From PeselyG@apsu.edu Sun Sep 30 18:40:16 2001 Received: from mailscan3.cac.washington.edu (mailscan3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.08) with SMTP id f911eFN104704 for ; Sun, 30 Sep 2001 18:40:15 -0700 Received: FROM mxu2.u.washington.edu BY mailscan3.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Sep 30 18:40:14 2001 -0700 Received: from exchange.apsu.edu (exchange.apsu.edu [198.146.56.24]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.08) with ESMTP id f911eEu20527 for ; Sun, 30 Sep 2001 18:40:14 -0700 Received: by EXCHANGE with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) id ; Sun, 30 Sep 2001 20:36:10 -0500 Message-ID: <8C1D549B4324D51181010090277A49DE1636F4@EXCHANGE> From: "Pesely, George" To: "'classics@u.washington.edu'" Subject: RE: Dispilio disputandum est Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 20:36:09 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Yesterday Tom Palaima posted on AegeaNet a review by Andrew Robinson, originally published Sept. 1, 2000, in _The Times Higher Education Supplement_, of several books, including John Man's _Alpha Beta_. The review mentions something relevant to this discussion: John Darnell (by himself, or together with Deborah Darnell) recently discovered in the Egyptian desert "what may be the first alphabetic inscriptions dating from perhaps 2000 B.C. If he is right--and the evidence is insufficient at present-- it appears that the Semitic alphabet, and hence the Greek and Roman alphabets, derive mainly from the simplest signs used in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The alphabet would therefore have been invented in Egypt, rather than in Sinai or Palestine as previously thought." Speaking of Egypt, the website www.ancientgr.com which was recently brought to our attention dates one of the pyramid-like structures in the Argolid to about 2720 B.C., or about 100 years before the first Egyptian pyramid. The same site thinks Linear A and Linear B were discovered by A. Evans in 1947 and makes mention of someone named "Sleeman." George Pesely, Austin Peay State University peselyg@apsu.edu -----Original Message----- From: James M. Pfundstein [mailto:jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu] Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2001 8:03 PM To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Dispilio disputandum est (reply to Sotiropoulos) [portions deleted] I've read that the oldest sample of Phoenician script was unearthed at Gebal/Byblos (modern Jbeil in Lebanon), and is datable to 1200 (or so) BC. Word on the street is that it seems to be an independent cultural development (like the later Greek innovation of vowels). I don't pretend that any of this stuff meets SS's own high standards of intellectual rigor, but it might give him a start in his independent investigation. JMP("Proverbs 30:15-16") .