Libyco-Berber.

D Vance Smith writes for Aeon about a little-known script:

Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years. Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared.

Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century. But even after 400 years, it hasn’t been fully deciphered. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. That fate, of course, is not unique. It’s something that’s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he’d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. It’s not currently on display.

But Libyco-Berber also reveals a more insidious kind of destruction, an epistemological violence inflicted by even the best-intentioned Europeans. There are numerous stories of badly educated, arrogant Europeans insisting that Africans not only never did, but never could, write books. Even as sensitive a philosopher as the French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who had deep personal ties to Algeria, and who supported the Berber/Amazigh cultural movement, could essentially make the same assumption. He insisted that the Kabyle people, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber. Bourdieu’s is a cautionary tale for intellectuals who are committed to social activism. The passion – the need – to do what’s right is all too often steered by the conviction that, precisely because we’re intellectuals, we know what’s right. For Bourdieu, for example, the very ability to think, to reflect about what’s right, is tied to literacy.

He goes on to talk about Punic:

When the Romans destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, its libraries of Punic literature were either burned or dispersed among nearby Numidian leaders. A few of these were later translated into Latin, although none of them have survived, and there are only allusions to what might have been in them. The only exception is a treatise on farming by a Carthaginian writer named Mago, which was translated into Latin and widely quoted. But Mago’s treatise itself hasn’t come down to us. As a spoken language, Punic survived for several hundred years. Augustine, growing up in what’s now Algeria, was certainly acquainted with it, and referred to it later in life as ‘our’ language, the language of we ‘Africans’. He even defended it against some snob in the city of Madauros, where he’d attended grammar school: ‘Many words of wisdom have been committed to memory in Punic books,’ he said, ‘as is disclosed by very learned men.’

Then he gets back to the script:

Libyco-Berber makes it very difficult to insist that no writing in Africa could have been indigenous. There are two theories about the age of old Lybic script. If it’s derived from Punic, then it couldn’t be older than the 10th century BCE, when Phoenicians arrived in North Africa. If Lybic script developed from pictographs, then it could be much older. Pictographs still on rock faces in the High Atlas mountains of Morocco could be older than 1,000 BCE, although it might be impossible to establish exactly how old they are. As with the question of whether Punic can be considered an African language, the relation between pictographs and Libyco-Berber itself is riddled with assumptions about the general conditions of literacy and forms of representation in North Africa across the centuries.

The newest inscriptions date from the 4th and 5th centuries CE, but the great 14th-century Arabic sociologist and historian Ibn Khaldun might have been describing a Lybic inscription that, he reported, included the name Suleiman. If he was right, that inscription suggests that the Lybic script was used after the arrival of Islam in Morocco in 680 CE, and possibly during Ibn Khaldun’s lifetime. Another possibility is that it never really did die out. One of the newer inscriptions was found in the tomb of a woman known as Tin Hinan, buried in the 4th century. Today she’s regarded by the Tuareg in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria as their ancestral matriarch. Writing of Libyco-Berber in her book So Vast the Prison (1995), Assia Djebar says: ‘Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.’

The name ‘Libyco-Berber’ is really just the name of the supposition that modern Tamazight (Berber) languages descend from it. Two other names, Numidian and Old Libyan, are used less frequently, but they don’t smuggle in the assumption that we know much about the language itself because of the continuity of the script. The script it was written in, however, has been taken up recently as the official script of the Amazigh movement in the Maghreb, which is fighting for greater recognition of the Tamazight-speaking peoples. They call the script tifinagh, a word that’s often taken to mean ‘Punic letters’; -finagh is derived, perhaps, from Latin punicus. Another etymology argues that it’s the plural form of afnegh in Tamazight that means letter/character/sign; the verb ‘to write’ is efnegh. The first derivation frontloads the supposition that the script is derived from Punic writing; and, to separate both its form and its origin from Carthage, scholars tend to use the terms Libyc or Lybico-Berber to describe the ancient script. […]

The history of modern European encounters with the Lybic script is a history of neglect, false assumptions and outright destruction. Evidence was overlooked, lost or obliterated. A Numidian prince named Atban was buried in a magnificent tomb around the time of Carthage’s destruction. A plaque in the tomb, written in both Punic and Lybic, was discovered in 1631 by Thomas d’Arcos, who sent a transcription of it to a friend in France, where it lay neglected for a couple of centuries. The inscription’s next fateful encounter occurred in 1842, when Thomas Reade, Napoleon’s former jailer on St Helena, noticed it while he was the British consul in Tunis. Reade, whom a British officer once called aptly a ‘Nincumpoop’, tore the tomb down to get at the plaque and sold it to the British Museum for five pounds. He destroyed another plaque in doing so, but this surviving plaque, having been written in both Lybic and Punic, ultimately proved to be the key to deciphering Lybic.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the essay — maybe half, I haven’t counted — is about Bourdieu, about whom I care little or nothing. At any rate, I like his conclusion:

But we also need to look for wisdom where institutions train us not to expect it. The other seductive legacy of Bourdieu’s work is his theory that the old Marxist superstructure actually did matter a great deal – what Bourdieu called social capital was one of the propulsive forces of culture. In many ways, because of his audience – especially in the US, where French theorists tended to be read only by academics – Bourdieu’s work on social capital amounted to a theory of university power. That is, a theory that universities had power to change because they taught, and reproduced, knowledges that live more fully in the mind than in the body. They reproduce the kind of blindness that would make Bourdieu assume from the start that the Kabyle had never been literate.

Academic friends have expressed surprise when I tell them about spending time listening to local activists talk to, and about, the people who live around us in the decayed industrial city where I live. Their sentiment runs something along the lines of ‘I suppose activism can be local too.’ The trick for intellectuals is to imagine continually what’s actually obscured by what we read: the languages of people who don’t read Antonio Gramsci, or Paulo Freire, or Fred Moten. Darren Green, an extraordinary activist in Trenton, New Jersey, walks around 11 public housing projects every day, several of them more than once, to talk with, and listen to, the people who live in them. He likes to say that the elderly are like walking bookshelves. As the example of Bourdieu shows, even the most intellectually committed, even the smartest – perhaps especially the smartest – of us can all too easily overlook the script of those lives, the language that might remain hidden for too long.

I expect Smith, “a medievalist and Old Dominion Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University,” gets stuff wrong, but perhaps Lameen will give us a more knowledgeable take. Thanks, Kobi!

Comments

  1. It’s a good popularization, but he does get stuff wrong – especially this bit:

    He insisted that the Kabyle people, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber.

    When Bourdieu started his fieldwork, Kabyles hadn’t used Libyco-Berber (or Tifinagh) for nearly two millennia. Those who could write – a minority admittedly, but a more significant one than Bourdieu seemed to think – did so in Arabic and/or French. Not too long after Independence, activists in exile attempted to revive the script in Kabylie by creating a heavily edited new version, Neo-Tifinagh; that would go on to enjoy some success from the 1980s onwards, though most Kabyle language activists prefer Latin characters. But Bourdieu can hardly be blamed for not having anticipated that.

    The script never did disappear, of course – but it was preserved only in the central Sahara among the Tuareg. Everywhere else it is either long gone or recently revived.

  2. Oh, whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad! Thanks, and I’m relieved to hear it’s a good popularization.

  3. Sorry for the self-promotion, but my open-access chapter on Kabyle Arabic orthography may help paint a picture of the nature of Kabyle literacy during the colonial period…

    Kabyle in Arabic Script: A History without Standardisation

  4. Good lord, don’t apologize, that’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping you’d provide! Thanks very much.

  5. (My secret method is to post half-assed stuff in the hopes that someone will come along and provide the Other Half of the Ass.)

  6. I can say anythign useful here but I will ask a question. I many times I read (mostly in popular texts, a couple of times in less popular texts) references to use of characters related to both Libyco-Berber and Tifinagh among Touaregs — or like here “Berbers”, but usually it is Touaregs.

    But never I saw a detailed description of this “use”. The time span in question is large (from old epigraphics to modern people, either familiar with Neo-Tifinagh or not) and so is the range of things that can be described as “use” is incredebly large.

    Does anyone know where I could learn more about this (possibly a starting point from where I could follow the references)?

  7. David Eddyshaw says

    “Libyco-Berber makes it very difficult to insist that no writing in Africa could have been indigenous” says the article.

    I’m always brought up short by Europeans who appear to think subconsciously that Egypt is in Europe or Asia or something. Few Africans seem to have this problem.

  8. J.W. Brewer says

    There was a lengthy thread on this article last month at Language Log, in which Vance Smith himself (a child of American missionaries, who grew up variously in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya depending on what his parents were up to at the given moment) popped up. But one of the points made in that thread was that “Africa” as a purely geographical notion is a bit vacuous, and in some varieties of English (specifically including the North American ones) “Africa” often means “sub-Saharan Africa” unless otherwise specified. Things may be otherwise elsewhere. But if I were an *African* African from Malawi or someplace like that it would I think be arbitrary and silly to think of Egyptians as my compatriots in a way than Yemenis, for example, were not.

  9. @David Eddyshaw: To Americans, I suspect even more than most Europeans, “Africa” normally codes as “sub-Saharan Africa” (or what might have been dismissively called “black Africa” sixty-plus years ago).

  10. Do Western Europeans think of the Caucasus (e.g. Georgia) as Europe, or Asia?

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s actually not uncommon for West Africans to have origin stories involving Egypt in some way. There were a lot of links across the Sahara before the European invasions.

  12. Trond Engen says

    Europeans too make a very clear conceptual distinction between Mediterranean North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is obviously right when we discuss Antiquity. North Africans were participating (even founding) members of the Mediterranean Cultural Horizon, or what the Greeks called the oikouménē. What we don’t easily grasp is that we mostly didn’t belong there ourselves. Until the Roman Empire the cultural links across the Alps weren’t significantly stronger than those across the Sahara or up the Nile.

    Prejudiced as this is, it’s still not a prejudice that would lead 19th century European imperialists or plunderers to underestimate the significance of a North African script. Egypt was known. It was idolized. It was a source of fame and fortune. Carthage was known and frequently portrayed as culturally superior to Rome. The barbarism of the modern populations could be ascribed to the malevolent influence of Islam and unhealthy carnal relations with slaves. Discovering a “lost civilization” in North Africa would have been the dream of any ambitious explorer. So I call small corpus and bad luck.

  13. J.W. Brewer says

    @Trond: it’s apparently not entirely clear whether the script in question is an offshoot of a script imported from the Levant by the Carthaginians or something more indigenous than that which was developed independently by the remote ancestors of the Berbers. Smith writes as if the latter would be a big prejudice-demolishing bombshell, but I’m not so convinced. Or rather, I think that traditional prejudices against North Africans are distinct enough from traditional prejudices against sub-Saharan Africans that a compelling counterexample to the former wouldn’t do much to undermine the latter.

  14. For me Egypt is Africa (and I share David’s perplexion) and so is North-West Africa and so is South Africa (or what else they are?).

    But if you call a Egyptian “African”, she may disagree.

    There were a lot of links across the Sahara before the European invasions.
    It implies “bad Europeans and good Africans”.

  15. the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot, ever since an old discussion here, of biblical and Mishnaic placenames which survived in the speech of the local Palestinians. Yoel Elitzur’s book, which I mentioned there, is a fine and thorough work of philology, relying on toponymy recorded by earlier researchers, but also by Elitzur himself, in the villages of the West Bank.

    Which is good, but Elitzur himself has been an avid supporter of the settlement project since its early days after the 1967 war. Ultimately, that project’s purpose has been to displace the indigenous population, and incidentally, its traditional knowledge. Some of the local knowledge which came from west of the Green Line has faded from the world since 1948, in the misery of refugee camps in various countries. I allow myself to believe that a number of people regret the loss of this knowledge, with no empathy to those who held it.

