From: PASAlist@aol.com
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 00:05:50 EDT
Peter wrote,
<<So you confirm that there is still a lot of guesswork, at least when it
starts to be real Sumerian. Why not earlier, as well? How can this
distinction between pictographs and real Sumerian pictograms be
determined, except perhaps by their progressive stylization? Wiseman
mentions the stylization as an almost necessary consequence of a writing
technique using clay tablets. And how do you determine whether there
were any semantic effects of position, sequence, or combinations of the
seemingly simple pictures? Egyptian hieroglyphs also look like simple
pictures. By the way, what are the time frames in which scholars detect
the different types of Sumerian writing?
A review by A.Lawler, Science 292 (29 June 2001), 2418-2420, suggests
that the origin of writing has been pushed back to at least 3300 B.C.,
if not much earlier. "The prehistoric communication revolution" is
believed to have begun about 7000 B.C., but there seems to be very
little information dating to before 3500 B.C. In Mesopotamia, clay
tokens preceded real writing. To date, the earliest clay tablets found
at Uruk date to perhaps 3200 B.C. and early cuneiform to 3100 B.C. A
photograph of an example of "protocuneiform" dating to 3000 B.C. is
shown. One researcher called the early cuneiform "too good" to have been
developed in a haphazard way, implying sufficient sophistication to
write texts like early Genesis....
If we accept 2900 B.C. as the date of the flood (according to Carol Ann
Hill's article in the last issue of PSCF), Adam's death was in 3623 B.C.
and Shem was born about 3000 B.C. So, the Tower of Babel is no problem,
but we would have to push back the earliest writing at least by a little
bit over 600 years. But is this really impossible? I still wouldn't call
this highly improbable. The review by Lawler mentioned above has already
pushed it back by at least 300 years to about 3300 B.C. Isn't it like
dating the "earliest" fossils of some biological species? Many of these
also keep beeing pushed back by newer finds. It seem that we need more
data: earlier finds, more reliable datings, and better understanding of
the scripts found.>>
The earliest writing in Mesopotamia is usually dated from c. 3200 BC. If one
says 3300, it really does not make any significant difference because it
would still be quite primitive. From 3200 to c. 3000 it is pictographs. In
some 4000 tablets from those first two centuries of writing, 85 to 90% are
just economic receipts composed of nouns, numerals, and a few adjectives:
like "sheep-three-temple"; and the other 10 to 15% are lists of words for the
scribes to learn. There are no narratives. There is a slow development from
logographic to phonetic or syllabic writing (which is what is necessary to
have a language able to match speech), but this is very minimal in these
first two centuries. In fact, most scholars go down to c. 2900 or even 2800
before speaking of the next stage of writing.
With regard to the tablets down to c. 2900, Driver says their meaning can be
more or less roughly guessed, "although they can hardly be read in the strict
sense." (G.R. Driver, Semitic Writing). Cambridge Ancient History 3rd edition
vol 1:1 p. 227 talks about Sumerian writing from the earliest period down to
the Early Dynastic Period 1, that is down to 2900 to 2800 BC, and says,
"Before that, writing is restricted to economic texts, usually of a very
simple kind, and in several respects it is very deficient. Signs lack
standardization: their order within a word is arbitrary; phonetic writing is
largely confined to personal names. This inefficiency of early writing
coupled with its highly restricted use, means that our picture of the period
it covers is never going to be more than fragmentary. ’ĶHence the spread of
writing beyond the economic sphere, and the appearance of fully intelligible
texts, marks the beginning of history proper in Mesopotamia." Note that they
put the appearance of "fully intelligible texts" after the Proto-historic
period, that is, after 2800 BC.
The Sumerologist, Samuel Kramer, set forth the same thing: Speaking of the
beginning of writing. he said, "Their first attempts were crude and
pictographic; they could be used only for the simplest administrative
notations. But, in the centuries that followed the Sumerian scribes and
teachers gradually so modified and molded their system of writing that it
completely lost its pictographic character and became a highly
conventionalized and purely phonetic system of writing. In the second half of
the third millennium, the Sumerian writing technique had become sufficiently
plastic and flexible to express without difficulty the most complicated
historical and literary compositions. " Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at
Sumer (Doubleday, 1959) xix. Note that he is placing the peak of writing
that is able to express complicated historical and literary compositions
after 2500 BC.
Gen 1-5:2 with its sophisticated wordplays, poetic lines and involved
narrative simply does not fit the kind of writing that existed earlier than
c. 2900 BC.
<<If we accept 2900 B.C. as the date of the flood (according to Carol Ann
Hill's article in the last issue of PSCF), Adam's death was in 3623 B.C.
and Shem was born about 3000 B.C. So, the Tower of Babel is no problem,
but we would have to push back the earliest writing at least by a little
bit over 600 years. But is this really impossible? I still wouldn't call
this highly improbable. The review by Lawler mentioned above has already
pushed it back by at least 300 years to about 3300 B.C. Isn't it like
dating the "earliest" fossils of some biological species? Many of these
also keep beeing pushed back by newer finds. It seem that we need more
data: earlier finds, more reliable datings, and better understanding of
the scripts found.>>
I agree with Carol Hill (and Dick Fischer before her, and a number of
archaeologists before any of us) that the flood of 2900 BC is probably the
Flood the Bible is talking about. But, as you say this would push Adam's
death and his tablets (Gen 1-5:2) back to c. 3600 BC, and that just makes
them all the more improbable.
In addition to the fact that the Sumerian writing before c. 2900 BC is not
developed to the place where it can be easily used for narrative, Gen 1-5:2
contains names and even more importantly wordplays like 2:7 Adam and adamah
(ground), 4:1 Cain and kanah (acquire); 4:25 Seth, actually Sheth and shith
(appoint, set) which depend upon a Semitic original. Gen 1-5:2 would have to
have been written at least in Akkadian, not Sumerian which is not a Semitic
language; and the wordplays would not work in Sumerian. And since the
Akkadian writing was adopted from the Sumerian, anything written in Akkadian
would have to be dated even later than 2900 B.C. The first evidence of
Akkadian in the tablets found thus far is Semitic names in Sumerian documents
c. 2600 BC., and actual Akkadian literature is even later.
Paul
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