Origin of script and logograms

Script, logogram, Laussel, attribute, rational analysis, Mother Invention, predator, relativity, Lascaux, Celestial Hall, Lorthet, game law, Isturitz, Rahu, icon, ideogram, pictograph, Glozel, Azillian, Otherworld, Lepenski Vir, He-Goat.

For some reason many people expect that early people were spiritual and superstitious to a greater extend than some of us are. But how could they prove that?

This is very important since it is a matter of attitude. They tell that the Romans thought their attitude was the superior compared with the Etruscans. When thunder and lightening goes the Etruscans meant that it was messages from the gods in the tradition of teleological thinking. The Romans told that when the clouds collide thunder and lightening is created. That is the analytic attitude seeing the causality in the world of humankind and his company the nature.

The fact is that both cultures lived for long. The difference seems to be that the analytical method create things while the teleological attitude leads to canonical fundamentalism and life bounds to tradition if not fundamentalism.

Those attitudes are not dead yet. Italians say "Footstep of Man" about rock-carvings while some Scandinavians say "Footstep of gods". Lately Graham Hancock used the header "Fingerprints of gods". The crucial point is that gods do not make footprints, fingerprints or anything else. Their existence is abstract and fictional. So with Roman and stoic rationalism the teleological attitude is rubbish since we can operate only with things we can see, hear, feel and operate.

Here I take 20000 to 3500 BC as agenda for the discussion and I use the available figurative remains as link to reality. Naturally people around 20000 BC onward had their history and prehistory but we do not know if they were aware and if it was necessary to be aware. Sorry, they needed to use all inventions and achievement of their ancestor of course. Probably much of it was folk memory tied to the starry sky and ritual places like Isturitz with remains from 30000 BC onward… many call it "forefathers cult" when we use the oldies such as Einstein, Darwin, Newton as the heads we look back at.

We can only make a curl on the thread when we go beyond 30000 BC and mention the few things we know before the Moon Lady above. We can go more than ten times 30000 to find the BIG BIG GRANDMA of the Laussel Lady. Near Tan-Tan Morocco they have found a female statuette Tan-Tan Lady dated to between 300000 and 500000 years old. Thye have found another similar Berekhat Ram at the Golan Heights later …The archaeologists maybe do not understand when I tell this in plain English since they normally use special names such as 'Acheulian' and terms that no layman can remember. Anyway we know that fertility has been the real thing for long…. For photos see Don's maps Venus figures he name them

When people with theological background see these ladies they almost always call the "Great Goddess" and use their own frames Maiden Maria on the past. However I think the old girls would be angry if they knew. Girls want to be individuals and that man notices their specialities. Some idols have big butt, others big womb, the third maybe have big diddies and Mother Invention were known for her brains. They analysed child making, pregnancy, birth giving, nursing, housing and such things and of course how to get food on table when Man in House did not have success in hunting.

All beings in the world are predators and evolution have made them fit for their special niche in the biosphere. Early science made clumsy categories and mixed valuation. That has nothing to do with analytical and logic description of the relative world where each being lives on special substrate and is adapted to the local environment.

Every summer I watch how mother Jackdaw teaches next generation how to come to the parking place and the front of the cars. The human predator has killed many insects that fasten on the bumper. That is adaptation to the local relativity field and that make the specie survive. Should we call it creative jackdaw thinking? Oh no, only humankind could think they say.

Many people think they should shoot the jackdaws since there are "too many" as they say. The real problem is that humankind spread much garbage and in fact the jackdaws spare us from what the organisms in the garbage could cause. The jackdaws fill the niche of garbage and waste. Now they have got some competition since humankind has over-fertilised the big lake so the archipelago is greening with less food and mating space. Now we have the gulls in our little town and they are sometimes attacking us in defence of their little ones. But is humankind practising creative thinking when we let the biosphere decline? I think Mother Jackdaw should protest.

It is the law of relativity that in nature and the world "everything affects everything" said with a popular phrase after the discovery of fractals. The law of relativity says also that every niche and relativity field should be described according to the local conditions and context. Early science put in "higher and lower" culture when we nowadays should speak about sustainable and expedient culture/ local biosphere.

The jackdaws do not need more than learn mating and nurse the little ones and how to teach next generation to get food. Every environment need special teaching such as learning that there are plenty of food on the bumpers. That is enough and we asking if that is humanlike behaviour make a silly question like those fools make. WE should focus on the living style of the object and not on ours living. It would be much more appropriate to ask how much humankind has learnt from many kinds of beings in the biosphere we do not valuate before there is money in it. Humankind is the week specie that needs to kill and destroy nature included other humans to make a living.