  16. Trond, isnt the Northern European Bronze Age evidence that there were in fact stronger cultural connections to the north than across the Sahara? Or what am I misunderstanding?

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    It implies “bad Europeans and good Africans”

    Depends on what you deduce from my use of the word “invasions”; but whatever you deduce, it’s the right word.

    However, you don’t have to be “good” to get invaded*, and Individual invaders may well be kind to small animals and indigenes, too.

    * If Gildas is to believed, my own forebears had it coming to them, on account of being so depraved.

  18. Jen in Edinburgh says

    If people had writing and now don’t, are the post-literate? I’m not sure if this is a silly question or not…

    It would never have occurred to me that there wouldn’t be writing in Africa, which makes this feel like an odd argument.

  19. Bathrobe says

    I was not impressed with the article, as you can see from my comments at LanguageLog: African (il)literacy. To quote myself:

    This piece must be read as a polemic. A passionate, poetic polemic against the sidelining of an “African” script.

    …this piece accusing Western intellectuals of ignoring an African script due to their own intellectual blinkers and ideological preconceptions contains two assumptions that are open to challenge:

    One is that Bourdieu, despite being an advocate of the Berbers, deliberately ignored Tifinagh. Professor Smith speaks as if the existence of Tifinagh were blindingly obvious.

    Later at that thread Lameen pointed out the real facts (as they are sometimes called), which he repeated at the start of this thread. Bourdieu did not deliberately slight or ignore Tifinagh among the Kabyle, because there was nothing to ignore. It appears that Smith manufactured this part of his story because he wanted to create a target for his righteous indignation.

    The second assumption is that this is due to a bias against “Africans”. ….this leans heavily on Professor Smith’s own perception of what “Africa” is.

    There is no doubt that modern perceptions of “Africa” in the Western world generally confine it to sub-Saharan Africa. But there is a lot more to unpack here than simple modern racism (south of the Sahara is “black”, north of the Sahara is “white”). There is an awful lot of history lurking in there.

    For a start, there were ancient links between Egypt and Southwest Asia, which arguably formed a reasonably compact world of its own (roughly, the eastern Mediterranean). Despite our modern perceptions of “Asia” as “Asia” and “Africa” as “Africa”, I really don’t think the Assyrians ever thought to themselves, “Let’s nip across to Africa and conquer ourselves a bit of territory; here we come, Egypt!”. I strongly suspect that that’s not how they saw the world, and to imply that they did (or should have) is simply historical revisionism.

    Later, the Mediterranean Sea served not to divide but to unite the Mediterranean world. Greeks and Phoenicians followed the sea to the west to found colonies in Italy and North Africa. Rome began life as a Mediterranean power. Although it also pushed north into modern Europe as well as Southwest Asia (the Levant and the Parthian Empire), the Mediterranean was its natural territory. The Sahara desert, on the other hand, was far more of a barrier to Roman expansion than the Mediterranean ever was. So it’s also a kind of historical revisionism to chop North Africa off from its Mediterranean and Southwest Asian context and somehow claim it as “Africa, full stop”.

    Two later developments helped sunder the unity of the Mediterranean world: the split between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires (both religious and political), and the Islamic conquests of Southwest Asia and North Africa. From the perspective of Northwest Europe (a northerly offshoot of the Western Roman Empire), Africa this side of the Sahara was historically familiar but “lost” territory belonging to the Islamic “other”. Sub-Saharan Africa was a new and largely unfamiliar world.

    This is as good a reason as any for the split in perceptions in Europe, without appealing to racism for the division between the “white” north and the “black” south.

    The idea that “Africa” is a natural unit to itself, from Cairo to Cape Town, is an extremely modern, and, I would add, rather politicised concept. Smith invokes it with the specific aim of expressing indignation at Western intellectuals slighting his beloved continent.

    The question that needs to be answered is: was Tifinagh ignored by Europeans like Bourdieu because it was African, or was it due to other factors — factors that have more to do with the linguistic and cultural positioning of Berbers within the North African and Islamic world? The more you learn about the extremely complex linguistic situation in Algeria, the more you realise that Smith’s article, despite being passionate and well-written, is highly slanted towards his own preoccupations.

  20. Bathrobe says

    But never I saw a detailed description of this “use”. The time span in question is large (from old epigraphics to modern people, either familiar with Neo-Tifinagh or not) and so is the range of things that can be described as “use” is incredebly large.

    Try Wikipedia.

    In English:

    Regarding Tuareg Tifinagh: According to M.C.A. MacDonald, the Tuareg are “an entirely oral society in which memory and oral communication perform all the functions which reading and writing have in a literate society… The Tifinagh are used primarily for games and puzzles, short graffiti and brief messages.”

    In German:

    Eine Literatur, die in Tifinagh abgefasst war, hat es nicht gegeben. Die gebildeten Schichten bei den Tuareg, die Inislimen ‚Männer des Islam‘, benutzten seit dem Mittelalter die arabische Schrift. Auch die Chroniken der einzelnen Tuareg- bzw. Berber-Konföderationen, etwa die Chronik von Agadez, wurden nicht in Tifinagh abgefasst, selbst wenn sie in einer Berbersprache geschrieben waren und die Phoneme des Berberischen dem arabischen Zeichen nicht immer entsprachen. Tuareg-Fürsten, die selbst das Arabische nicht beherrschten, hatten in ihrer Nähe stets einen schreibkundigen Mann, meistens einen Marabout, der die Korrespondenz mit anderen Tuareg-Gruppen oder mit arabischen, maurischen oder – etwa im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert – osmanischen Adressaten (in Murzuk oder Tripolis) – führte.

    Einer der bekanntesten Mythen, die sich um die Kultur der Tuareg ranken, besagt, dass die Mütter ihren Kindern die traditionelle Schrift beibrachten. Tatsächlich handelt es sich bestenfalls um die Verallgemeinerung von Ausnahmefällen. Die meisten Tuareg waren Analphabeten, das schriftliche Kommunikationsmittel war allenfalls das Arabische. Lediglich in den Adelsclans, wo die Frauen nicht zu den körperlich schweren Arbeiten herangezogen wurden, fand eine solche Vermittlung traditionellen Wissens statt.

  21. There does seem to be a rather strong prejudice in some contexts that writing isn’t authentically African. If Egypt has it, well, Egypt isn’t really Africa Africa, it’s part of the Middle East. If North Africa has it, well, real Africans are black so that doesn’t count. If Ethiopia has it, well they’re just Semitic invaders anyway. If scholars in the Sahel or on the Swahili coast were writing astronomy textbooks and chronicles, well, they were doing it in Arabic so it’s just foreign influence (just as the Venerable Bede doesn’t really count as part of English heritage since he only wrote in Latin.) True Africans don’t use this newfangled writing business; they live in the bush in splendid isolation from the entire rest of the world, in an eternal “anthropological present”.

    “Post-literate” strikes me as a not entirely accurate but defensible description of 1950s Kabylie – not so much because Libyco-Berber had faded away a couple of millennia ago, but because its traditional higher educational system had been largely dismantled by the French 80 years ago. After the failure of Mokrani’s rebellion, enormous tracts of land were confiscated from Kabyles and Arabs alike, with a particular focus on land belonging to traditional schools (zawiyas / timɛemmrin). French schools, usually missionary-run, filled the resulting vacuum only very incompletely.

  22. I mean, are there any writing systems truly indigenous to Europe? Ogham I guess, insofar as the letter shapes are completely novel, and Linear A and B; all the rest is merely derivative, adaptations of adaptations of Middle Eastern originals. Technically there might well be more indigenous African writing systems than indigenous European ones (Egyptian and Meroitic, Vai, N’Ko, and quite a few less successful ones like Osmanya or Garay.)

  23. Bathrobe, thank you! I remeber Macdonald: he compares use of writing among Touaregs to Arabian scripts. Al-Jallad’s Safaitic grammar also has a quote from Macdonald. The context is his fascination with the fact that nomads made all those inscriptions (apparently, hundreds thousands of them if not more) and that they learned to write at all. His explanation of this is that they could learn it out of curiousity:) I definitely remember myself reading and re-reading the article in Wikipedia in search of a reference and I don’t remember this paper:/

    It is better: it is “Literacy in an Oral Environment“, it has subchapter Literacy for fun: the Tiflnagh, which begins with “I have, alas, no expertise whatsoever in the Tifinagh and, in what follows, I have learned heavily on the fascinating work of …” and it has references.

  24. Bathrobe says

    I am 100% sure that there is deep-seated prejudice against Black Africans amongst Europeans (including intellectuals). And that Europeans themselves have nothing to crow about in the writing department. But that doesn’t constitute a defence of Smith’s article.

    Smith has an axe to grind about European intellectual attitudes to black Africans, and he uses rather dubious assumptions (as outlined above) to make his case. I don’t buy either his assumptions or his arguments. Which is not to say that I agree with either prejudice against sub-Saharan Africans or smug, self-serving European attitudes towards their own supposed “cultural lineage”.

    Arbitrarily fencing off “cultural regions” has always been an invitation to bias, false generalisations, and cultural imperialism.

  25. David Marjanović says

    Do Western Europeans think of the Caucasus (e.g. Georgia) as Europe, or Asia?

    Depends on what their schoolbooks were like (e.g., mine put the line on the crest of the Caucasus, my mom’s put it far north of there through the lowest points between the Black and Caspian seas), what the context is, and whether they think about that area at all – it isn’t thought about often enough for there to be a noticeable tradition on such matters.

    But the only people who actually think of Egypt as Africa unprompted are in the Afrikanistik institute of the University of Vienna.

    I mean, are there any writing systems truly indigenous to Europe?

    More so than Ogham? No. Even the Linears ( + “Cretan hieroglyphs” + Phaistos disk) show stimulus diffusion from Egyptian and/or Luwian.

    In German:

    “A literature composed in Tifinagh did not exist. The educated classes among the Tuareg, the Inislimen ‘men of Islam’, were using the Arabic script since the Middle Ages. This includes the chronicles of the individual Tuareg/Berber confederations, like the chronicle of Agadez; they, too, were not written in Tifinagh, even when they were written in a Berber language and the Berber phonemes did not always correspond to the Arabic sign[s]. Tuareg princes who did not have a command of Arabic themselves invariably had around them a man who could write, usually a marabout, who took care of the correspondence with other Tuareg groups or with Arabic, Moorish [whatever that means here!] or – e.g. in the late 19th century – Ottoman addressees (in Murzuk or Tripolis).

    One of the most widely known myths growing like vines around the culture of the Tuareg claims that the mothers taught the traditional script to their children. In reality this is at best a generalization of exceptional cases. Most Tuareg were illiterate, the written means of communication was at most Arabic. Just in the noble clans, where the women were not drafted for physically hard labor, such a transmission of traditional knowledge took place.”

  26. @Bathrobe: I’m not really interested in defending his article – it’s shaky in many respects, and a bit credulous. (Assia Djebar felt that “this writing is also her own writing”, but in much the same sense that a modern Irish writer might feel that Ogham was “her own writing”; she’s as much a “non-tifinagh reader” as anyone else.) But “Africa” was originally Tunisia. The term was expanded by medieval Europeans to cover the whole continent in the context of religious hostilities that made the Mediterranean seem much more like a divider than like a uniter – and in that context, the relatively small colour differences between North Africa and Europe were not infrequently reimagined as an unrealistically stark contrast of black and white. At least that’s the impression I get from portrayals of “Moors” in medieval English and French literature. “Africa” is a European invention – but its restriction to sub-Saharan Africa is a later development, and modern efforts to include North Africa in it are true to its medieval origins.

