I finally finished the book I mentioned earlier, and I wasn't disappointed. Nicholas Clapp saunters around in the deserts of Southern Arabia, mountains of Ethiopia, (the old Coptic churches of Lalibela carved straight from the rocks) not to forget the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, in search of the elusive legend of the Queen of Sheba, Balkis/Bilqis. No conclusive results, but in archaeology one rarely gets those, but one gets an interesting travelogue at least.
A curious connection to current events is that the land of Saba (that's how its spelt in languages other than English) is in the area of Yemen, one of the troubled Islamic areas: bin Laden family is originally from areas of Saudi-Arabia close to the mountainous corner where Yemen is. The Yemeni tribes are still practically feudal: local little wars, killing government officials just because, honor killings, taking people for ransom, are still very much in fashion. But Clapp went in (with his wife and friends!) and did small-scale research on the ruins of Marib. Marib had a huge dam (720m long, 60m wide at the base) built starting from about 2000 BC. The Marib dam broke because of series of earthquakes in 600-something-CE, which gave a final deathblow to the kingdom/queendom, that had flourished for 3000 years, mainly based on the irrigation system that fed 30 000 people (back then that was a huge city), and on frankincense trade.
The next book in the pile is about deciphering Linear B, an ancient syllabary for writing ancient Greek (the most archaic Greek we know), from close to one millennium before the Iliad and Odyssey (Trojan War, for which I recommend In Search of the Trojan War) were written down, from times of the Mycenaean/Minoan culture (when the Trojan war, if there ever was such a thing, took place). The decipherment of the Linear B script was done by an English architect Michael Ventris in 1950's, and at least one way it was much more brilliant work than deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs by Champollion, because there was no Rosetta stone (that is, the same text in several languages) helping the deciphering-- and in this case, neither did they know in which language the Linear B texts were written, not a single word, none. They had several (but conflicting) candidates: Etruscan, Hittite, some unknown Indo-European, ... Greek was a very distant (and disapproved by Authorities) possibility. Ventris wasn't scared and attacked the texts armed with linguistics and statistics, and figured out things like "this must be plural of that other thing", progressing to "this could be past tense of a verb"... and finally, after years of diligent work, nothing else than an extremely archaic form of Greek fit the texts.
I've been to Knossos and Mycenae, and been on a bus by Pylos (another Mycene city in Peloponnesos), which is where the large majority of the Linear B tablets were found, so I'm curious to see what people who lived there thousands of years ago were up to. (Unfortunately, it seems that they were up to war.)
Re:the Linear scripts
jhi on 2002-02-06T04:38:20
I have and have read that, too
:-) Though promising (for a layman hobbyist like me) attempt, there simply have been too many cranks trying to decipher the Phaistos disk to take any deciphering attempts seriously, unless several experts can agree. While Fischer may be the breaker of the rongorongo (the Easter Island tablets), he came through as having quite a high opinion of himself, and as a general rule I shy away from such people. I can recommend Breaking the Maya Code. Deciphering the Maya script is still rather unknown story, probably because of political reasons: it was done in the "darkest" Soviet Union by a lone Soviet scholar, Yuri Knosorov (who incidentally died just a few years ago). How did this guy come to study Mayan? He was one of the Red Army soldiers storming Berlin, and spotted some burning books in the ruins of some library or museum, and grabbed them as war mementoes: the books were about the Maya glyphs. The man became obsessed by them, and became a scholar, and solved the glyphs. Of course, since he was a dirty Russki, nobody in the West believed the guy for years...
Regarding the Sabaeans, they had their own script, Epigraphic South Arabian, or ESA for short, which I see might become Unicode one day. An early Semitic script which we can read, more or less, but a script with no surviving oral tradition.