Humankind was probably at first specialised as predator on vegetable food but became all-eater and got taste for meat. Bloods taste and game lit the hunting instinct adapted from their prey that from time to time brought plenty of food from just one hunt. That is heydays of the lazy male. Even vegetables are in wide meaning predators with the feet in the underground. They catch sun and rain from above and minerals and other things from beneath. On an old oak there could be 600 types of beings that are predators all of them.

The caves are time capsules reflecting the outside culture at that time. Otherwise there would not be many remains in nature since it is covered with layers of waste from later times. Normally we forget the cultures outside the caves and in other parts of Europe from the early growth of civilisation and population.

However in Russia they have found many figurines telling about the aspects of the Ladies of Fertility but the surrounding environment is missing of course. There are not so many male figurines however some lion-men draw attention … my wife called me "Honeypaw" when the lights were out in bed. That is another name for Bear.

For long there was not much interest in the caves caused by the difficult environment and maybe they put too many labels on our ancestors such as primitive beings with no culture. Still today the Giza Plateau and Middle Kingdom in Egypt is like a toad covering everything. Here we should look at the rational thinking behind icons and scripts.

It is hard to separate figurative art from the symbols/ ideograms in the early ages. In Later Egypt we see they animated qualities and abstractions using animals or constructing animals for the purpose. Maybe they wanted to keep abstractions and reality apart? In the big caves is a collection of their company on earth. For them animals were icons for the special kind of game needed to catch a particular animal and at a certain time of the year. They projected all their knowledge in space-time to the pictured animals.

It looks as a pure male world but perhaps women participated in game in some places but traditionally they were at the settlement and harvested vegetative nature. The symbols above may indicate that they also cultivated some unknown plants. There are rock-carvings in Spain showing women being in the game. Anyway animals and games including fishing filled most of the male brains, which also mean that the hunting hand used most of the brains.

No game kills animals with magic. 'Magic' is a word science use instead of pretending the world of those days. In the caves we see often the symbol/ logogram TI = life or an arrow pointing at the heart of the prey. The heart of the animal is life for the animal and when killed the animal means life for the people. There is nothing magic, cosmological, superstitious or spiritual in such paintings. It is "the real thing". It tells, "Hit the animal there to get life". They pretended to be the animal to learn the nature of the prey.

Some of the caves are closed for the public and as a whole only some scientists have been allowed to visit all caves. Too much traffic in the caves would damage the fragile paintings and reliefs. That causes that you and I are dependable on the pictures they publish. Unfortunately the choice and cut of the photos is often non-scientific. We are often presented keyhole pictures showing no more than curiosities and no context.

The golden rule in interpreting archaeology including rock-art is that we should see the whole context. On some or near some animals in the big hall of Animal Round there are signs completing and giving another dimension to the cave. We should be shown the signs as well as the animals because they could belong to each other.

At the time of these celestial images the equinox were around a half turn apart from today's spring equinox at the ecliptic. That means Ramadan and end of moon season was in our Pegasus that was known as the Stag/ deer / reindeer. The image of the falling Stag gives the picture another dimension and later on end of "first half-year" was animated as a fallen man. At the same time solstices were in both end of Watergate/ Milky Way.

I think the symbol separates seasons or half years and it is found in several places in the Big Celestial Hall. Much later in India the H-goat RbHus announced the monsoon and was also symbol for each of three season. A similar symbol is used in Egyptian astronomy at half year/ new year at midwinter. They were making pictures for thousands of years and that means due to precession the year, half-year and quarter points were mowing 1/12 every 2200 years of total turn 25 800 years.

In upper right corner there are two signs that old women in my childhood called "goose feet" and that later are interpreted "decision by law". The carvings are maybe 13000 years old. At that time autumn equinox was in asterism Stag = Pegasus and the Fishes due to precession. The abstract symbols tell us about organised game law. In the natural society every animal and plant should be harvested at the right time.

At Drammen Norway there is a game law in rock-carvings showing a big whale and a baby whale. These are excluded by "goose eyes" = " …" as they say in Denmark. The object or word within the goose eyes is excluded from the present room/ agenda … Nowadays the Norse hunt baby seals and they have forgotten the old law (think what money and greedy could do).

In Bohuslen Sweden at Aspeberget there is a hind with two fawns excluded by the goose eyes. That is the game law that 'hind with fawns' should not be hunted. Every local settlement sets rules for their year and society. From later times we know that peace and rules guarded "the season" that begun at spring equinox in most places. In most cultures the spring ritual was the most important time.

