proto-Sinaitic.)
The writing system of the Canaanite peoples prior to their
conquest by the Israelites in the closing years of the first millenium
BC. Heavily influenced by both Akkadian and Egyptian hieroglyphics,
it started to emerge in the southern Levant around 1700 BC, but by
1500 BC was already beginning to shade into Phoenician, whence - in
due course - Greek, Latin, the modern Western alphabet, Hebrew,
and Aramaic. (See Naveh, 1988, for a fuller account.)
Rebus: A system of having one thing "stand
for" another. Using pictures of things "to indicate certain other
entirely different things not easily susceptible of pictorial representation,
the names of which chanced to have a similar sound. [] The method was
that by which Prior Burton, in the Middle Ages, playfully symbolised his name
by a thistle or burr placed upon a barrel or tun"
(Gardiner, 1957:7; italics original). An earlier example was the Egyptian
King Narmer, who drew his name as a nar (a type of fish) over a mer
(a chisel). We find the same picture-sound game in modern children's game
books, and also in Chinese where it is used to transliterate foreign
names like Tchaikovsky. Contrived though the method might be, Gardiner argues
that in the absence of a fully phonographic system there would have
been no better way of dealing with foreign names! Here is an example of the
new alongside the old:
Rune: Strictly speaking, one of the characters
making up the Runic (1) alphabet (the Germanic version), but loosely
any non-Latin dark ages lettering, especially if used for occult purposes
(which is why the term is so commonly used in modern Dungeons and Dragons
adventure gaming). (On the use of writing systems for mysticism, see Gematria.)
Runic (1) - Germanic: (See firstly rune.)
The futharc - the writing system of the Norse and Germanic
races during the European Dark Ages. Possibly derived from Etruscan
and/or early Latin due to trading contacts across the Alps. In common
use - albeit with considerable local variation - by 800 AD, and widely spread
thanks to the voyages of the Vikings. Replaced by Latin with the spread of
Christianity. Here are the 32-character Anglo-Saxon and 24-character Norse
versions (see Gordon, 1957, for full details):
Runic (2) - Hungarian: (See firstly rune.)
The writing system of the ancient Magyar races. According to Szabados
(1996), it started to emerge from Sumerian at a time when the
ancestral Hungarians lived just north of Mesopotamia.
Samaritans: Historically, the people of Samaria.
Possibly descended from lower class Israelites who - as common clay -
escaped the exile of 721 BC (Samaria having been the capital of the northern
kingdom), intermixed with other peoples brought forcibly from Persia.
Noteworthy because the tiny "Samaritan Sect" retains to this day a
ritual usage of otherwise very long-dead Hebrew (1) (Goody 1981).
Semitic (1) - Racial Grouping: An ancient Middle
Eastern race. The Akkadians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Canaanites,
for example, were racially semitic, whilst the Philistines and Sumerians
were not.
Semitic (2) - Linguistic Grouping: A branch of ancient
North African and Middle Eastern spoken languages within the Afro-Asiatic
language family, including Akkadian, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew,
Maltese, Canaanite, and Phoenician. Includes also the Proto-Canaanite
and Phoenician writing systems, the branch "from which most or
all alphabetic writing systems descend" (Sampson, 1985:77). The most
important characteristics of semitic writing systems is that they record the
consonants but not the vowels, and are written from right to left (sht kl kl
hslgN km dw hcW).
Sumerian: Southern Babylonian during the
fourth millenium BC. The ancient non-Semitic civilisation of the Tigris-Euphrates
basin, south of modern Baghdad. "A people of unknown descent"
(Coulmas, 1989:72). In what Lecours (1995:219) describes as "the
Sumerian invention", they developed the world's "very first writing
system" around 3300 BC. This was a 1200-sign pictographic system
possibly deriving from the use of tokens. It developed, in turn, into
the cuneiform system around 3000 BC.
Syllabary: A type of writing system. One
where each sign represents a syllable rather than an individual phoneme.
Syllabaries typically have a hundred or so signs. This is many less
than a logographic system, but appreciably more than an alphabet.
In Japanese Kana, for example, there are 49 different symbols to
learn, but - once learned - spellings are very concise and regular. In hieroglyphics,
there are around 100 common biliteral signs approximating to CV or CVC
syllables, and another 15 or so triliteral signs approximating to CVCV
or CVCVC double syllables (Gardiner, 1957; Davies, 1987; Zauzich, 1992).
Token: A primitive way of keeping records,
probably as an aid to trading and/or the collecting of taxes, and apparently
in widespread use in the fertile crescent during the neolithic period
(say from 8000 to 3300 BC). A possible precursor of the writing systems
which then emerged between 3300 and 3100 BC. Schmandt-Besserat (1978, 1992)
describes how the Jarmo village site in Northern Iraq (first occupied around
6500 BC - see Map (a)) yielded more than a thousand simple clay shapes -
spheres, disks, cylinders, etc. She also points to similarities between the
inscriptions on tokens from Uruk in Southern Iraq (3500 BC - see Map (b)) and
some of the characters in the Sumerian writing system which developed
in that region a few centuries later. Here, redrawn from Schmandt-Besserat
(1978:44-45), are some examples:
Transliteration: The task of
converting written material from one writing system to another,
retaining (or occasionally improving) the sound but without necessarily
understanding it. The first stage in translating hieroglyphics, for
example, is to transliterate the (unsegmented) pictograms into their alphabetical
equivalents (as shown in the examples given under ideogram). This
greatly assists their segmentation into words, and the word roots may then be
looked up in a dictionary in the normal way.
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