    As for Tuareg Tifinagh, my understanding is that one of the key practical functions of the script is flirting… Older men will often claim not to know it because it’s not really compatible with their dignity to recall the days when they used to do that sort of thing.

  27. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, ever since an old discussion here, of biblical and Mishnaic placenames which survived in the speech of the local Palestinians. Yoel Elitzur’s book, which I mentioned there, is a fine and thorough work of philology, relying on toponymy recorded by earlier researchers, but also by Elitzur himself, in the villages of the West Bank.

    Which is good, but Elitzur himself has been an avid supporter of the settlement project since its early days after the 1967 war. Ultimately, that project’s purpose has been to displace the indigenous population, and incidentally, its traditional knowledge. Some of the local knowledge which came from west of the Green Line has faded from the world since 1948, in the misery of refugee camps in various countries. I allow myself to believe that a number of people regret the loss of this knowledge, with no empathy to those who held it.

    This is remarkably reminiscent of Melnikov-Pechersky, who in his capacity as the government official Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov did his level best to persecute the Old Believers in Nizhny Novgorod province and wipe out their communities, but carefully collected their traditions and used them in his capacity as the novelist Andrei Pechersky to create detailed artistic portrayals of those very communities, with loving accounts of their customs and folkways. I confess I do not understand that degree of cognitive dissonance.

  28. As for Tuareg Tifinagh, my understanding is that one of the key practical functions of the script is flirting

    Reminded me how I read a newspaper article (yet another) about intelligence of crows and the only example that impressed me was that they love to slide down church domes, ruinign the gilding…
    The rest was boring tool use.

  29. My secret method is to post half-assed stuff in the hopes that someone will come along and provide the Other Half of the Ass.

    That’s a half-assed application of Cunningham’s Law.

    Do Western Europeans think of the Caucasus (e.g. Georgia) as Europe, or Asia?

    One might survey which sources give Mont Blanc rather than Elbrus as the tallest mountain in Europe. I see Elbrus is actually north of the ridgeline, thus fully European by that definition.

    Both UEFA and the Eurovision Song Contest include the Caucasian republics; the former since as the USSR dissolved, the latter not till 15 years later. OTOH UEFA also includes Kazakhstan, Eurovision Australia, and both Israel.

  30. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    Do Western Europeans think of the Caucasus (e.g. Georgia) as Europe, or Asia?

    I suspect that most Western Europeans don’t think about the Caucasus at all, and if asked which is the highest mountain in Europe they will say Mont Blanc. What about Mount Elbrus? What’s that? If pressed they might admit that Mount Elbrus is in Europe. As for the people of the Caucasus, most will accept Armenians and Georgians as European, but not Azeris. That makes no sense at all, of course, except on a racist and Christianist basis.

    I see that Mollymooly already referred to Mount Elbrus while I was writing.

  31. J.W. Brewer says

    I tend to assume (although Lameen may have better insight than me) that people committed to the “no real writing in real Africa that isn’t an obvious imperialistic import” attitude are typically unaware of the long tradition of writing in Ethiopic script rather than having a glib argument for explaining away that counterexample ready to hand. Ethopia is sort of a symbolic prototype of “real Africa” and has over the centuries often been used as a metonym or synecdoche for “real Africa.” Its writing system is obviously in terms of deep history derived from the Levant, but as noted above the same is true of the quintessentially “European” ASCII alphabet. Heck, Thai and Khmer script is ultimately indirectly from the Levant but isn’t typically perceived as non-indigenous or inauthentic.

  32. January First-of-May says

    One might survey which sources give Mont Blanc rather than Elbrus as the tallest mountain in Europe. I see Elbrus is actually north of the ridgeline, thus fully European by that definition.

    I’ve also seen suggestions for Ararat, Khan-Tengri, and IIRC one or two other candidates. (Kazakhstan does in fact have a small piece within the most commonly used boundaries of Europe.)

    Purely geographically speaking, the best way to define Europe seems to be by something to the effect of “which parts would be separated from where if the sea level was higher”. Unfortunately, if we do the calculations it turns out that Scandinavia ends up in Asia (the boundary approximately corresponds to the Volga-Baltic channel).

    I suspect that most Western Europeans don’t think about the Caucasus at all, and if asked which is the highest mountain in Europe they will say Mont Blanc. What about Mount Elbrus? What’s that? If pressed they might admit that Mount Elbrus is in Europe.

    I don’t know a lot of Western Europeans, so can’t confirm, but my suspicions are similar: they think Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe, because that’s what they learned, but if they find out what Elbrus is (and exactly where it is) they would probably have to admit that it’s technically also in Europe.

  33. I’ve also seen suggestions for Ararat

    But Ararat is in Turkey, which is by definition Asia.

  34. David L. Gold says

    With regard to the boundary between Europe and Asia, there is no Platonic ultimate reality, where “the true boundary” will be found. It is a matter of convention (according to one of the conventions, Eurasia is a single unit).

    If you search for “boundary between Europe and Asia,” many websites will come up. This one has a good summary of the question:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundaries_between_the_continents_of_Earth#History

  35. But “Africa” was originally Tunisia. The term was expanded by medieval Europeans to cover the whole continent in the context of religious hostilities that made the Mediterranean seem much more like a divider than like a uniter

    Well, that is true, but similar (although different) stories apply to the two other continents bordering the Mediterranean, Europe and Asia. Both “continents” are Eurocentric in nature — there is no real way to meaningfully divide Europe from Asia, as people pointed out above. Asia itself is a motley mix of different regions (East Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southwest Asia, and, of course, Russia). More than anything, “Asia” is basically “not-Europe”.

    The term “Orient”, now deprecated following Said, is used in a similarly vague way to refer to anything east of (and including) Turkey.

    As for discrimination against the “darker-coloured” Moors, as I said, North Africa and the Middle East were “othered” by Europeans after the Muslim conquests. More tellingly, discrimination is even present against people of the northern coast of the Mediterranean (Italy, Spain, Greece), who, despite being “European” are (or were) regularly described as “swarthy”. So yes, it’s Northwest European racism at work.

  36. J.W. Brewer says

    Indeed, in lateish Roman times, the administrative division of territories in place from roughly the time of Diocletian to that of Justinian had the “Diocese of Asia” in western Asia Minor, which was thoroughly Hellenized and not meaningfully different in culture/language/”race” or what have you than the opposite shores of the Aegean and the islands in between, but also had the “Diocese of the Orient/East,” which encompassed the Levant and adjoining parts and was, shall way say, incompletely culturally Hellenized, especially once you got outside the cities. So the “Orient” was a bit “other” in a way that “Asia” in the limited sense wasn’t – or at least from the perspective of Rome proper “Asia” was “other” to pretty much exactly the same degree as Athens, no more and no less.

  37. For a Japanese perspective on these things, Akira Nakanishi’s “Writing Systems of the World” (1980 English edition) has 13 African scripts: Amharic (Ethiopian), Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, Meroitic, Punic, Ge’ez, Coptic, Tiginagh, Bamum, Vai, Maghreb, and Somalian (Osmanya).

    The Maghreb script is just a variety of Arabic, while Ge’ez appears to be an older epigraphic stage of Ethiopic. This brings the number down to 11; or 9 if the 3 Egyptian scripts are regarded as one writing system.

    He unforgiveably left out KONGO.

    For scripts of Europe and the USSR, Nakanishi has 21 scripts: Latin, Greek, Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Cretan (Minoan), Cretan Linear A, Cretan Linear B, Phaistos Disk, Tartaria, Early Greek, Iberian, Etruscan, Runic, Ogham, Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Old Hungarian, Gothic, Gaelic, and Albanian (Buthakukye).

    Here, there is a double up of Greek and Early Greek, Russian and Cyrillic, Latin and Gaelic. This brings the total down to 18. Of course, there are heaps he leaves out, eg. Old Italic scripts, Abur, other Albanian scripts, etc.

  38. J.W. Brewer says

    BTW if you compare the entries of Georgia and Azerbaijan in the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest, the latter has some “Exotic Oriental” musical effects* that the former lacks, even though both are sung in (fairly obviously non-native) English. But I guess you’d have to review a larger sample size of prior-year entries to know if that was a consistent distinction between the two countries’ entries. Also, the Azerbaijani song rather heavy-handedly has the Exotic-Oriental-Signifier title of “Mata Hari,” yet I am advised by wikipedia that “Despite traditional assertions that Mata Hari was partly of Jewish, Malaysian, or Javanese, i.e. Indonesian, descent, scholars conclude she had no Jewish or Asian ancestry and both of her parents were Dutch.”

    The video for the Azerbaijani entry does *not* reflect Islamic values regarding modesty in female dress but instead exemplifies the cheesy soft-porn tv-advertising vibe that is apparently crucial to the cultural self-understanding of modern secular Europe.

    *That said, they’re the sort of “Oriental” musical effects found in Greece and parts of the Balkans, so they’re not really non-European — they’re non-Western for a restrictive definition of the West that does not include all of Europe.

  39. Some previous discussions of the boundaries between Europe and Asia and also the nature of Eurasianism.

  40. January First-of-May says

    Here, there is a double up of Greek and Early Greek, Russian and Cyrillic, Latin and Gaelic.

    Linear A and Linear B is a near-double; it’s hard to tell to what extent they count as distinct scripts. OTOH the difference between Greek, Gothic, and (early) Cyrillic is not much larger. I’m not sure if whatever’s up with Tartaria is still considered a script. I agree that Old Italic is missing, though the compiler might not distinguish it from Etruscan. The situation with the Phaistos Disk is just a mess; they could just as well have included the Voynich manuscript.

    Glagolitic seems to be about as indigenous to Europe* as Ogham, though with more inspiration from elsewhere; the origins of Runic and Iberian are apparently debated, especially for the latter.

     
    *) we might have to assume that Constantinople is in Europe, but it does appear to be there, if only barely; the rest of the relevant places are more clearly European

  41. David Eddyshaw says

    I had a Turkish colleague once who was from Edirne (Adrianople to all you Franks.) He was quite keen on telling people (reasonably enough) that this meant that he was European.

    (Looking up “Edirne” on WP, I find a reference to “Sinan the Architect”, who surely deserves his own Robert E Howard series.)

  42. Any man wearing suit and tie is European by definition.

  43. When I was in Turkey I tried to see as many of Sinan’s mosques as I could; the man was a genius. Alas, I didn’t get to Edirne.

  44. David Eddyshaw says

    Any man wearing suit and tie is European by definition.

    Here’s someone who agrees with you (from about 7:00):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu7GuVk5X9A

  45. J.W. Brewer says

    Ethnic Turks living in Edirne or elsewhere in Thrace are European, in the same sense that Afrikaaners are African. But the suit-and-tie criterion would lead to the conclusion that many American men (even myself on occasion) were European, which would be absurd. An instance of the etymological fallacy, one might say.

  46. Elbrus and Mont Blanc aside, do Western Europeans think of Chechens / Georgians / Armenians / Azeris as Europeans? Middle Easterners? Asians?

  47. J.W. Brewer says

    Further evidence from a few years back of modern Azarbaijan’s affinity for Western (even though as mentioned up thread that’s not precisely coextensive with “European”) musical culture. https://nypost.com/2020/10/02/azerbaijan-military-releases-heavy-metal-song-amid-clash-with-armenia/

  48. David Eddyshaw says

    do Western Europeans think of Chechens / Georgians / Armenians / Azeris as Europeans?

    I recall in a prayer meeting after an Armenian earthquake one of the elders (by no means a stupid or ill-informed man) praying for the suffering Muslims of Armenia. I think this reflects a fairly usual level of understanding of the Caucasus in the UK.