From Skaane we know that the footprints has to do with the season. In Egypt an empty boat symbolised start of season. The footprint with the snake has the toe beneath and symbolises water and fertility running down. That helps us understand the artefact from Isturitz that is maybe 10000 years elder and the cave was used from around 30000 BC onward. We see the footprint under ground and the spiral symbolises the flow and the other signs are other times.

This Karelian symbolism could symbolise Ramadan when the moon year is aligned with sun year and star year. When the astronauts stepped on the moon the Indian Brahmins said "Now the moon dog Rahu has got flea". The concept Rahu is/ was the falling node of the moon. In the image we see that Rahu/ Fox is aligned with new moon and sun in the asterism reindeer. Normally it is a stag that in Samic is called "sarves" and the word is in Finnish root sarvi = horn. No animal has more imposing horn crown than an old reindeer..

Some of the signs we could maybe identify as logograms wit sound as a word. However it does not matter since we have to translate the whole picture and context to our language. We do not get whole texts and as far as I know they did not know to make strings of signs/ logograms yet. But it is also of help if we get logograms with sound we can speculate about.

When we make icons, ideograms/ pictograms and text in a system we create another world that became our abstracted Otherworld. It does not matter whether it is in the sky, the underworld, in the woods or somewhere else. For thinking our brains need the logical room where known things happens and are stored. Naturally that is in our brains and in the collective's brains known as conventions and rituals.

We need often a symbolic room, symbolic point, symbolic act or manifestation of some of the things in memory. Today our important people have planners and schedules to keep their program. Ancient people manifested in stones, in night sky, in rituals and songs.  

Earlier scientists were eager to put on labels as low culture, magic, primitive and shamanism on these early achievements of mankind. We use much of our ancestors' inventions still today so I see no reason in calling ourselves primitive when we use good old inventions?

In this essay there is no room for deep analysis, but I try to give an overview of the intellectual achievements around Magdalenian before 7000 BC. In the whole period we have only the keyhole to the caves but we see the scripts were born concerning important things in the day of our ancestors at that time.

Icons, ideograms and signs are used as long as they are frequent so it is no wonder if we meet them much later and far away. Only in few places there were people enough and need for script in our sense. I hope next generation get the opportunity to deeper analysis of the context. From much later Scandinavian rock-carvings we see they tell about their ritual calendar including the idols understood myths and on the other hand they tell about news from the BIG WORLD and we can draw conclusions about their contemporary in trade.

Inventions are often created by demand and need. The need increase with population and culture. In the pictures above we see script as complement to visuals pictures from their environment. Most of them are manifesting the ritual at the time. An icon could stand for a whole proces or event. If you mark with a symbol for spring equinox we have to understand the time ritual but also the feast and market in the context. Even an ideogram is like shorthand for a big or small feature/ event.

The same was use with real scripts and texts that stored ritual and songs. That began maybe 7000 years ago in places with enough population 

Azillian script

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In the Glozel script we get a clue of the meaning from the four upper small stones. In all of them there is X in the end of the text. It can be transcripted ' to cross' and we understand that the first logograms are wishes for successful crossing to the Otherworld of resurrection. In lower left corner we see the Lady of Fertility in birth giving position and that helps us also in the transcription of this type of texts.

The site Glozel was a disgrace to French archaeology for around 50 years. The academics created a vicious circle of rivalry and accused the amateur finder and the amateur archaeologist for fraud and delayed the topic. Now technical analysis has proven that the artefacts are real. At the same time they have new finds of the same kind from at least five other sites in Middle France.

Nowadays they call it the Azillian culture and it dates from before 7000 BC onward to known ages. However some artefacts could be 15000 to 17000 years old. The name it got from the cave Mas d'Azil where they found hoards of painted rounded pebbles. These are then the oldest tokens we know of

I think some people have difficulties with the words like Otherworld, Netherworld, Underworld, and Upperworld. We use past tense for Netherworld/ Underworld and we are not aware of how agriculture works and we do not speculate about sowing and growing. There is no magic and no spiritual in that. Otherworld is also used for the past where our ancestors are and it is no cult to remember all they told their wisdom and taught us about the past.

Upperworld has two aspects and that is the real Mights of Weather … and farmers nowadays use pesticides against some of them. The other part is that they used it as memory of World Order that existed in the brains but needed to be focused into heavens. It is good to blame unreachable Mights and it is good to tell "Don't blame me, the gods up there have told me". The logic is like ours but the vocabulary is animated and not so precise as ours is. We need the poetic mind to understand.

