other_life
bioconfused
third and luka this is your place to shine
currently studying fuckloads of this kind of literature + stuff adjacent/contextual to it. want this thread to center on afro-asiatic, indo-iranian and indo-european esoterica bc of my own bullshit cultural bias but if u can link it other stuff ofc is fine
here's a spitball ab phonetic writing re:marx's ethnological notebooks
“3) Upper status [of barbarism]. Commences with the smelting of iron ore, use of iron tools, etc., ends with the invention of a phonetic alphabet, and the use of writing in literary composition.”
The history of religious literatures, and therefore the prehistory of the idea of logos, of exegesis/hermeneutics as a channel for gnosis, begins in this transitional period between 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'. Marx says “a phonetic alphabet”, without specifying which. This is because Marx did not live to see the discovery of some of the earliest phonetic inscriptions ('Proto-Sinaitic') at Serabit el-Khadim, in 1904, 21 years after his death. The inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol date even earlier (18th century BCE) and were discovered in 1999.
The use of writing as a creative pursuit or the creation of complex documents presupposes a much longer prehistory: pictorial representation in general (the stone engravings found at Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coastline of Africa, c. 68,000 BCE), and later, elaborated symbol-systems for the keeping of transactional records, ornamentation of artworks and, probably, divination (tortoise shell inscriptions prefiguring the latter 'oracle bone script' were excavated in 2003 at Jiahu, Henan province, China, and radiocarbon date to the 7th millennium BCE).
Between the earliest symbolic/abstract art and the earliest intimation of more complex symbology, a period of 63,000 years elapses. Between the latter and the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, a much shorter period of 5,000 years. We see there is an accelerated development here, and a great abstraction from more complex syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts in the development of the phonetic alphabet (as well as in the transition from Sumerian pictorial writing to the abstraction of cuneiform).
The earliest phonetic inscriptions still owe a great debt to Egyptian hieroglyphics. They are identifiably pictorial, though the consonants they represent are abstracted from the beginnings of syllabic/word characters. The Phoenician script, and its later descendants, are so abstracted that you have to strain to see the connection.
This abstraction of forms to their simplest parts makes phonetic scripts highly contagious (witness its spread from northern Africa to northern Europe), where syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts are contained. Phonetic scripts are universally adaptable, where syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts require initiation to decipher (this is indeed what makes them hieratic). The lack of vowel-points in early abjads like these, whereas abugidas disambiguate for vowels by modifying the base consonants, also leant to ambiguous readings (necessitating the development of the Masorah for Hebrew and the modern Arabic script). This ambiguity is key for later exegesis/hermeneutics, as well as writing/language-based magics.
currently studying fuckloads of this kind of literature + stuff adjacent/contextual to it. want this thread to center on afro-asiatic, indo-iranian and indo-european esoterica bc of my own bullshit cultural bias but if u can link it other stuff ofc is fine
here's a spitball ab phonetic writing re:marx's ethnological notebooks
“3) Upper status [of barbarism]. Commences with the smelting of iron ore, use of iron tools, etc., ends with the invention of a phonetic alphabet, and the use of writing in literary composition.”
The history of religious literatures, and therefore the prehistory of the idea of logos, of exegesis/hermeneutics as a channel for gnosis, begins in this transitional period between 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'. Marx says “a phonetic alphabet”, without specifying which. This is because Marx did not live to see the discovery of some of the earliest phonetic inscriptions ('Proto-Sinaitic') at Serabit el-Khadim, in 1904, 21 years after his death. The inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol date even earlier (18th century BCE) and were discovered in 1999.
The use of writing as a creative pursuit or the creation of complex documents presupposes a much longer prehistory: pictorial representation in general (the stone engravings found at Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coastline of Africa, c. 68,000 BCE), and later, elaborated symbol-systems for the keeping of transactional records, ornamentation of artworks and, probably, divination (tortoise shell inscriptions prefiguring the latter 'oracle bone script' were excavated in 2003 at Jiahu, Henan province, China, and radiocarbon date to the 7th millennium BCE).
Between the earliest symbolic/abstract art and the earliest intimation of more complex symbology, a period of 63,000 years elapses. Between the latter and the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, a much shorter period of 5,000 years. We see there is an accelerated development here, and a great abstraction from more complex syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts in the development of the phonetic alphabet (as well as in the transition from Sumerian pictorial writing to the abstraction of cuneiform).
The earliest phonetic inscriptions still owe a great debt to Egyptian hieroglyphics. They are identifiably pictorial, though the consonants they represent are abstracted from the beginnings of syllabic/word characters. The Phoenician script, and its later descendants, are so abstracted that you have to strain to see the connection.
This abstraction of forms to their simplest parts makes phonetic scripts highly contagious (witness its spread from northern Africa to northern Europe), where syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts are contained. Phonetic scripts are universally adaptable, where syllabic-pictorial hieratic scripts require initiation to decipher (this is indeed what makes them hieratic). The lack of vowel-points in early abjads like these, whereas abugidas disambiguate for vowels by modifying the base consonants, also leant to ambiguous readings (necessitating the development of the Masorah for Hebrew and the modern Arabic script). This ambiguity is key for later exegesis/hermeneutics, as well as writing/language-based magics.
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