Dave L Wrote:
...
> These ideas attributing everything to the
> Sumerians ...

What/who's ideas do you refer to here? What is "everything"??

Is this the "racist" 19th century stuff you refer to?

Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund
Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. ISBN: 978-0-226-58659-5 (ISBN-10: 0-226-58659-6) Fall 1993

"Archaic Bookkeeping brings together the most current
scholarship on the earliest true writing system in human
history. Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the
fourth millennium B.C., this script, called proto-cuneiform,
survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now
posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets,
excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear
context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets
was not to record language but to monitor the administration
of local economies by means of a numerical system."

If you do a little research, you should discover that the proto-cuneiform notation system goes back much further in Mesopotamia, before civilization arose during the Uruk period, +/- 4000–3100 B.C., well before cities emerged during the Late Uruk period, 3500–3100 B.C. and cylinder seals around 3400 B.C. I'm not at my library, or I would cite references.







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/03/2008 11:54AM by archaeo.