The other sample is a text on clay tablets that can give grey hair. Other scripts are on harpoons, spear heads, hooks, axes, bone combs, engraved bones and shale bits with engraved animals in style of Old Stone Age. There are also engravings on shale rings that could have been used to separate Our World and Otherworld when looking through it. In high game women were not allowed to look directly after the hunters and then they used a ring. Naturally that was precaution that children should not run after their father when he went for the Bear.

Most of the bones are from reindeer and deer. It is notable that on some artefacts we see text together with the horse that disappeared for several thousand years before it came back after 3000 BC or something like that. These facts give us much to think about and we need reliable dating for everything.

The full syllabary of Glozel is about 55 supposed signs/ logograms compared with normal say 22 letters in phonological alphabets. In spite of that some logograms looks like other later alphabet letters but we should expect that the Azillian symbols are logograms. In other syllabaries we have normally more than one stage of the development so that we can see how it began with pictorial script that was simplified to signs and not much is left in the signs chosen for the phonetical alphabet

We are forced to make big jumps when looking at the time before 4^th millennium BC since we have no places of continuous culture. Balkan is an important place since they think metal culture was born there. We have also a lot of seemingly ritual symbolism in artefacts that tell us about their worldview. Even from Greece there are finds of artefacts with script in the "stroke style" and dated to around 5300 BC. Something for the next generation to search for and think about.

In India the icon He-goat = Capricorn = seasons, He-goat-season, Leader of year since they began the year after Ramadan in late summer. They counted years in "harvests" so the new year began after harvest time and that means autumn, inundation or monsoon time. In Egypt they used icons like renpet = palm leaf, hut, mountain, heron for the time when they moved from the shores of the Nile to dry land. In Old Scandinavian language year = harvest.

The amulet in the middle could mean "four seasons" and even the third amulet shows advanced glyphs. We see ready glyphs and some of them were used for long in an area much bigger than Balkan. In Anatolia and for instance Catal Hüyük 7000 BC onward they have found many stamps with geometric figures (I have 32 pictures) that could have been used in trade. Even the Minoan cultures used stamps as for instance the texts on the Phaistos disc they think is influenced from the Luvian culture not far from for Catal Hüyük.

In Lepenski Vir they have found a little statue of the Fishbeing. That make us associate to Oannes in Sumer and the same being on an amulet showing that it must be an early icon Orion + Oxen. In the legend they tell that the Fishbeing brought culture to the Sumerians and he was celebrate in Underworld with fish offer. In the oldest Sumerian town they have found the place.

It seems that in the beginning the "old leaders" were forced to create virtual beings to "lead the people" that stuck to the natural law that all people are equal. None should tell anyone what to do, but with growing populations some kind of suite and leadership were needed. There are many other signs in Sumerian literature that the leaders were forced to lure people to common work and organisation.

Later when the worldly leadership should motivate their role as leader for instance Sargon told that he was the orphan chosen to be leader = the first Moses. Other leaders or nobility told that they came from abroad. Usually science cannot prove such things. It is much like Heinrich syndrome that the legend tell about Troy, but there are many Troys once we begin to seek.

They used things or details as symbol for logograms and normally binary consonant - vowel CV / morpheme/ logogram with separate meaning that could stand alone but also be used as syllable in a world. For instance the Sumerian head above is also translated LU = man while the head with a cup is translated NINDA = food, eat and there are also worlds with three sounds. But the general rule is the binary construction

There is much confusion on Internet about Sumerian Script. The Sumerian formal empire ended around 2350 BC with the Akkadians and Sargon I taking rule. At the same time the cuneiform script was developed but still with some pictorial signs and remains. The Sumerian culture ended but continued with other rulers and with Babylonians from north the name of the deities changed officially. But for instance at the town Uruk the culture continued until 3^rd century AD. Originally Sumer was a confederation of city states and that made it weak when Akkadians and Babylonians went for domination.

The Sumerians were the earliest to write in cuneiform, closely followed by the Babylonians, Elamites, Hittites, Hurrians and the Urartu from Anatolia, Assyrians and more from 2400 BC. Sumerian was originally logogram/ syllable script until ca 1300 BC when it was transferred more or less to letters all depending on the base language. Cuneiform was the language of politics until the fifth century BC. It died out and was replaced by the 22 letter Aramaic in about 900 BC.