    I would think pretty much all Caucasians would be thought of as non-European* by the Western European Great Unwashed; especially Muslims. The idea that there have been Muslims in Europe from long before Marine was a twinkle in her fascist father’s eye, or Nigel thought of a way to be rich and famous – not familiar.

    * Oh, the irony … I have tried to get our trainees to refrain from describing the paler kind of Welsh patient as “Caucasian”, but it doesn’t seem to take for long. They read it in their American textbooks, the poor dears …

  49. John Emerson says

    I listen to a lot of Ethiopian music, and it’s a mix of Mediterranean, American, African and Middle Eastern sounds. I love it. What Sub-Saharan influence there is may come via Brazil or America. This kind of fusion / world beat is sort of niche in the US but every area seems to have their own distinct version.

    I’m sure that there is non western-influenced music too, but I haven’t heard it.

    https://thevinylfactory.com/features/an-introduction-to-ethio-jazz-in-10-records/

  50. Trond Engen says

    Ryan: Trond, isnt the Northern European Bronze Age evidence that there were in fact stronger cultural connections to the north than across the Sahara?

    Yes, I didn’t mean that as an absolute statement. The discussion has moved on, and Bathrobe has argued my position much better.

    Besides, I was thinking rather narrowly on Classical Antiquity/the Iron Age. In the Bronze Age, the Mediterranean, Northern Europe and the Eurasian Steppe were connected in ways never seen before (and not again for a long time), but the Nile was certainly also a corridor to Nubia, and the Red Sea led to the Horn of Africa and beyond.

  51. David Marjanović says

    Turkey, which is by definition Asia

    Lots of Americans, on political websites anyway, casually classify all of Turkey as Europe. It makes sense in a number of ways…

    do Western Europeans think of Chechens / Georgians / Armenians / Azeris as Europeans? Middle Easterners? Asians?

    Turks aren’t thought of as Asians, they’re thought of as Turks. I think that’s the closest you’ll get to an answer.

    Except that Chechens are thought of as wild-eyed wild-bearded Muslim fanatics and therefore have to be Middle Eastern…

  52. David Eddyshaw says

    Modern Greek traditional material culture is really pretty Middle-Eastern, unsurprisingly.

    I would not advise discussing this with a Greek over a meal of dolmades followed by loukoumi and Greek coffee, especially if the ouzo has been flowing. Stick with Homer. That always goes down well.

  53. David Marjanović says

    Greek coffee

    Serbian coffee, traitor.

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    At least the elder didn’t think the Armenians were Arminians.

    For an old-timey American perspective, here’s a judicial decision from 1925 concluding that Armenians were “white” for purposes of eligibility for naturalization as U.S. citizens under the law as it then stood.* https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/F2/6/919/1551454/ This decision was just a few years after the more famous Supreme Court decision holding that an allegedly light-skinned fellow from Punjab was not “white” in that sense regardless of whether then-vogueish anthropologists might consider him “Caucasian” or “Aryan.” But obviously there is no reason to think the geographical frontier between white and non-white peoples in Eurasia should track the frontier between “Europe” and “Asia” as defined for some other purpose.

    *From 1870 on, you could be naturalized under U.S. law if not “white” as long as you were of “African nativity” or “African descent” (for some undefined value of “African”) but not if you were some third thing — race-based barriers to those who were racially neither-of-the-above were not completely removed until after WW2.

  55. Trond Engen says

    David E.: Modern Greek traditional material culture is really pretty Middle-Eastern, unsurprisingly.

    I would not advise discussing this with a Greek

    Maybe if one instead suggested that modern Middle-Eastern material culture is really pretty Greek?

  56. J.W. Brewer says

    By the way, one of the expert witnesses referenced in the link in my prior comment as testifying to the whiteness of Armenians (and going further to say that they had in ancient times lived in Europe before relocating to Asia Minor and/or the Caucasus) was a fancy Ivy League professor named Franz Boas, whose name may have come up here from time to time.

  57. Trond Engen says

    Y: Elbrus and Mont Blanc aside, do Western Europeans think of Chechens / Georgians / Armenians / Azeris as Europeans? Middle Easterners? Asians?

    mollymooly (earlier): Both UEFA and the Eurovision Song Contest include the Caucasian republics

    I think this is spot on. Taking part in European football and (even with some sucess) in the ESC make Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan European by definition for most Western Europeans. Chechnya does not take part and will not be thought about at all, except when it’s in the news for other reasons — reasons which, as David M. says, make it Middle Eastern by definition.

  58. John Emerson says

    American racial theory and practice can be regarded as weird. Finns are recognized as white, but they had to go to the law to get that recognition.

    And of clourse, behind this lawsuit was the idea that there are definitely some nonwhite people who don’t deserve full human rights. But F inns do not belong to this group. Even though they are taciturn, stubborn, and (at that time) often Communists.

    https://brucemineincident.wordpress.com/historical-back-drop-for-novel/are-finnish-people-white-what/

  59. @David Marjanović: Anatolian Turkey (that is, Asia Minor) is construed as part of Europe by NATO. This is necessary because Article 5, stating the casus foederis, of the North Atlantic Treaty reads:

    The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

    Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security. [emphasis added]

    With the admission of Greece and Turkey in 1952, Article 6, clarifying this issue, was amended to:

    For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:
    • on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;
    • on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

  60. J.W. Brewer says

    @Brett: so if pre-independence Algeria was, like Asia Minor, part of “Europe” for NATO purposes, does that make Libyco-Berber a “European” writing system?

  61. But… article 6, as cited, does not state that Anatolia is in Europe. It circumvents the question by declaring that article 5 applies to it whatever is the definition of Europe.

    Israel is a member of UEFA and Eurovision as well. I am not sure my expensive read on Europe extends that much (I mean, Israeli polititians of the male kind do wear ties, sometimes, but their facial expressions when in the uniform is of clear anticolonial disgust, or so I imagine)

  62. John Emerson says

    The Japanese were “honorary Aryans” to Hitler, and they were part of the Western World to Vera Michaels Dean

    ANYTHING can be true if realpolitik needs it to be.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/0451601904/ref=olp_aod_redir_impl1?_encoding=UTF8&aod=1

  63. ANYTHING can be true if realpolitik needs it to be.

    Truer words were never spoke.

  64. Trond Engen says

    Israel is a member of UEFA and Eurovision as well.

    Yes, and I wouldn’t rule that out as irrelevant to the political fronts. To some, Israel is a European imperialist colony in the Middle East, to others it’s a civilized European society threatened by barbarians.

  65. We were told by my fourth grade teacher (in a mostly Ashkenazi Tel Aviv school) that Israel is geographically in Asia but culturally in Europe. The charming simile “a villa in the jungle” was coined by politician Ehud Barak in 2006 to describe Israel’s position in the Middle East, and has been used with a straight face by many since then.
    That said, until the late 1970s members of the ruling Labor Party shunned neckties, and went for the open collar, socialist-man-of-the-soil look.

  66. J.W. Brewer says

    The members of the “European Olympic Committees,” which contrasts with the “Asian Olympic Committees,” currently include per wikipedia “Israel, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia which are physically in Asia but have strong historical and cultural ties to Europe, and Turkey and the Russian Federation, both of which countries have land in both Europe and Asia.” For Olympics purposes Israel used to be in Asia, but was some decades driven out of the continent and into the sea by the glorious anti-Zionist cause and somehow washed up in Europe thereafter.

    The wiki article on the UEFA, however, treats the three Caucasus-based nations as well as Kazakhstan as “transcontinental,” a la Russia and Turkey, although Israel is still a little bit of an anomaly and Cyprus is just sort of asserted to be European by handwaving.

  67. That makes no sense at all, of course, except on a racist and Christianist basis.

    Well, I have no problem with assigning labels like “European” based on culture or appearance. Especially given that some people call themselves “Caucausian” just because they belong to the same race as Georgians.

  68. Jen in Edinburgh says

    The sea borders are all a bit handwavy, really – some of the Greek islands are definitely physically closer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland, but there’s no obvious point among them where you can say ‘right, everything beyond this is geographically Asian’. (Is the Dardanelles a fault or just an accident?) Once you’ve included Rhodes in Europe, why not Cyprus…

  69. some people call themselves “Caucausian” just because they belong to the same race as Georgians

    Not quite. Many or most people who call themselves Caucasians have never heard of Georgia or the Caucasus. It’s all due to some stale old myths.

  70. J.W. Brewer says

    By the way, the “national” soccer teams of “nations” of disputed ontological status in the Caucasus like Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Artsakh (a/k/a Nagorno-Karabakh) seem to consider themselves part of “Europe.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_CONIFA_European_Football_Cup

  71. 1-On the case for Libyco-berber script as an offshoot of Punic: I found the following book convincing, but I would like to know what other Hatters think of the matter (The author did a good deal of fieldwork among the Tuareg, and has much of interest to say on the use they make of Tifinagh today):

    https://www.amazon.com/Lalphabet-touareg-Histoire-alphabet-africain/dp/2271083397

    2-There is a good deal of irony involved here: as Lameen pointed out in the first comment of this thread, Kabyle Berber was not written in Tifinagh when Bourdieu did his fieldwork there, and the introduction of Tifinagh is a recent phenomenon: the irony is that awareness in present-day Kabylia of the existence of Tifinagh is due to…well, colonial-era ethnographers who described Tifinagh among the Tuareg.

    So in effect Bourdieu is being condemned for failing to describe a writing system not in use in Kabylia in his time (because of a “colonial” bias), but whose later diffusion in Kabylia is directly due to French colonization, leading to intellectuals such as Assia Djebar (approvingly quoted) calling this script “ours”, despite the fact that no pre-colonial knowledge of this script, or indeed its existence, existed in Kabylia. So…err… are we to understand that colonialism was “good” because it put Kabylia back in touch was a cultural heritage which is in some mysterious fashion “theirs” despite its having no attested historical roots dating back to before colonization?

    To quote a fictional character, “Say! You all didn’t happen to do a bunch of drugs, did ya?”

    3-I guess now is as good a time as any to say that Assia Djebar herself almost slapped me in the face when I actually told her that I believed (and still do) that in Roman times the language ancestral to Kabyle Berber was NOT spoken in Kabylia. (Yes, I was very young and innocent and thought people actually would want to learn facts rather than fantasy when it comes to their homelands, languages and ancestors). She ultimately did not slap me, but refused to talk to me afterwards.

    This is relevant to this thread: if Kabyle Berber was introduced into Kabylia in post-Roman times (as I believe), it is quite possible that Libyco-Berber/Tifinagh script was NEVER used to write Kabyle. Which would add to the irony of the whole thing (see 2 above).

    4-Trond Engen’s comment (yesterday, 8:11) hits the nail on the head: in Classical times, the basic dichotomy was between the circum-Mediterranean world and the “outside” world, not between Europe and Africa. This is very clear in Julius Cesar’s writings: he explicitly says that the Belgians are the fiercest and least civilized of the peoples of Gaul, because of their Northernmost location, keeping them (comparatively) away from the civilizing influence of the Mediterranean world.

    5-Lameen, David Marjanović: The case for Ogham as a system which was created by people very familiar with the Latin script is to my mind certain, so that (if I am right about Ogham), there indeed is no such thing as a purely European script.

  72. Yes, I was very young and innocent and thought people actually would want to learn facts rather than fantasy when it comes to their homelands, languages and ancestors

    It took me a long time to learn that sad lesson as well: “human kind/ cannot bear very much reality.”

  73. Many or most people who call themselves Caucasians have never heard of Georgia or the Caucasus.

    I know. But as I remember, the idea was that people of some part of Georgian are so beuitiful that obviously the race originated from there (and Georgians thus represent its most original form). “Because” must be understood as referring the whole tradition, including that Iberophilic scholar.

