Language Log

The 4,000-year-old tablets reveal translations for 'lost' language, including a love song.
(Image credit: Left: Rudolph Mayr/Courtesy Rosen Collection. Right: Courtesy David I. Owen)

From:

Cryptic lost Canaanite language decoded on 'Rosetta Stone'-like tablets

Two ancient clay tablets from Iraq contain details of a "lost" Canaanite language.

By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science, Jan. 30, 2023

If one has a knee-jerk reaction to attribute all distant cultural resemblances to chance coincidence (independent invention), that would be to make a mockery of human mobility and adaptability.  It would be as if people never deigned or had the opportunity to borrow something from another group.

I can give hundreds of long distance cultural correspondences that could not possibly have been due to chance coincidence — so complicated, intricate, and exact are they, especially when accompanied by textual, artistic, and other types of evidence, much of it hard / material.  Moreover, we often have the bodies and the goods and the words — at transitional stages and times — to go along with the transmission.  For some examples, see the "Selected readings" below.  Many more could be adduced.

In a masterful Smithsonian Magazine (January-February 2023) article, Chanan Tigay documents:

How an Unorthodox Scholar Uses Technology to Expose Biblical Forgeries:  Deciphering ancient texts with modern tools, Michael Langlois challenges what we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls

This engrossing account is so rich that I can only touch on a few of the highlights.  It's about a would-be, and to some extent still is, rock musician — looking like the bassist from Def Leppard — named Michael Langlois.  But, at 46, "he is also perhaps the most versatile—and unorthodox—biblical scholar of his generation."

What makes Langlois so special?  Reading through Tigay's article, it is his relentless quest to get to the bottom of puzzles posed by tiny details of the Dead Scrolls, and his creativity in devising unconventional tools and approaches for doing so.

Regular readers of Language Log will not be strangers to Sogdian, an extinct Middle Iranian language (see the list of "Selected readings" below).  The pace of research on Sogdian has picked up greatly in recent decades.  Now, with the publication of Catalogue of Sogdian Writings in Central Asia by International Institute for Central Asian Studies (IICAS) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, we are set for even more intensive studies on Sogdian in the coming years.

Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo (12/20/22):

The Coolest Archaeological Discoveries of 2022

Let's revisit the best old stuff that made headlines this year.

Some of these are gruesome, e.g., the parasitic worms found in 2,700-year-old toilet, which reminds me of my experiences in Nepal.  Many of them have implications for language and linguistics (see the references and links below).  Most of them attest to cultural contacts across wide distances.

My favorite is King Tut's space dagger, made out of meteoritic iron, which is especially interesting, given that the Iron Age didn't begin until a century after King Tut's death.

The researchers did chemical analyses on the dagger and also turned to ancient Egyptian literature, where they found references to a special dagger gifted to King Tut’s grandfather by a foreign ruler.

(source:  here, here)

The spread of Greek language and culture across Asia has often been a topic of discussion in our posts, for which see "Selected readings" below.  Now we have a long, richly illustrated article that summarizes much of what has come to be known on this subject, a large part of it aptly from the pages of Sino-Platonic Papers.

"The Ancient Greek Kingdoms of China"
By Arunansh B. Goswami, Greek Reporter (December 1, 2022)

Note that the author is an Indian.  South Asia was an important conduit for the transmission of Sino-Hellenic cultural elements across Eurasia during antiquity.  This is not a conclusive, academic paper, but a convenient, comprehensive survey that usefully introduces many themes for the further study of Greek influence in Eurasia during the last two millennia and more.

We just finished looking at this recent decipherment from France:  "Decoding an emperor's letter: the dark arts of diplomacy" (11/29/22).  Now we have an equally challenging case from Israel:

Researchers Crack Secret of 1,400-year-old Inscription From Catacomb in Israel

Exaltation my mouth? Graffito from Beit She’arim cemetery confounded scholars for decades – until they figured out it was written in Aramaic using a Persian alphabet. But its true meaning remains inscrutable

Ariel David, Haaretz (11/28/22)

Credit: Beth She‘arim Expedition of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Photo Archive of the Institute of Archaeology

Below are the opening paragraphs of a review by Richard Foltz in Caucasus Survey (2022), 1-2 [10.30965/23761202-bja10006; published by Brill].

Warwick Ball,The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas, Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 414+xix pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-8806-8, £19.99 (pbk).

The work under review is a revised and expanded edition of the author’s earlier The Gates of Asia: The Eurasian Steppe and the Limits of Europe (London:  East & West Publishing, 2015), although he prefers to describe it as “a new book rather than a new edition” (p.4). In taking on the vast sweep of Eurasian steppe history, the author’s stated aim is “to focus on those subjects that shaped Europe, even at the cost of glossing over the effect on other regions such as the Middle East, South Asia, or China” (p.3).  Ball is an archaeologist, so it is not surprising that the book draws heavily on archaeology, although he ventures as well in to other topics such as language, ethnicity, mythology, and art (the possible echoes of Scythian motifs in art nouveau, for example).