When we come to the dynastic ages we are in "known archaeology" where the scientist rather stay as long as they do not know how to solve the difficult questions. A young archaeologist told me that if it is too difficult it is better letter it be … in a way he is right … but still it is a challenge to solve very old symbolism and script.

Nowadays they extend the dynastic period in Egypt back to 3200 BC and normally they are only interested in dynastic scripts and artefacts. But when we look at archaeology the lively period seems to have been around 3500 BC when we see there were Sumerians in Egypt. There is evidence from the Delta/ Lower Egypt. The best evidence of script we find in the vase paintings with more or less systematic calendar paintings.

There are icons/ symbols connected to the calendar and the season is general symbolised by a boat with oars … we see the time boats also in Scandinavian symbolism. At least a part of the symbols we find in Sumer and also in the Indus culture. The crucial point between loose icons and organised script is the discovery that in writing we need strings of organised symbols. That gives order to the message. Maybe the ritual boat was the first step where we can go from stern to stem and read the symbols that describe a period in time. Soon they created a convention in which way rows of symbols and ideograms should be read.

The earliest known examples of writing are found on clay tablets from Uruk (about 4300-3450 BC) dating to about 3300 BC. Already it was a complete system with more than 700 different signs. The first tablets recorded the transfer of commodities such as grain, beer and livestock and some were lists used by scribes learning how to write. The German archaeologist G Dreyer claimed that the Egyptians were firs, but think of the number of early Sumerian pictorial signs? They are not developed in short time.

Three tops is the mountain symbol known from Egypt to China and North America. It could be interpreted with many synonyms mountain, foreign country and later known as 'Original Hill'/ dry land on which the Herons stands during inundation. The hut is also sign of inundation. Both these are in stem of the boat and in stern there is the palm-leaf that later become the RENPET glyph and it counted harvest as well as years.

On most of the boats there is a gate in the middle that shows the step from a space-time to another. Already in Narmer's palette it is transferred to a portal. The temple was naturally "another world". The Sumerians made amulets in the shape of a gate to underworld symbolising the gate to resurrection of man and seed. They tell that the Egyptian and the Sumerian palace front/ gateway are similar. We find the portal also in Hittitian and Minoan symbolism and it was an important icon to separate worlds and spacetimes.

As a whole the small evidence about Sumer - Egypt connection is contradictory. From the Delta there are border stones from agriculture as well as signs of battle between Sumerians and native Africans. Later it was custom to picture battle on the year plaquettes. But that could be Horus and Seth battling about the harvest, treshing or the Pharaoh expanding the land every winter. The symbolism on the two sides of the Narmer palette is ambiguous and could be seen as the agriculture year in which Pharaoh was the "Yearman" and leader of ritual.

Lugged and spouted jars were characteristic of Sumerian Uruk pottery that style is found at Naqada. Cylinder seals also first appeared in Egypt at that time. Some were imports from the east, but others had been made locally and used Mesopotamian or Iranian motifs. In Upper Egypt Flinders Pertrie found figurines at Naqada II ca 3500 BC. The face is in the shape of a pointed triangle and with long beard and that seems to indicate the Sumerians were also in Upper Egypt.

We get the impression that the Sumerians were eventually dominating. As a whole the conclusion is that the Sumerians brought much culture to Egypt before the dynastic period starting around 3000 BC. Even after that they traded with the Egyptians.

On some of the vase paintings we see signs of the "Stepping down ritual" and marriage in Underworld that is the Sumerian type of ritual. That developed to Isis stepping down to earth but Osiris was sent to Underworld. The Inanna myth is difficult sort out from the material. I read lately a long list of attributes, qualities, rituals and myth fragments ascribed to Inanna, new moon and rain originally. It is much like the Nordic Odin with around 150 attributes and qualities that are contradictory and could not be present at the same time..

Firstly in Sumerian time, i.e. Inanna was head deity in Uruk that was a sister town to Eridu with some ritual in common. At the spring festival the suite made a trip by boat between the two cities. We know the same between Upper and Lower Egypt and in Middle Kingdom between Luxor and Karnak. The Babylonians made a similar trip at the Akitu festival.

If we want to keep an open mind we can not use questions like "Origin of writing" and narrow it to when we find strings of symbols and dynastic tablets. The messages from our ancestors could be pictorial, mix of pictorial and symbols, icons, mix of icon and ideograms pictorials. Every ancient symbol gives us a message and the tricky point is for us to understand without preconceived ideas and frames from our world

For the very old days see Don's maps