  74. J.W. Brewer says

    But of course an important part of the notion of the “Caucasian” or “Caucasoid” race was that it was not limited to Europe but also found in Southwestern Asia and North Africa. If you’ve got Norwegians, Persians, and Berbers all lumped into that macro-category, trying to decide if Armenians are “European” or “Asian” (or which larger landmass Cyprus ought to be considered an adjunct of) is irrelevant.

  75. January First-of-May says

    Maybe if one instead suggested that modern Middle-Eastern material culture is really pretty Greek?

    To a large extent the generically-Middle-Eastern bits of culture, particularly the ones that are also shared with the Balkans, turn out to have been inherited from the Ottomans.
    (For one example that I’ve personally experienced, Armenia and Bulgaria both claim ayran as their national sour-milk product – something that only makes sense as an Ottoman inheritance, because the two don’t really have that much in common otherwise.)

    I suppose that some of those cultural bits would have been further inherited by the Ottomans from the Byzantines, though offhand I can’t think of any in particular.

    But… article 6, as cited, does not state that Anatolia is in Europe. It circumvents the question by declaring that article 5 applies to it whatever is the definition of Europe.

    Indeed; if anything it sounds like it’s saying that Turkey isn’t in Europe.

    I wonder, incidentally, whether the article was further amended after the independence of Algeria. (Apparently not, but a footnote was added to the effect that there are no longer any Algerian departments of France that this subsection could apply to.)

    As a side-note, it sounds like Article 6 as written would not cover Ceuta and Melilla; but perhaps that was considered too minor of an oversight to fix. Apparently there’s been an official opinion that technically it would not cover Hawaii either.

    For Olympics purposes Israel used to be in Asia, but was some decades driven out of the continent and into the sea by the glorious anti-Zionist cause and somehow washed up in Europe thereafter.

    This is essentially its FIFA situation; I hadn’t realized that it was also the case for the Olympics, but that makes sense.

    The case for Ogham as a system which was created by people very familiar with the Latin script is to my mind certain

    IIRC, while there are some leftover fringe alternate options, for the most part the theory that Ogham was essentially a code for the Latin script is the mainstream view by now. OTOH it was very much a European code and used as a script in its own right.

    Glagolitic might have a slightly better claim, in so much as it innovated some new letters that weren’t trying to encode any original Greek. OTOH some of the letter shapes are derivative from non-European origins.

  76. The case for Ogham as a system which was created by people very familiar with the Latin script is to my mind certain

    “Script” or “alphabet” are already confusing words: it is a set of (shape : meaning) pairs.
    In the case of Ogham, the shapes – and it is the shapes, or rather the approach to generating them that make it unique – could be inspired by somethign native. Or not. How do you know?

    On the other hand, “independently coming up with alphabetical writing” would be impressive achievement that is worth a medal but it wouldn’t produce an unique result.

  77. @ JW Brewer

    I always thought that the no-tie + short sleeved look adopted by Israeli politicians was much more sensible for a warmer climate like Israel’s. And that it should be adopted here in Australia as formal wear too.

  78. @Etienne: Assia Djebar wasn’t Kabyle anyway; she was from Cherchell (and, as I understand, didn’t speak any Berber variety.) Her belatedly discovered Berber identity was more an ideological position than anything else.

    Libyco-Berber inscriptions are to be found all across North Africa, from the Canary Islands to Libya – though they get even less readable the further you go from Numidia. Whether Kabyle came in from some other region or not (I’ve discussed the problem here), odds are it was still written in it at some stage. As for the role of colonialism, Assia Djebar actually addresses that – pointing out that the first of those French “ethnographers” learned of Tifinagh not directly from the Tuareg but from Algerians further north who traded with them and had learned the script themselves. It’s a safe bet that at least some Kabyles knew of Tifinagh before the French arrived. The difference is that, without any Romantic ideology of deep-rooted national authenticity to inspire them, they probably didn’t much care.

    The role of Phoenician in inspiring Tifinagh seems obvious to me (look at the t, for a start). But there are enough signs with little or no similarity that the process was clearly not just a matter of copying, and the paucity of matres lectionis confirms a rather early date.

  79. The role of Phoenician in inspiring Tifinagh seems obvious to me (look at the t, for a start).

    The t is exceptional. A lot of the characters don’t resemble anything about Phoenician at all.

    In addition, I wonder if you can say that as a rule, scripts are slow to adopt phonemic distinctions they didn’t have previously. By that rule of thumb, since Tifinagh represents the full phonemic gamut of the languages it is used for, it was either created for them ex nihilo, or it had had a long time to evolve.

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    Thanks for the link to the paper, Lameen. Very interesting, and somewhat envy-provoking.

    I wish I (or indeed, anybody) were in a position to write something as illuminating for Western Oti-Volta as your paper is for Berber. WOV is like Berber in being a group of obviously closely related languages where subgrouping into a nice branching model seems doomed to failure by disobligingly criss-crossing patterns of isoglosses (apart from one clear subgroup formed by Mampruli-Dagbani-Hanga-Kamara, with lots of nice common innovations.)

  81. John Cowan says

    But if you call a Egyptian “African”, she may disagree.

    I recall an anecdote of a new immigrant from Egypt putting herself down on a form as African American and being gently corrected.

    It appears that Smith manufactured this part of his story because he wanted to create a target for his righteous indignation.

    That seems harsh. Smith may well have thought that because Lybico-Berber/Tifinagh script was in use in North Africa two thousand years ago and is in use there today, that it had a continuous if subaltern existence throughout that period. Granted, it is easy to disabuse yourself of such a notion, provided it occurs to you to look for the counterevidence. Similarly, it would be reasonable to assume that Hebrew has always been spoken in Palestine or that Greek has never been spoken anywhere but in Greece.

    Later, the Mediterranean Sea served not to divide but to unite the Mediterranean world.

    Indeed, this may be said of seas and oceans in general: the vast Pacific does not divide but unites the Polynesians.

    x I confess I do not understand that degree of cognitive dissonance.

    I spent many years working for banks on the Willie Sutton principle (“that’s where the money is”) despite my distrust of fractional reserve banking and overall dislike of bank(st)ers. If you are paid to persecute, you must persecute, whatever your private feelings in the matter.

    ======

    Here is Unicode’s geographical/temporal classification of the scripts present in version 13.0, the current release:

    European I (modern and liturgical): Latin, Greek, Coptic, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, Armenian, Georgian.

    European II (historic): Linear A, Linear B, Cypriot syllabary, Anatolian alphabets, Old Italic, Runic, Old Hungarian, Gothic, Elbasan, Caucasian Albanian, Old Permic, Ogham. Shavian is also grouped here.

    Middle Eastern I (modern and liturgical): Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Samaritan, Mandaic, Yezidi.

    Middle Eastern II (ancient): Old North Arabian, Old South Arabian, Phoenician, Imperial Aramaic, Manichaean, Parthian/Pahlavi, Avestan, Chorasmian, Elymaic, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Hatran.

    Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics: Sumero-Akkadian, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Meroitic, Anatolian Hieroglyphs.

    South and Central Asian I (official scripts of India): Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam.

    South and Central Asian II (other modern): Thaana, Meetei Mayek, Lepcha, Sinhala, Mro, Saurashtra, Newa, Warang Citi, Masaram, Gondi, Tibetan, Ol Chiki, Gunjala, Gondi, Mongolian, Chakma, Wancho, Limbu.

    South and Central Asian III (ancient): Brahmi, Marchen, Zanabazar Square, Kharoshthi, Old Turkic, Old Sogdian, Sogdian, Bhaiksuki, Soyombo, Phags-pa.

    South and Central Asian IV (other historic): Syloti Nagri, Khojki, Grantha, Kaithi, Khudawadi, Dives Akuru, Sharada, Multani, Ahom, Takri, Tirhuta, Sora Sompeng, Siddham, Modi, Dogra, Mahajani, Nandinagari.

    Southeast Asian: Thai, New Tai Lue, Pahawh Hmong, Lao, Tai Tham, Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong, Myanmar, Tai Viet, Pau Cin Hau, Khmer, Kayah Li, Hanifi Rohingya, Tai Le, Cham.

    Indonesian and Oceanian: Philippine scripts, Javanese, Sundanese, Buginese Rejang, Makasar, Balinese, Batak.

    East Asian: Han, Bopomofo, Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Yi, Nüshu, Lisu, Miao, Tangut, Khitan Small Script.

    African: Ethiopic, Vai, Mende Kikakui, Osmanya, Bamum, Adlam, Tifinagh, Bassa Vah, Medefaidrin, N’Ko.

    American: Cherokee, Osage, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Deseret.

    Many more scripts can be found at the ISO 15924 list.

  82. If you are paid to persecute, you must persecute, whatever your private feelings in the matter.

    But he didn’t persecute grudgingly, trying to provide loopholes; he persecuted enthusiastically, really working to wipe out the religious communities. He enjoyed the culture, but he genuinely wanted it to stop.

  83. @Y: Tifinagh is descended from Libyco-Berber, and we don’t know nearly enough about the latter’s phonology to say how well it reflected it. The sibilants in particular are rather puzzling.

    @David Eddyshaw: Thanks, and I would love to read anything you might write on that subject! I can well imagine the challenges are greater there though.

  84. So it’s especially surprising that Bourdieu referred to the Kabyle as a ‘society without writing’.

    He did not.
    If Smith read Bourdieu instead of books about Bourdieu or at least bothered to give references he would have noticed that.

    It would indeed be mad, because Kabylia was not “without writing”. But there is a terminological issue: who exactly do we call “the Kabyles”.

  85. David Marjanović says

    1-On the case for Libyco-berber script as an offshoot of Punic: I found the following book convincing, but I would like to know what other Hatters think of the matter (The author did a good deal of fieldwork among the Tuareg, and has much of interest to say on the use they make of Tifinagh today):

    So… what does that book say? I just read the entire preview, and three chapter headlines in the table of contents suggest he thinks it’s based on Phoenician, but that’s all.

    Funnily, the long foreword states as an aside that the sign for /t/ has nothing to do with T and is +. That’s the original shape of T before the Greeks (…Phrygians?) somehow lost the top stroke.

    By that rule of thumb, since Tifinagh represents the full phonemic gamut of the languages it is used for, it was either created for them ex nihilo, or it had had a long time to evolve.

    Or the sounds shared with Phoenician are written with shared letters, while letters for the other sounds were made up. That’s how Cyrillic was made from Greek (well, most of the Cyrillic-only letters are simply taken from other sources, which wasn’t an option in Africa that far from Egypt, but some do seem to be completely made up).

    He enjoyed the culture, but he genuinely wanted it to stop.

    Maybe he wanted the heresy to stop, and thought stopping the culture along with it was just an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect?

    The sibilants in particular are rather puzzling.

    What do we actually know about the sibilants of 9th-century BCE Phoenician?

  86. Trond Engen says

    Y: In addition, I wonder if you can say that as a rule, scripts are slow to adopt phonemic distinctions they didn’t have previously. By that rule of thumb, since Tifinagh represents the full phonemic gamut of the languages it is used for, it was either created for them ex nihilo, or it had had a long time to evolve.

    Counterexample: The Runic alphabet. The oldest inscriptions seem to be fairly complete, already including additional letters for phonemes not found in the language it was adapted from. Now that I think of it, I wonder if that says something about the environment in which it was created.

  87. O. Russian libraries have this one (L’alphabet touareg). It is a significan improvement, because I can’t access most of classical French literature about the region in any other way than buying a ticket to there.

  88. PlasticPaddy says

    @trond
    Or it says that “the oldest examples” we have are developed from earlier examples that employed a discontinued or perishable technology.You would no doubt be familiar with parallels in architecture or structural engineering.