During our discussion of the Iranian antecedents of "kiosk", we also touched upon the Indian origins of "stupa".  In this post, I would like to focus on a single monument of utmost importance that shows the intimate intermingling of Indic and Greek archeological, architectural, artistic, iconographical, religious, numismatic, and, not least, linguistic elements.

The Butkara Stupa (Pashto: بت کړه سټوپا) is an important Buddhist stupa near Mingora, in the area of Swat, Pakistan. It may have been built by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, but it is generally dated slightly later to the 2nd century BCE.

The stupa was enlarged on five occasions during the following centuries, every time by building over, and encapsulating, the previous structure.

The stupa was excavated by an Italian mission (IsIOAO: Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente), led by archaeologist Domenico Faccenna from 1956, to clarify the various steps of the construction and enlargements. The mission established that the stupa was "monumentalized" by the addition of Hellenistic architectural decorations during the 2nd century BCE, suggesting a direct involvement of the Indo-Greeks, rulers of northwestern India during that period, in the development of Greco-Buddhist architecture.

A new kind of cabbage for me:

Introduction to the site:

"The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)

I have written about Shimao informally before, but the more we keep finding out about it, the more I come to believe that it is the most important archeological site in China from before the beginning of our era.

Li Jaang, Zhouyong Sun, Jing Shao, and Min Li, "When peripheries were centres: a preliminary study of the Shimao-centred polity in the loess highland, China", Antiquity, 92.364 (August 22, 2018), 1008-1022.

Chinese archeologists continue to do work at Shimao, although with restrictions because of the sensitive nature of the site.  We can expect additional publications about the site and its artifacts, including, for example, 20,000 bone needles (reported by Min Li who is writing a paper on the textile industry found at Shimao).

New article:

"King Carved In Stone Found at 4,200-Year-Old Chinese Pyramid Palace", by Sahir Pandey, Ancient Origins (8/11/22)

With copious illustrations from the site, including clear photographs of relief carvings and inscriptions.  Astonishingly, in some respects they resemble figures from the mysterious Bronze Age site of Sanxingdui in Sichuan (southwestern China)

As the art historians Richard Barnhart (Yale) and Lukas Nickel (Vienna) have shown, Greek elements, images, and techniques reached into the mausoleum of the First Emperor of the Qin (259-210 BC) and the massive terracotta army entombed there.  See "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18) and the many references thereto.  The continuing research of Lucas Christopolous has cemented the presence of things Greek in East Asia even more securely.  Here we present just one significant finding documented by Lucas' investigations, namely, the crouching position of warriors in the First Emperor's army and in my favorite artifact from Eastern Central Asia, a kneeling bronze statue from the south bank of the Künäs River, Xinyuan (Künäs) County, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum Collection, exhibited in the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 2011.  See object 44 on p. 155 of Victor H. Mair, ed., Secrets of the Silk Road (Santa Ana, CA:  Bowers Museum, 2010).  See also p. 47 here and p. 163 of Mallory and Mair, The Tarim Mummies (London:  Thames and Hudson, 2000).

Notice that the bronze warrior is bare-chested, has a long nose and round eyes, is wearing a pleated kilt and helmet in a Trojan or other Greek style, and has additional Greek attributes.  Since another similar figure was found nearby, this is not a one-off fluke.  He is often said to be from the 5th c. BC, but see below for Lucas' slightly later dating.

[This is a guest post from Zhang He]

Dear Colleagues:

I am writing to you at the airport of Termez, a city on the southern border of Uzbekistan with Afghanistan. This city is so far the highest point of my trip. The city’s name is very likely after Demetrius, a general of Alexander the Great, who, after the death of Alexander, ruled this area. There are several important cultures that met here: Greek, Bactrian, Buddhist, and later Islam. A village 20 km north of the city is still called Macedon (!!!) after more than two thousand years! I went to a ruin called Kampir Tepe (Tepe means “hill”) which is believed to be one of the 80+ Alexandrias: Alexandria-Oxus (Alexandria on the Oxus River, which was later called Amu Darya). It was a citadel of Greco-Bactrians from 4th c. BCE to 2nd c. CE. It is believed that Alexander himself and his troops took six days to cross the river and started a settlement here. His third wife Roxana is from a nearby place in today’s Tajikistan (less than 60 miles). I saw big ceramic storage jars. The fragments were laid out on the ground by working archaeologists from more than two thousand years ago! Really amazing!