Roundup of Archaeology and History May 12-18

Here are the posts I enjoyed this week:

I love this article by Jenny Bhatt about letters between writers and editors–from Thoreau to Virginia Woolf to Hunter S Thompson. You can hear these iconic voices so distinctly. Click here for Scroll.in “We love their books but these letters between writers and editors showcase a dying art form”

This never happens. It’s what one jokingly says would be great, but, of course, never happens at an archaeological dig. You dig up a pot in which are stored tablets that name the city you are digging and it is a famous, recognizable city from other sources. And yet—It has happened in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. There’s been an active dig for years at what we now know is the lost city of Mardaman, but the pot full of solid written evidence came to light and was translated recently (cuneiform on clay). Cities are usually identified by a series of indirect pieces of evidence that never settles to absolute certainty. The tablets date to about 1250 BCE when the city was part of the Assyrian Empire. It’s located strategically along the trade routes between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Syria during the Bronze Age and later. The tablets were sealed in with a layer of clay at a time when the city was destroyed (later rebuilt) and look to have been intentionally preserved. The subject matter so far is administrative and commercial. There are many academic squabbles, Troy’s identification included, that would be very conveniently settled if similar pots of tablets would only come to light. In Turkey it is a particularly big deal to be able to claim your dig is a famous city, and often the claims are made on perhaps tenuous evidence. Human nature and government funding are what they are. Click here for Live Science “Ancient Lost City of Mardaman Uncovered in Iraq”

Found in a tomb in Egypt, possible fragment of the earliest A,B,C sequence of “our” alphabet (from the Phoenicians), from 3,400 years ago. The tomb belongs to an Egyptian official named Sennefer who dealt with foreign affairs. As such, he knew, we might presume, the Semitic languages of the Eastern Mediterranean. It looks like this fragment of limestone was a mnemonic with Egyptian hieroglyphs and Semitic alphabet, a bit like a nursery rhyme story for children today. It predates texts written in the Semitic language so sorting out the words depends on comparing to written texts from later period. But it makes sense that the scribes responsible for communicating with these areas had tools for remembering the varied writing systems. The back side appears to have another writing system that didn’t persist as well as the Phoenician one. Kind of like the reference works we all keep handy today. I feel like I’m sitting in an ancient diplomatic office and seeing it at work. How about you? What’s indispensable on your desk? Click here for Live Science “Earliest Version of Our Alphabet Possibly Discovered”

If you are interested in what the Phoenician alphabet looks like and a comparison of it to Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic, click here for a good chart on WikiMedia Phoenician Alphabet.