  89. January First-of-May says

    Or the sounds shared with Phoenician are written with shared letters, while letters for the other sounds were made up. That’s how Cyrillic was made from Greek

    …and essentially also how Coptic was made from Greek, a thousand-ish years earlier. But apparently it did take a few centuries to introduce the new letters into Coptic (and they were basically repurposed Demotic anyway), whereas Cyrillic basically sprang up fully formed within, at most, decades of its initial creation (lending credence to the traditional narrative of it being deliberately developed by a small group of people).

  90. Trond Engen says

    @PP: Sure. But the oldest Runic inscriptions we know are from around 200 CE, a couple of centuries before the first futharks turn up in southern Scandinavia in the early 5th century, and I’m not aware of any evidence that those early inscriptions failed to make distinctions that later became possible. Runes must have been used for some time — maybe even another couple of centuries — before anything was left for us to find, but it’s still conspicuous.

    Instead there’s evidence of simplification. The Runic alphabets found in Continental Europe are less complete but also younger. And the Viking Age futhark is frankly degenerate.

    I agree that this seems to go counter to a scenario in which Germanic speakers took up writing after coming into contact with the Rhaetians or some other people in the Alps and gradually developed a canonic set of letters and letter forms. I really think we must consider a deliberate act of creation and promotion. Maybe there was a need for intra-Germanic diplomacy and fast messagind in the Migration Era,

  91. by the way Runes: from Lány (Czech Republic) – The oldest inscription among Slavs. A new standard for multidisciplinary analysis of runic bones.
    (nothing interesting, just recent paper descring a bone with 6 Futhark letters in otherwise Slavic context in where Slavs make beer, that is in Czechia)

  92. PlasticPaddy says

    @drasvi
    “The carver was likely not very experienced and produced runes with distorted proportions”. These sort of statements seem to me to be “unscientific”. Looking at the image I would even say the carver had an artistic sense (you can find old masters who (a) elongated or distorted lines or contours or (b) attempted certain lines or contours several times on a finished work). From an inexperienced carver I would expect non-optimal use of surface (e.g., discrepancies in character spacing and centring, leading to final “cramping”, expanding or lengthened margin). And why use dye if it is just a practice exercise in carving by a student?

  93. Trond Engen says

    We discussed this inscription recently.

  94. David and others: to summarize the book, the author argues that Libyco-Berber is a very early offshoot of Phoenician/Punic, which remained in contact with Punic script for a a long time after its emergence as a separate script. He seeks to explain the differences as being due both to phonological differences between the two languages in contact and through a process of graphic simplification in Libyco-Berber, which among other things lead to some letters being modified to prevent them from being mistaken for simplified forms of other letters.

  95. @Trond, wow. I did not notice!

    @PlasticPaddy, issues with spacing are indeed expected, but what do you mean about old masters attempting several lines or contours?

    When I said “nothing interesting” I meant that it is norminally cool, but I do not know what to say about the bone other than “they found a bone”:)

    It is a good illustration to a line known to many Slavs, from a book titled “about letters of blackrobe brave” (usually understood as “About Letters” by monk Brave (Chernorisets Hrabar)) that says that Slavs did not know letters but read (?) and divinated using strokes and cuts, being pagan. (the word for ‘read’ could actually mean something else). Specifically it is a good illustration of cuts (just like any runic bone:)).

    Runic alphabet absolutely looks like an alphabet meant for writing with a knife on something softer than a rock, just like Carolingian minuscule is clearly meant for pen.

  96. David Marjanović says

    I agree that this seems to go counter to a scenario in which Germanic speakers took up writing after coming into contact with the Rhaetians or some other people in the Alps and gradually developed a canonic set of letters and letter forms.

    It does, but the latest idea I’ve encountered is that the stimulus diffusion went north on the Amber Road, from the Venetians, east of the Alps, far to the east of the limes and possibly well before the limes was established. That would not only explain why the runes aren’t more Latin-like and why they first show up in the north rather than next to the Empire.

    Direct evidence is of course lacking and remains so, but I had a “how stupid of me not to have thought of this myself!” moment.

    Ironically, it removes geography as an argument against considering the Negau helmet Germanic. But the linguistic argument remains that the inscription, if read as Germanic, combines a pre-Germanic with two West Germanic features and that a reading as Venetic + Rhaetic may make more sense.

    the author argues that Libyco-Berber is a very early offshoot of Phoenician/Punic, which remained in contact with Punic script for a a long time after its emergence as a separate script.

    Makes perfect sense to me.

  97. January First-of-May says

    Runic alphabet absolutely looks like an alphabet meant for writing with a knife on something softer than a rock

    Not necessarily a literal knife; just a sharp and linear implement. (Arguably that’s still a variety of knife.) I suspect it would have worked very well on Novgorod-style birch bark.

    …I wonder if any runic birch-bark documents have been found yet (in Novgorod or elsewhere).

  98. There are bark letters from Bergen.
    I learned about them because of my interest to Bergen, not bark letters, so possibly there are many more.

  99. Bark SMS.

  100. Trond Engen says

    drasvi: There are bark letters from Bergen.

    Are you sure? I’ve never heard of that, and I spent too much time at Bryggemuseet as a teenager.

    The Runic alphabet was developed for incising on sticks. The lines are vertical and diagonal, which means no cuts in the direction of the fibers. I don’t think anybody is seriously questioning that.

  101. Trond, it seems I was wrong. Wikipedia says “wood”.
    I though there was birch bark too, but I could have misremembered. Wood is of course a relative of bark. Usually you don’t have it preserved after a thousand years. Novgorod has unique soil.

    Bryggen inscriptions

    Yes, I learned about them when reading about the museum.

  102. Honestly I don’t even know if there are enough birches around:) I haven’t visited the city yet.

    It is an extremely convenient medium, but we have them all over the place, and also there are birches and there are birches.

    I can walk just a few dozen meters toward the forest and pick up a sheet 10×20 cm – it is ready for use and even my fingernail will leave visible coloured line, without applying pressure. So basically it we have paper all around and do not use it because we have paper proper too.

    But then a birch grove in rocky or tundra environment beyond the polar circle – that is, a circle 1-3 meters in diameter and barely knee high (I am describing a “birch grove”, not the polar circle) is a different story:)

  103. without applying pressure.much pressure I wanted to say. And not always “colored”, depends on.

  104. Well, for those who do not have our variety of birch: I actually can obtain such a sheet within a minute (maybe even have one in my house: I sometimes bring stuff from the forest), but if it is 10×20 cm, it will be thick and not very convenient.
    Producing a large enough piece which is convenient will require a knife and some effort. Yet still within minutes.

  105. And not 10×20. The important thing about birch bark is that it is .. provoking.

  106. January First-of-May says

    I can walk just a few dozen meters toward the forest and pick up a sheet 10×20 cm – it is ready for use and even my fingernail will leave visible coloured line, without applying [much] pressure.

    As a teenager I liked to write inscriptions in pine bark sheets with my fingernails; but those only get good impressions if they’re dry, and they’re prone to breaking apart if pressed too strongly.
    OTOH they are fairly large; 10×20 cm doesn’t sound like an exaggeration. (Then again it doesn’t sound like much of an exaggeration for birch either.)

    In retrospect birch is a lot more convenient to work with. I’m not sure why I preferred pine. Probably either because birch wasn’t satisfying enough, or (more likely) because a lot of that experimentation happened in Karelia, where pines are far more common than proper-sized birches.
    (I have yet to visit any places beyond the nominal polar circle, but I have seen dwarf birches, along the Kuzema river in Karelia. Not a lot of bark on those.)

    …Next time I go to a forest (or a forest-ish place, anyway; there’s a few of those within 0.5-2 km from my house) I’ll try to check what the bark sheets look like; I might be misremembering.

  107. Trond Engen says

    There are birches — tall, straight, fine birches — though fewer after the massive planting of spruce in the 20th century. I agree that birch bark is a good medium for writing, and it may well have been used for runes as well, but if so, no examples have been found.

    A word of caution about Bergen as a center of Runic writing. The number of inscriptions may seem significant, but important as they are for scholarship, it’s also an artefact of preservation. Bergen is a medieval city, officially founded by king Olaf 3 in 1070 (and archaeology doesn’t make it much older), at a time when official writing already was in Latin script, and all finds are from the commercial quarter.

  108. I have been in Karelia, but it was a very short and absurdist trip. Usually people around me either come to there in groups for kayaking (sounds exciting, but organized groups are less so: if I like the place I want to be able to stay and explore) or to ББС, the White Sea Biological Stantion (biology students because they are biology students, other have biological friends). I have tried neither, just offered a couple of my friends (those of them who are not overly organized, that is, musicians) “let us go to Karelia” and so we did.

    A booklet we found in some train mentioned особо ценная карельская берёза, “higly [lit. particularly] valuable Karelian birch” and it remained an inside joke in our company for years

    When we get to the Petrozavodsk we learned that we must go back. I insisted on at least taking a suburban train from there to any random good-looking station and spending a night there. The place was strange: rare short (2-3 meters) very crooked birches on a slope, fog, northing else and a stream or rather a rapid. Fifty shades of white in twilight.

    Likely “particularly valuable Karelian birch” was the first thing we all exclamed, but the Internet says that the variety is threatened since recently (because it is “highly valuable”)

  109. Sounds like something out of Andrei Bitov.

  110. Trond, yes, my idea is that anything that we have is an artefact of preservation:)

  111. Owlmirror says

    Sorry for the self-promotion, but my open-access chapter on Kabyle Arabic

    Not only is the chapter open-access, but the entire book is open-access.

    Indeed, most of the books in the same series (Studies in Manuscript Cultures) are also open-access.

    A few titles that caught my eye in addition to Lameen’s (Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures):

      • Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China

      • Studies on Greek and Coptic Majuscule Scripts and Books

      • Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages

      • Jewish Manuscript Cultures

      • The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa

      • The Writing System of Scribe Zhou: Evidence from Late Pre-imperial Chinese Manuscripts and Inscriptions (5th-3rd Centuries BCE)

    . . . and maybe others that would be of interest to Hatters and Hattics and so on.

  112. I know the series and I was overwhelmed by it. I first thought I must read it immediately, but it is TOO much.

    Weirdly I was about to say that some things are good about the Western approach to scientific publishing (books that no one can afford) but — apart of the boom in production of Russian university presses in 90s (as a counter-argument), when everyone was somewhat hungry and I could have a monograph at the price of a bottle of beer, — it is open-access!

  113. Trond Engen says

    drasvi: A booklet we found in some train mentioned особо ценная карельская берёза, “higly [lit. particularly] valuable Karelian birch” and it remained an inside joke in our company for years

    When we get to the Petrozavodsk we learned that we must go back. I insisted on at least taking a suburban train from there to any random good-looking station and spending a night there. The place was strange: rare short (2-3 meters) very crooked birches on a slope, fog, northing else and a stream or rather a rapid. Fifty shades of white in twilight.

    Likely “particularly valuable Karelian birch” was the first thing we all exclamed, but the Internet says that the variety is threatened since recently (because it is “highly valuable”)

    Right. I suppose this must be what we call valbjørk, a genetic variety of the common birch which grows …. Yes, it is! I see on the Wikipedia sidebar that the Russian entry is named Карельская берёза.

    Anyway, it’s a genetic disease causing misgrowth, yielding a curly or “flamy” pattern in the wood, making it very valuable as a material for furniture.

    Another name is masur, named in the Saga of Erik the Red as one of the resources that Leiv found in Vinland.

