Ancient Unknown Writing Found in Turkmeni

If this is indeed an early form of writing, as its discoverer has suggested, it is strong evidence for a previously unknown civilization that began about 2300 B.C. across much of modern Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

But some scholars challenge this theory, arguing that the signs are not true writing based on a spoken language. And, they say, one sample with three or four characters on a thumbnail-size stone is hardly sufficient to establish the existence of a writing system. On that, the discoverer, Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, agrees.

An even more puzzling aspect of the discovery has been raised by specialists in ancient Chinese writing. They contend that the inscription bears more than a passing resemblance to Chinese writing � not an early script, but one that was not used until about 200 B.C.

How could that be? The characters on the stone, thought to be a seal, would be hard enough to explain if the writing was like the earliest known Chinese script. There is no clear evidence for Chinese writing before about 1300 or 1200 B.C. � 1,000 years after people lived at the Anau site in Turkmenistan where the mysterious inscription was unearthed.

But in independent studies of the inscription, two experts in ancient Chinese � Dr. Qui Xigui of Beijing University and Dr. Victor H. Mair of Penn � concluded that the characters were much like a more advanced script practiced in the Western Han dynasty of 206 B.C. to A.D. 9.

If that is correct, scholars say, several possible explanations must be considered. One is a matter of the archaeological context � exactly where and how the object was found in the buried ruins of Anau. Perhaps the inscribed object is out of place and time.

It could have been dropped there long after the site had been abandoned by its occupants in 2300 B.C. Commerce between China and Central Asia and on to the Mediterranean began in the Han dynasty along the Silk Road, which crossed the land in the region of Anau, near Turkmenistan's border with Iran. Or someone more recently could have deliberately planted the artifact in the buried ruins to confound archaeologists.

"If we ignore the archaeological context," Dr. Qui said, "then I would say this inscription can't be earlier than the Western Han." In other words, the script looks like Han writing, but that seems inconceivable if the experts have not been somehow misled in their excavations.

Another possibility, which would throw the scholarship of Chinese writing into turmoil, is that the 2300 inscription date is correct. That would suggest that influences from Central Asia or farther west might have contributed to the invention of Chinese writing. Dr. Mair, who holds that such influences were greater than previously thought, has raised this controversial point. "The Anau seal forces us to rethink in a most radical fashion the origins of the Chinese script," he said.

Dr. Gilbert L. Mattos, a specialist in ancient Chinese writing at Seton Hall University, said three of the characters definitely resembled Chinese. But it was not clear, he said, whether this was true writing. "This is certainly a significant find," Dr. Mattos said, "but it's hard to interpret at this point."

Dr. Sarah Allan, a scholar of Chinese and Asian studies at Dartmouth, agreed that the inscription "looks extraordinarily Chinese," but she questioned whether there was enough information to identify it as "a script of a known period."

Other experts said some symbols of completely different ancient Asian scripts bore a likeness to one another even though there was no evidence that they are related. One of the inscription's characters, variously described as the "bow tie" or "figure eight," resembles signs or design motifs in many cultures, including some as far away as Easter Island.

When Dr. Mair met with Dr. Qui last month in China, they tried to translate the inscription. Dr. Qui suggested that one sign could mean grain, and Dr. Mair speculated that the seal had been used to account for some number of units, perhaps five, of grain, suggesting that the seal had been used in accounting for commodities. Archaeologists had said the room in which the inscription was found appeared to have been part of an administrative center for the agricultural society.

Defending his research, Dr. Hiebert, a historian and archaeologist, said last week: "I remain fully convinced that this is a stamp seal with some symboling and writing on it. I have no question about the context and methods of my particular find."

After hearing Dr. Hiebert explain the excavation methods, colleagues at Penn said they agreed that the seal belonged where it was found, in a layer of the ruins dated at 2300 B.C. There was no evidence, they said, that the dirt-encrusted artifact could have been introduced by rodents or water seepage, or by a hoaxer straight from the antiquities market.

In this and previous excavations, archaeologists said, no artifacts had been uncovered that had anything to do with China in the Han dynasty.

Dr. Hiebert made the discovery a year ago in excavations of ruins of a settlement near Ashgabat, Turkmenistan's capital. He was the first American to explore the site since Raphael Pumpelly, the leader of an expedition for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, dug there in 1904. Soviet archaeologists had conducted extensive research there and elsewhere across the Kara-Kum desert, revealing the existence of a resourceful agricultural society more than 4,000 years ago. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the area was largely closed to Western scientists.

Working with Turkmen and Russians, Dr. Hiebert found more evidence that Anau was one of several settlements in the foothills that preceded the culture's expansion around 2200 B.C. out into the arid basin, where the residents practiced irrigated farming at oases. Whoever the people were, their culture is now called the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex. It disappeared a few hundred years after the expansion.

Previous research had shown that the culture built large urban centers with fortifications, had the administrative skills to develop extensive irrigation systems and produced surpluses to pay for fine ceramics, jewelry and bronze goods. If Dr. Hiebert's findings are correct, the culture also developed a writing, or proto-writing systems. Thus, by the definition of some anthropologists, the culture probably could be considered an early civilization that was later lost.

"What is supersignificant to me," Dr. Hiebert said, "this is the first time that three or four signs have been found in relation to each other this long ago in Central Asia. At some basic level, this seems to be writing. These are not just a series of random signs, potters' marks or decorations. Of course, with only one seal it is premature to talk about how it was used, what the symbols meant or what kind of language it was."

In a story going around the Penn campus, when Dr. Hiebert showed the inscribed object to Dr. Robert Dyson, retired director of the University Museum of Archaeology, Dr. Dyson said: "Good job, Fred. Now go out and find a hundred more like it."

It may take that to dispel skepticism over whether this one Anau inscription came from an ancient Central Asian culture that could write. Dr. Hiebert said he was shifting his excavation strategy to widen the investigation at the depth where the seal was found.

One skeptic is Dr. Holly Pittman, director of the Center for Ancient Studies at Penn.

"I don't know if this is writing, if we mean that writing represents an underlying language," she said. "It may be a signing system, not a writing system. A drawing of the sun, for example, represents the sun, but not necessarily any sound. A signing or symbolic system projects some kind of message, but whether it is connected to spoken language in a way that you and I would be able to read in the same way is debatable."

As far as archaeologists can tell, humans began expressing themselves with symbols and signs in cave art and rock carvings as early as 30,000 years ago. The Sumerians, from what is now southern Iraq, are credited as the first to convert picture-writing into true writing more than 5,000 years ago. At first, the Sumerians used it mainly for accounting, but they were writing poetry by the era of Anau.

"We shouldn't be surprised to see people in Central Asia experimenting with symbol systems or writing," Dr. Hiebert said. "They were fairly urban and had a high level of production, complex architecture and complex metallurgy. An accounting system and symboling would have been useful to them."

Dr. Mair is continuing to pursue a possible Chinese connection. Tipped off by Chinese scholars, he found pictures and descriptions in Chinese journals of another seal with a size and characters almost identical to the Anau artifact. Called the Niya seal, it was collected in Xinjiang province, far to the west of the core of Chinese civilization.

Although the Niya seal appears also to be from the Western Han period, Dr. Mair said the exact circumstances of its discovery in the 1960's were not documented.

So the story of the Anau seal is far from over. "No matter how this saga turns out," Dr. Mair said, "the Anau inscription is of tremendous significance."

Source of this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/science/social/31SEAL.html?ex=997803191&ei=1&en=1ae07d403dc66370

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