From jayabarathi Tue Apr 6 05:03:00 1999
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Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 20:15:19 +0800
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Subject: [agathiyar] Origns of Writing symposium
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Dear Netters,

Here is something that will interest many people.
Gratis from Indology List.

Regards

Jayabarathi

------------------------Forwarded--------------------
>Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 05:46:35 -0600
>From: Michael Rabe
>Subject: Origns of Writing symposium
>To: INDOLOGY@...
>
>[excerpts from an illustrated article w/ 1 _ekazringa-bull seal from
>Harappa]
>Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers
> By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
>(April 6) A disagreement has erupted between certain scholars, who
>believe the origins of writing lie in Mesopotamia, and some
>archeologists, who say writing first appeared in Egypt.
>*************
>[http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/040699sci-early-writing.ht
ml]
>
>PHILADELPHIA -- ...at a recent symposium on the origins or writing, held
>here at the University of Pennsylvania...
>
>...the writing idea became more widespread at the beginning of the third
>millennium B.C. The Elamites of southern Iran developed a proto-writing
>system then, perhaps influenced by the proto-cuneiform of their Sumerian
>neighbors, and before the millennium was out, writing appeared in the
>Indus River Valley of what is now Pakistan and western India, then in
>Syria and Crete and parts of Turkey. Writing in China dates back to the
>Shang period toward the end of the second millennium B.C., and it dates
>to the first millennium B.C. in Mesoamerica.
>
>Archeologists have thought that the undeciphered Indus script, which
>seemed to appear first around 2500, may have been inspired in part from
>trade contacts with Mesopotamia. But new excavations in the ruins of the
>ancient city of Harappa suggest an earlier and presumably independent
>origin of Indus writing.
>
>In a report from the field, distributed on the Internet, Dr. Jonathan
>Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin and Dr. Richard H. Meadow of
>Harvard University showed pictures of marks incised on potshards that
>they interpreted as evidence for the use of writing signs by
> Indus people as early as 3300 B.C. If these are indeed proto-writing
>examples, the discovery indicates an independent origin of Indus writing
>contemporary with the Sumerian and Egyptian inventions.
>
>Dr. Meadow, using E-mail, the electronic age's version of the king of
>Uruk's clay tablet, confirmed that the inscribed marks were "similar in
>some respects to those later used in the Indus script." The current
>excavations, he added, were uncovering "very significant findings at
>Harappa with respect to the Indus script."
>
>At the symposium, though, Dr. Gregory L. Possehl, a Pennsylvania
>archeologist who specializes in the Indus civilization and had examined
>the pictures, cautioned against jumping to such conclusions. One had to
>be careful, he said, not to confuse potter's marks, graffiti and
>fingernail marks with symbols of nascent writing.
==================================================>

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