  114. masur(björk)

    visa

    Finnish
    Etymology
    From Proto-Finnic *visa (“hard?”). Cognate with Estonian visa, Karelian visa and Livonian vizā. The original adjective “hard, difficult, demanding” is now exclusively found in dialects (and some derivations, like visakoivu); the modern sense “quiz” is a backformation of visailla, itself derived from that adjective.

    Pronunciation
    IPA(key): /ˈʋisɑ/, [ˈʋis̠ɑ]
    Rhymes: -isɑ
    Syllabification: vi‧sa
    Noun
    visa

    1. Synonym of visakoivu
    2. quiz (competition in the answering of questions)

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/visakoivu#Finnish

  115. David Marjanović says

    At least one birch-bark letter in runes in Old Norse has been found in Novgorod… IIRC. I can’t figure out how to find that on Wikipedia.

  116. David, I googled, it must be a letter from Smolensk 11 (out of 16 by now).

    Smolensk 1 was found a mere one year after Novgorod 1, by a team related to people who worked in Novgorod.

    I wonder what enable them too find letters in new cities (as I said, Novgorod also has unique soil): did htey learn where to look or did they just stopped throwing them away? I guess the latter (the first ever letter in Novgorod was found by a local unprofessional women who volunteered for professionals as a worker and noticed letters on a piece of bark – I am afraid it implies that professionals threw them away without looking:-( ).

    The entry in the base (with an interpretation by Melnikova).

    An article in Swedish, whose author does not think that it is runes.

  117. PlasticPaddy says

    @dm, drasvi

    Имеется несколько грамот, написанных по-церковнославянски, а также пять текстов на неславянских языках: по одной на карельском (знаменитая берестяная грамота № 292 с заклинанием против молнии), латыни (№ 488, Готский раскоп, литургические записи[44]), греческом (№ 552, Троицкий раскоп[45]), нижненемецком (№ 753, Троицкий раскоп, заклинание[46])[47] — новгородские грамоты; на руническом древнескандинавском — смоленская грамота (№ 11)[48].

    48. Авдусин Д. А., Мельникова Е. А. Смоленские грамоты на бересте (из раскопок 1952—1968 гг.) // Древнейшие государства на территории СССР. Материалы и исследования. 1984 год. — М.: Наука, 1985. — С. 208—211.

    Source: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8F%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%8B
    So
    There are some birch-bark tests in OCS and 5 [known] texts in non-Slavic languages:
    1 Finnish
    1 Latin
    1 Greek
    1 Low German
    1 Old Norse (runic)
    The Old Norse is reference 48.

  118. Trond Engen says

    The subject of the present article is a 12th-century strip of birch bark from Smolensk, which, according to E. A. Mel´nikova (1984) and S. L. Nikolaev (2017), is inscribed with Scandinavian runes of the younger Futhark. Mel´nikova’s reading and interpretation have been accepted in Russian scholarship but viewed with scepticism by Scandinavian runologists. For this reason, the inscription on the birch bark strip from Smolensk has not been included in Samnordisk runtextdatabas, the database of Scandinavian runic inscriptions.

    That explains why I hadn’t heard about it.

  119. About PlasticPaddy’s comment about experienced carver.

    One should look at my handwriting after graduation. Or any doctor’s (with possible exception of DE?) handwriting.

    (A freind of mine once was surprised by beaitful and legible writing of some guy. A year later she came to the same doctor and now he wrote in the same language that they use in China and Russia and everywhere. She asked why and he said: he was young and full of hopes and just started his practce, now he is disillusioned. I ‘ve seen his writing. His arabic is the same as our cyrillic… or was it french?)

  120. Trond Engen says

    I’ve finally let myself take a long enough break from the summer sun to finish Lameen’s La diffusion en berbère: Reconcilier les modèles. Well-written, convincing, and important.

    A point from the conclusion, with value far beyond Berber:

    L’existence du contact intra-berbère rend très compréhensible les réserves traditionnelles dans les études berbères envers les modèles arborescents. Il reste néanmoins vrai que les effets de ce contact ne peuvent être identifiés qu’en appliquant un modèle en partie arborescent – en identifiant les innovations partagées et les exceptions à ces innovations.

  121. Yes, words to live by.

  122. @Trond: Thank you – very glad you liked it. It’s good to have feedback.

    @David: The problem is that LB had 7 sibilants to Phoenician’s 4 (and proto-Berber’s 3), making it rather hard to establish how they differed from each other…

  123. David Eddyshaw says

    Or any doctor’s (with possible exception of DE?) handwriting

    No, I’m afraid I conform to the stereotype.

  124. January First-of-May says

    I wonder what enable them too find letters in new cities (as I said, Novgorod also has unique soil): did htey learn where to look or did they just stopped throwing them away?

    I suspect it’s a bit of both, though I’ve seen studies of the Novgorod situation heavily implying that at least in Novgorod they figured out where to look but would already have noticed any such documents previously if they found any.

    OTOH IIRC before the discovery of Novgorod #1 in the 1950s the prevailing idea was that any relevant early medieval documents would either have been written on wax (even more perishable than birch bark, though ultimately a wax text was also found) or in ink (considered unlikely to preserve well in wet soil, though, again, a few such texts were eventually found and read). A text scratched on birch bark was an unexpected surprise.

    [EDIT: TIL that Vasily Peredolsky, a major Novgorod-based antiquities collector from the 1890s, reportedly had several birch-bark texts in his collection; the vast majority of his collection had been lost, so we’ll probably never know for sure.]

    There are some birch-bark texts in OCS and 5 [known] texts in non-Slavic languages

    …plus several texts that don’t appear to be in any language at all; in particular, Novgorod #1131 is (after the initial addressing formula) a bunch of probably-meaningless glossolalia.

    I wonder if some day a text in a West or Southwest Slavic language will show up; would be interesting to see. In principle that doesn’t sound particularly implausible.

    As for Smolensk #11… it’s mostly vertical and near-vertical lines, and if anything I personally suspect that it’s a strip from the middle of some much taller narrow letters. If not that, it’s probably some vertical scratches. I don’t really like the runic interpretations.

  125. PlasticPaddy says

    @drasvi
    Sorry for not answering earlier. What I meant by old masters leaving corrections in finished work is described here:
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento
    I could not find a good image or series of images to show this well visually.

  126. @PlasticPaddy, I was thinking about drawings and carving, where all your previous attempts are visible, and even though I correctly identified ‘old masters’ as painters I kept thinking about visible attempts:) Thank you.

  127. PlasticPaddy says

    @drasvi
    Re corrections in drawings, you might like this. I am not 100% sure the artists meant these as finished works:
    https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/rembrandts-mistakes-and-other-do-overs-in-drawing/

    In the case of a rune bone, where the final strokes are dyed, the visibility of the other strokes depends on how closely the examiner is allowed to view or handle the object.

  128. Lars Mathiesen says

    So now we’re supposed to memorize that Rembrandt was Harmenszoon van Rijn? Sure his father was Harmen, but once you glommed onto a nice aristocratic sounding family name, did you bother with patronymics any more?

    Anyway, what kind of a name is even Rembrandt, it looks like one of those Germanic two-component ones run through a few more languages and gussied up with extra consonants.

    On the flip side, I happened to spot the headword Goya y Lucientes in my Danish 1883 encyclopedia. Clearly nobody bothered to remember that for long. Saavedra is also in the Trivial Pursuit category.

  129. I forgot to link this earlier – one of the best studies of Tifinagh among Tuaregs in modern usage, written by someone who grew up with it, and freely downloadable online: Le tifinagh au Niger contemporain : étude sur l’écriture indigène des Touaregs.

  130. @Lameen, wow! Thank you.
    It absolutely looks like something I want to read (and it is not the first thesis from Leiden that looks like that).

    As for Libyco-Berber, there of course is Pichler’s Origin and development of the Libyco-Berber script 2007, Berber studies no. 15. Library Genesis has a pirated copy.

  131. PlasticPaddy says

    @trond
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_(given_name)
    here is an older form ragembrand = advice + sword
    The first element is the same as Scandinavian Ragnar, and the second one is found in some infrequently used but not obsolete German names, also Gulbrand = “sword of God”, perhaps reflecting a robust (or OT) view of Christianity, suitable to adoption by Vikings.

  132. Thanks, PlasticPaddy! It never occurred to me to wonder about the name Rembrandt, but once Lars brought it up I was dying to know.

  133. Yes, naming one’s child a “divine punishment” is understandable:-E

    Though, my pirate-loving friend who I mentioned here occasionaly loved the quote from… I think White Viking by Gunnlaugsson? Anyway, ٍVikings are expressing doubts about cricified Christ and another character remembers that Odin also gave his eye to achieve wisdom.

  134. Trond Engen says

    PP: Gulbrand = “sword of God”, perhaps reflecting a robust (or OT) view of Christianity, suitable to adoption by Vikings.

    Perhaps, but…

    1. Names with a god’s name as the first element were probaby not understood as transparent “God’s somethng”. For one thing, the first element is not in the genitive. For another, the second element could be quite abstract.

    2. The name element guð- seems to me to have arisen by reinterpretation of gunn- “battle”, alternating with guðr on the same rule as maðr ~ mann-. In compounds it may originally have been phonological: Gunnarr, Gunnhildr, Gunnsteinr versus Gunnbjörn/Guðbjörn, Gunnlaugr/Guðlaugr, Gunnvör/Guðvör versus Guðmundr, Guðrún, Guð(þ)ormr

    3. The name Gulbrand is quite special in brandishing an l, which isn’t attested in Old Norse AFAIK. It might suggest a folk-etymology with gull “gold”, or it could be that the allophonic properties of the ð were somewhat different than in the other names.

    4. There are five persons by the name of Guðbrand known from the royal sagas. Two were petty kings or chieftains in the district of Guðbrandsdalir. The name, now Gudbrandsdalen, has been in continued use since ON, so it’s not a modern romantic renaming. The first of the two was one of the local kings the young Hárfagri had to defeat. The latter was a fierce opponent of Ólaf Haraldsson’s forced christianization, and their encounter as told by Snorri takes place at the heathen cult center of Hundorp (which I mentioned without naming in the Urchin thread yesterday). This makes the name solidly heathen in origin. You might counter that both Guðbrands are literary characters anyway, but that doesn’t really matter for the argument.

    The other three men named Guðbrandr can’t be placed that exactly, but they were leading men in that general part of the country at different times.

    6. I might go further out on a limb and suggest that the name Guðbrandr originated as an epithet for the local theocrat at Hundorp.

  135. “The Theocrat at Hundorp” sounds like the title of a particularly ponderous 19th-century story or play.

  136. Trond Engen says

    Yes. It’s far out. But the fact that this specific valley was named after a person is far out too.

  137. Trond Engen says

    An additional circumstantial argument that I forgot: The two leaders named Guðbrandr are specifically not named as kings, even when listed with neighbouring petty princes who are. They are just Guðbrandr af Dalum “of the valleys”.

  138. John Emerson says

    Puritan names:

    Humiliation. .
    Fly-debate
    No-merit.
    Helpless
    Reformation
    Abstinence
    More-triale
    Handmaid
    Obedience
    Forsaken
    Sorry-for-sin
    Lament

    To say nothing of Hepzibah and Mehitabel, both in my family tree., or Gomer and Nimrod.

    https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/puritan-names-lists-of-bizarre-religious-nomenclature-used-by-puritans.html

  139. A Boy Named Humiliation.

    Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar! Continent Walker! Humiliation Hynde! (“Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.”) NoMerit Vynall! Sorry-for-sin Coupard! Kill-sin Pimple!! There’s plenty more where those came from; go visit the link.

  140. David Marjanović says

    Guðbrandr af Dalum

    « Roi ne suis, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi, je suis le sire de Coucy »

    1. Names with a god’s name as the first element were probaby not understood as transparent “God’s somethng”. For one thing, the first element is not in the genitive. For another, the second element could be quite abstract.

