They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was super cool.
There were plenty of people who were pro slavery in those days. Mixed all across the US, read Mark Twain. There were plenty of people against it.
More to the point, I wonder if the museum addresses this. I'm going to guess only in a small way, having lived half my life in the south. Maybe someone with actual knowlege can comment instead of web search "experts" like me.
- the Vasa in Stockholm, Sweden is a ship dredged from the harbor and stabilized, sank in 1628
- the Mary Rose in Portsmouth, England is a Tudor ship that sank in 1545 that was raised and stabilized
In both cases a ton of work was done to stabilize and preserve the remains of the ships that is, imo, almost more interesting than the ship itself.
Using different number formatting instead of word or sign (~) is still implicit and not explicit.
Since he thought people would assume it was a rounded figure, he reported it as 29,002. And is therefore known as the man who first put 2 feet on the top of Everest.
Where I was taught…
2600 has 2 sd
2600. Has 4 sd
2.6e3 has 2sd
2.60e3 has 3 sd
Edit. If I had been in charge of setting sd rules, I would’ve said …
2600 has 4 sd
260? Has 3 sd
26?? Has 2 sd
The fact zeros are overloaded (they can be placeholders or they can actually mean 0) is confusing to students.
https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Made-West-History/dp/059372...
I feel a bit jealous of them, me being in tech, doing hard work like this to preserve the history of humanity.
I wonder if Phoenicians labelled the parts of ships like their fellow Carthaginians (Chanani)? Or is this a Carthaginian ship but it's referred to as Phoenician?
Cadiz: "boundary" - the city that guarded access to Britain. Malaga: "Queen City". Cartagena. Barcelona ("barkel" - blessing)
Way, way, way older.
Writing is an incredibly novel development. There are still today linguistic communities without writing, although they're becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
From a 1969 study of preindustrial societies (though I'm not sure if they are all contemporary or if some are historical):
39.2%: No writing
37.1%: Pictures only
23.7%: Writing
No need to go that far, the Slavs didn't write down their languages until ~800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.
Most are still not writing in their own language.
What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.
Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
No "boats" ala coracles or oak keel ships but (regionally) plenty of canoes .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Canoes isn't set on the Swan River.
Perth, of course, once had many lakes and swampy wetlands before all the market garden bore went in and drainage ditches.
> But has a story been passed down?
Many, all over. DM from up where I grew up touched up pretty old paintings and told stories: https://magabala.com.au/products/yorro-yorro
There were|are a lot of language areas each with stories of their own: https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
Stating this as fact is misleading. Lack of evidence isn't proof of absence.
Humanity in its current form has existed for 300,000 years. The idea that writing spontaneously emerged 13,000 years ago, independently in multiple locations all over the world, coincidentally right after glaciers melted and sea levels rose 300-900 feet, reshaping the world’s geography, is —at best— an assumption, not a certainty.
It also wasn’t discovered simultaneously. China is 3000 years ago, and Maya 2300 years ago. Sumerian or Egyptian were close to same time which probably means they were connected.
Plenty of people lived in agricultural civilizations that were not the "most highly developed societies". Also, I'm not sure hunter-gatherers couldn't develop writing, though I know theories and could imagine reasons either way. How do you tell your compatriots, coming in the next few weeks, where the good food is?
Meanwhile, we have mountains of evidence of writing from the advanced, settled Bronze-Age civilizations.
We can't be sure that nobody ever scribbled some symbol down before the invention of agriculture, but we know it can't have been common.
> We have plenty of artifacts and paintings from hunter-gatherers
Do we? And in the Neolithic or later?
Literally lost to history.
Beowulf is the greatest discovery in the history of English. It's the earliest epic poem in any Germanic language, and by itself it is about 10% of known Old English poetry. The date of the story's creation is unknown, with estimates ranging from 6th-8th century CE. The manuscript we have today is thought to have been written (not printed, of course) in the south of England, maybe between the 10th and 12th centuries CE. And at some point after that, the story and manuscript were lost to time.
