quote: One presentation, entitled the "Beginnings of Writing in Ancient Egypt," was given by Gunther Dreyer who is now heading the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo. For over twenty-five years, this Institute has been at the forefront of forging a reexamination of the Royal Necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt. This site is often referred to as Umm el-Qaab or the "Mother of Pots" because of the large number of vessels and jars found there used for funerary offerings in the context of burial sites and rituals. Dreyer defined writing as "a system to encode the sounds of language by using signs." To illustrate his point, he provided a modern-day example of our ability to look at traffic signs and understand their meaning without being able to "read" them because they do not represent sounds. When signs are used to represent sounds in systematic ways the beginnings of writing emerge. In interpreting various inscribed tags, seals, pottery, and jars found, Dreyer placed the origin of writing in Ancient Egypt at approximately 3400 B.C. He highlighted the theme of trade and commerce as perhaps being the catalyst for the emergence of writing because various objects describe quantities of imported and exported goods such as oil and fat functioning as tribute…
MS 2787 PROTOHIEROGLYPHS OF SHIP AND OAR (TRANSPORTATION)
MS in archaic Egyptian on clay, Egypt, Nagada II period, 3500-3100 BC, 1 black top jar, diam. 13-6 cm, h. 28 cm, (7x18 cm), 1 line of 2 large protohieroglyphs incised in the clay.
Context: A related example incised with an ibis: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Predynastic Egyptian collection, fig. 25, no. 174.
Provenance: 1. Found at Kamoula, Egypt (1897); 2. Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Surrey; 3. Private collection, Switzerland; 4. Sotheby's New York 5.6.1999:337.
Commentary: The present jar and the Ashmolean jar have, so far, the earliest "script" known in the Western world, preceding the earliest examples from Egypt and Sumer. Whether it actually is script is under discussion. It certainly is not continuos writing.
A group of pottery and ivory tags was discovered in a predynastic Royal tomb in Abydos in 1998 with similar protohieroglyphs dated to 33rd - 32nd c. BC. A pottery shed was found in 1999 in Harappa in the Indus Valley with 6 signs, dated to ca 3500 BC, but without any connection to the later Indus Valley script, see MS 2645.
Exhibited: 1. Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo, April 2002 - Jan. 2003; 2. Tigris 25th anniversary exhibition. The Kon-Tiki Museum, Oslo, 30.1. - 15.9.2003; 3. Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo, September 2003 -.
MS 200
HOR AHA OF UPPER EGYPT, THE NAME OF ONE OF THE FIRST TWO PHARAOHS OF DYNASTY I
MS in archaic Egyptian on clay, possibly Abydos, Upper Egypt, 3007-2975 BC, 1 cylindrical jar, h. 24 cm, diam. 11 cm, 2 columns, (10x7 cm), 7 hieroglyphs, including the cartouche of Aha surmounted by a falcon denoting the royal title "Horus", and "Shema" for Upper Egypt, in a rapid flowing script in black ink.
Provenance: 1. Possibly excavated at the First Dynasty tombs in the Royal necropolis at Abydos; 2. Sotheby's New York 2.12.1988:126.
Commentary: Among the earliest examples of human script in ink extant. The oldest are probably similar cylindrical jars from Abydos, with the cartouche possibly of the predynastic King Ka, about 3100 BC. One of these is in British Museum (BM 35508). Further the recent discovery of a predynastic Royal tomb at Abydos containing inscribed pottery and ivory tags. The first 2 Pharaohs of the first dynasty, Narmer and Hor Aha, reigned both ca. 3000 BC. Beckerath, however, allocates Narmer as a pre-dynastic king, before 3000 BC.
Exhibited: 1. Conference of European National Librarians, Oslo. Sept. 1994. 2. "Preservation for access: Originals and copies". On the occasion of the 1st International Memory of the World Conference, organized by the Norwegian Commission for UNESCO and the National Library of Norway, at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 3 June - 14 July 1996. 3. The Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology (PHI), Oslo, 13.10.2003-
Source for the above notes on the exhibits: The Schoyen Collection.
From Dreyer's 1998 archeological work, as acknowledged above in the notes from the Schoyen Collection, we have...
"The earliest writing ever seen may have been discovered in southern Egypt. The hieroglyphics record linen and oil deliveries made over 5,000 years ago…the new Egyptian discoveries have been confidently dated to between 3300 BC and 3200 BC using carbon isotopes.
The writings are line drawings of animals, plants and mountains and came mainly from the tomb of a king called Scorpion in a cemetery at Abydos, about 400 km (250 miles) south of Cairo…
Since 1985, Mr Dreyer and his team have unearthed about 300 pieces of written material on clay tablets barely bigger than postage stamps…
The newly discovered Egyptian writings also show that the society then was far more developed than previously thought, Dreyer said. He said man's first writings were not a creative outpouring but the result of economics: when chieftains expanded their areas of control they needed to keep a record of taxes. Although the Egyptian writings are made up of symbols, they can be called true writing because each symbol stands for a consonant and makes up syllables." - BBC News, Sci/Tech, 1998.
Photos: Courtesy Dreyer
Thus, these findings date the earliest scripts of the Nile Valley, which can confidently be considered writing or ‘continuous’ writing , back to Nagada III phase. One thing is clear, as Dreyer put it,…
“The newly discovered Egyptian writings also show that the society then was far more developed than previously thought, Dreyer said.”
He concluded his presentation by noting similarities between specific Egyptian and Mesopotamian objects and suggesting that perhaps there is an initial influence of Egyptian writing on Mesopotamia because there are signs on Mesopotamian objects that are only "readable" from the standpoint of the Egyptian language, but not the Mesopotamian language.
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^ The earliest known proto-hieroglyphs are found carved in rocks of Sayalah and Qustul which are located in today's southern Egypt but in acient times were part of the 'Nubian' kingdom of Ta Seti.
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