    Also, Germanic names don’t have to mean something. Often they were apparently made by remixing the elements of the parents’ names without regard for meaning. Further, many of the elements only occurred, outside of names, in poetry anymore, or not at all. That’s why there are several names that mean “fightfight” and “peacefight”.

  141. J.W. Brewer says

    Having a comparatively offbeat (by the standards of the given society, which may change considerably over time) “Bible name” is not really the same onamastic genre as these virtue-or-abstract-quality names. Especially since there is, at least in the U.S., considerable “churn” in the popularity of Old Testament names that seems largely independent of trends in actual piety/religiosity. E.g. two reasonably popular OT boys’ names for those born in 2020 (#13 Ethan and #50 Josiah) were not in the 1000 most popular for those born in 1920, and last year’s #56 (Caleb) had barely made the list a century earlier at #961. The two OT names in last year’s top 5 (Noah and Elijah) were a little more popular in 1920, but down to #384 and #356, respectively. Their current vogue means they don’t “feel” like the parents must have been weirdo Bible-thumpers, but you might have drawn different inferences in a different era.

    There are certain non-Puritan “abstract quality” girls’ names that are currently in vogue in the national top 1000, like “Journey” or “Destiny” or “Royalty.” They were not in vogue in my own generational cohort, and they are not presently in vogue for newly-born children of parents I personally know or to whom I am likely to be similar in various social-class markers. Which means that my gut reaction to them remains “sounds like a stripper’s stage name,” yet I feel like I am not understanding the actual sociological context of the communities in which the kids with those names are growing up which may well provide a context at odds with my gut reaction.

  142. Trond Engen says

    David M.: « Roi ne suis, ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussi, je suis le sire de Coucy »

    Yes, it could be something like that. It seems pretty obvious that an ideological distinction is made. It’s less obvious what that distinction might be. The explanations I’ve seen are along the line that the peripheral valley had kept a more egalitarian system than the more central neighbouring districts. But that doesn’t go very well with the fact that the valley farm of Hundorp contains the second largest field of large mounds in Norway, only surpassed by the clearly royal field of mounds at Borre by the Oslofjord, and it also doesn’t go well with the dynastic stability implied by the recurring Guđbrandr af Dalum.

  143. Trond Engen says

    Me: the second largest field of large mounds in Norway

    Correction: “In Eastern Norway” is the actual claim in the article.

    And a caveat: There were other large moundfields that have been erased. A presise classification based on size may be impossible to make.

  144. I grew up with someone of surname Hildebrand, and glancing around it seems pretty common. But perhaps there’s something implied in “some infrequently used but not obsolete German names, also Gulbrand” that I’m missing. Maybe rare as a given name or rare at the time of Rembrandt?

  145. PlasticPaddy says

    @ryan
    I meant more as a given name: besides Rembrandt there are at least
    G
    Gerbrand
    H
    Hadubrand
    Herbrand
    Hildebrand
    S
    Siegbrand
    T
    Thorbrand
    https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Vornamen_germanischer_Herkunft

  146. John Cowan says

    Rembrandt was Harmenszoon van Rijn? Sure his father was Harmen, but once you glommed onto a nice aristocratic sounding family name, did you bother with patronymics any more?

    The early modern Dutch definitely did: they used patronymic or surname or both, apparently depending on whim. And they often abbreviated the patronymic, so that you see people referred to in modern times by names like Rembrandt Harmensz.

    Apparently the Dutch never stabilized on a single preposition for locational surnames either: in addition to van, we also have te/ter/ten/toen/thor ‘at, above, towards’, the second and third being old datives and the last two even more archaic forms., to say nothing of aan, op, in, bij, over, onder, achter, bezuiden, boven, buiten, voor (hopefully I need not translate these), all with or without a definite article following. The particle de can be either French or the article in names like de Vries ‘the Frisian one’, the most common name in the Netherlands. And then there’s zonder in the names Zonderland ‘Lackland’ and Zondervan ‘person without a van in his name’.

    In short, Van Rijn is not a noble name, or even noble-sounding in Dutch, it is simply plebeian ‘from the Rhine’. Actual noble names (they are few) do sometimes begin with Van, but as often with French de, and as far as I can tell none of them are Uradel.

  147. Zondervan ‘person without a van in his name’

    I love it!

  148. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Didn’t Beethoven get himself in some kind of trouble for pretending he was an aristocratic ‘von’ when he was really only a Dutch ‘van’?

  149. David L. Gold says

    Van is so frequent in Dutch and Afrikaans family names that the Afrikaans for ‘family name’ is van (pl. vanne, for example here: https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Afrikaanse_vanne).

  150. There is a similar confusion about the most famous ending of Russian surnames.

    Many people in Russia have an impression* that surnames ending in -sky are of aristocratic origin (as opposed to more typical Russian surname endings of -ov and -in of patronymic orgin).

    It is wrong, of course, for the same reason. Ivanovsky* might signify an owner of a village named Ivanovo (and hence an aristocrat), but sometimes it also might mean someone from the village of Ivanovo (and hence a peasant).

    * In case of you were wondering, Dostoevsky comes from the village of Dostoevo in Belarus owned by ancestors of the great writer.

  151. PlasticPaddy says

    Russian Wikipedia:

    Фамилии на -ский / -цкий чаще имеют своё распространение среди поляков, белорусов, украинцев и восточноевропейских евреев. Несмотря на это, достаточно немалый процент коренного русского населения имеет фамилии на -ский / -цкий. К данному способу словообразования относятся фамилии, образованные от названий:

    местности или населённых пунктов — такой способ образования особенно характерен для княжеских фамилий или западнорусской шляхты Великого княжества Литовского, однако не столь характерен для великорусских дворянских фамилий (в отличие от Западной Европы).

    Примеры: Белозерский — владелец усадьбы Белоозера, Вяземский — владелец усадьбы в Вязьме.

    церковных приходов (церквей), в свою очередь, образованных от названий церковных праздников, имён святых.

    Такие фамилии исторически связаны с духовным сословием и инородцами (принявшими крещение в том или ином храме).Примеры: Вознесенский, Крестовоздвиженский, Рождественский, Троицкий, Успенский, Яранский.

    искусственно созданные в семинарии (см. Семинаристские фамилии).

    Примеры: Афинский, Афонский, Добровольский, причём, иногда в качестве фамилий использовалась греческая или латинская калька с буквально переведённой фамилии или прозвища, например, Соловьёв — Аедоницкий.

    https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%84%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B8#/languages

    This is difficult for me to summarise, and the English article does not contain any discussion of common suffixes.
    Basically, the above says that these names are prevalent among people with Belarussian. Polish, Ukrainian, and West-European origins. Outside of this there are several origins for -skii, -tskii:
    1. Places or population centres
    examples: Belozerskii, Vjazemskii
    2. Church parish or festival/holiday names
    examples: Voznesenskii, Rozhdestvenskii
    3. Artificial names created by clergy, including Greek or Latin calques of Russian names:
    examples: Afinskii, Dobrovol’skii

  152. David Marjanović says

    Zondervan

    Day saved.

  153. John Cowan says

    Day saved.

    Thread won.

    Personally I think “Rembrandt Harmensz” is pretty good too. The English WP article on Maarten Tromp, the famous Dutch captain and later admiral (he seems to have invented line-of-battle tactics), has a choice example of this disease. Tromp’s own name is given in full at the top as Maarten Harpertzoon Tromp, but he himself seems to have written his name Maerten Tromp. Anyhow, the Early Life section begins as follows:

    Born in Brielle, Tromp was the oldest son of Harpert Maertensz, a naval officer and captain of the frigate Olifantstromp (“Elephant Trunk” [lit. ‘trumpet’]). The surname Tromp probably derives from the name of the ship; it first appeared in documents in 1607.

    The utter implausibility of a Dutch name in -sz doesn’t seem to have tipped anyone off: WP followed some secondary source without realizing that that source would expect readers to know the convention already.

    I mention in passing that his first wife was named Dignom Cornelisdochter de Haes and his second Alijth Jacobsdochter Arckenboudt, both daughters of wealthy men (a merchant and a tax collector). I got onto him because I thought his name was Van Tromp, but that’s a modern character in a Heinlein novel. Damme if I know what “from the trumpet” means, though.

    Tromp’s vigorous prosecution of the First Anglo-Dutch War, even after his death (when his fleet captain kept his flag flying after he was shot in order to maintain fleet morale) helped push the Protectorate to peace, although neither side seems to have gotten much of what they wanted. (Historically, though, the treaty is a prominent early example of most-favored-nation treatment, though not yet so called, and binding arbitration for private wrongs in peacetime by “the Protestant Swiss Cantons”.)

    One proposed but unachieved goal for Cromwell was a federation (analogous to personal union) between the English Commonwealth and the Dutch Republic as both Protestant and republican states in a world hostile to both ideas. Apparently the Dutch thought the Commonwealth too unstable and too close to outright military rule to be a safe partner. But what if? If Britannia ruled the waves, how much more so Britannia-Batavia? Surely it wouldn’t have blundered so badly as to try to take India, for example.

    In a sense, union was achieved when the Prince of Orange took the British throne in right of his wife, though as his power was much greater in Great Britain than in the Netherlands he clearly favored that side of his rule, and since he was the last of the House of Orange (thanks to the Little Gentleman in Black Velvet) the Dutch connection was lost.

  154. J.W. Brewer says

    Gonna stick this here in this dormant thread, because relevant to the issue of what people have in mind when they speak of “Africa,” which of course varies quite a lot depending on time, place, and context.

    This is the description of an interesting-sounding course titled “Rome’s Africa, Africa’s Rome,” which is being offered this fall at my alma mater and (it being a small world) taught by a grad student who is the son of an old friend of mine:

    “This class is an experiment in literary history. Covering more than seven hundred years, this course surveys the history of Latin literature by focusing on literary production from and about North Africa. Together, we explore two overarching questions: “What is the place of Roman Africa, former territory of the Carthaginian enemy, in the Roman literary imagination?”, and “What is the place of Rome in the Roman North African literary imagination?”. In doing so, we navigate the terrain of Roman and Latin literature from its beginnings through Late Antiquity, examining how Romans “wrote” into being the province of Africa and how writers from Roman North Africa “wrote back.” Authors explored in this course (in Latin): Plautus, Sallust, Silius Italicus, Apuleius, Augustine, and Corippus. Authors explored in translation include: Livy, Vergil, Lucan, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Claudian.”

  155. Boy, I would have loved taking such a course. I might even have learned more Latin for it.

  156. “This class is an experiment in literary history” immediately reminded me about a title I saw somewhere (Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures).

    The class sounds interesting.

  157. That course sounds like fun. Reminds me of the recent republishing of The Passion of Perpetua.

  158. J.W. Brewer says

    @Lameen. Yes, but (ahem) how come the “and Felicitas” is so commonly omitted (you’re certainly not an outlier here)? Down with Sancta-Felicitas erasure!

  159. David Marjanović says

    They’re together in the Catholic Easter liturgy.

  160. Boy, that takes me back — I copyedited Heffernan’s The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity for OUP a decade ago.

  161. Stu Clayton says

    Perpetua was a prophet and a leader in her sect, and her narrative describes a series of visions: a ladder rigged with lacerating blades and tearing hooks, the torment of a family member, and a final climactic vision in which she becomes a man and fights hand-to-hand against the devil. Transgressive, radical, and determined to face down a violent death: Perpetua is a formidable figure.
    Perpetua was a Christian.

    Another crazy lady. But hey: “The Passiō is an ideal text for students. One immediate advantage of the Passiō is the relative simplicity of the prose.”

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