The physical document reappeared from oblivion, sometime before 1563 in the collection of Laurence Nowell. Nowell, unfortunately, didn't know (or didn't reveal) what they had. The document was there, but Beowulf the story and that manuscript were still lost.
And that continued to be the situation for over two hundred years, as the manuscript passed through at least two more hands, and still Beowulf was lost to time. In 1731 the manuscript was caught in a fire (!). Almost, it was forever consigned to oblivion before it was even discovered, but the fire only charred it around the edges, costing us a few words here and there, and drying the very old pages to make them even more fragile. Many other manuscripts were lost.
Finally, around 1790, Danish scholar Grimur Thorkelin read it and realized what he had. (Thorkelin then sat on it for another 25 years before finally publishing in 1815!)
Are there records we haven't discovered? Yes. Are they lost to history? Not yet.
They did not agreed on using certain sounds for specific things. They already did that on their own languages, each with their specific sounds. What the Phoenician Alphabet did was transcribing those sounds that already existed to a writing system that was common.
The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet but they used it so much that developed it a lot. They used it for communication as a Lingua Franca for commerce in the Mediterranean.
It actually became a language on its own. They will use a native word from the native language of some particular good or commodity and then everybody around the Mediterranean Sea will use that written name and sound for referring to that thing.
It was extremely useful, so people used it more and more creating over time latin and greek scripts.
No. Multiple languages were written with the same alphabet because of the borrowing of that technology by speakers of other languages, not because it was designed as such.
Actually the process of borrowing is fondamental to the emergence of alphabets: the three biggest (by corpus size) logographic scripts all gave birth to more phonetic scripts across language boundaries. That happened with hieroglyphics (the case we are discussing), but also with Sumerian cuneiform > Akkadian writing and Chinese characters > Japanese kanas.
As far as I’m aware, there no evidence that modern humans ever existed without language. And other recent hominid species that until recently co-existed with our ancestors probably had language too.
So probably there was never a human without language. Any non-lingual ancestor of ours was not human and probably pre-dates humans.
As for writing, to be reductionist, it is essentially arbitrary.
Where you draw the line between mere “vocalizations” and “language” is a pretty open question, IMO.
awk grep ping biff ip yum du curl sedNot to offend anyone, but ip yum and curl are neologisms introduced in later translations.
Wars have been fought over this disagreement!
Someone in this position started using those symbols to register the sounds of the Semitic languages, and the rest is literally history.
Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet.
Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the Semitic languages.
The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the sounds that were written with different letters in the older alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same pronunciation have been dropped.
22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
The small number of letters has created problems also for the writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the destruction of many cities).
Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that this number was not enough to write all the consonants of ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin", because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in the same way).
Writing has been invented independently in many places around the world, but in almost all writing systems the written symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems, all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing system, are the exception.
A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were pronounced together with the consonants.
The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing direction and this has been inherited in the other European writing systems.
Egyptian Hieratic script simplified the forms down for writing with ink.
Canaanites simplified it further by tossing all the ideograms, logograms and multi-consonant symbols to create an abjad.
The Greeks added the first vowels to create a true alphabet.
My guess for phoenicia is that their alphabet comes from numbers (or maybe other smaller individual set of symbols) borrowed from another culture, but I wouldn't be able to determine from who or where.
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
What gets to wood is critters. A lot of sea creatures will nibble away at it. On land, it's insects and fungus and the like. Tidal action will also scour away exposed wood.
The exceptions include the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the deep ocean.
Don't know what saved this old boat though.
The archeology museum in Arles, France displays a conserved Roman river barge which was conserved in this fashion, see their Youtube documentary [0] There are many more known river barges at the bottom of the Rhone, but these are best preserved by leaving them where they are.
See also "bog people".
But the results of such extreme anomalies do not extrapolate reliably to the general case.