August 31, 2009 at 8:32 pm (Archaeology, Literacy and writing, Numerals)
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.
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August 31, 2009 at 3:06 pm (Archaeology, Linguistics)
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.
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August 1, 2009 at 10:55 am (Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Literacy and writing)
[Author's note: Sorry for the great delay in posting! I promise that I am not dead, and neither is this blog - I've been involved in an ethnographic project since, well, the day after my last post here, and while it doesn't end for another two weeks, I thought I might check in, just in case anyone is still reading. Expect a flurry of posts to come in late August once I regain my bearings.]
Several months ago, the Tolkien Studies on the Web blog reported that the Maya epigraphist / linguist / archaeologist Marc Zender, who is a lecturer at Harvard, is currently offering (and presumably is nearly concluded?) a summer course entitled, ‘Tolkien as translator: Language, culture, and society in Middle-Earth‘. It looks like a really fascinating approach, from a scholar whose work on Maya hieroglyphic writing will doubtless provide many interesting parallels and contrasts with Middle-earth.
Tolkienophilia is often associated with medieval historians (and no, I haven’t forgotten about that list of sources on medieval anthropology), understandably given that the man was one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century, but I’ve always felt a kinship with Tolkien from an anthropological perspective, despite any number of rather unsightly issues of class, race, and gender that exist within his oeuvre. His incredible focus on language, his deep concern with genealogy and kinship, and the foundational roles of myth and history in his worldbuilding, were what first attracted me to Tolkien’s writing, and still do.
There is no question that, even though I’ve hardly read any of his actual scholarship (and wouldn’t understand it if I could), Tolkien has been one of the more important scholarly influences on my work as well. One of my good friends (an archaeologist) once described me as a philologist in the style of Tolkien, and while that’s not actually true, I see what he means. I was about two hours away from leading a seminar discussion on the Elvish tengwar script (as well as other fictional writing systems) as part of a course on the anthropology of writing and literacy. That was the day Bruce Trigger died, and I cancelled class that day, and never taught the topic since.
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