§1 WELCOME TO LABYRINTHS

What is Labyrinths about?

Each issue of this series of publications might be different in its focus. What they all have in common is that they serve as an account of some of my experiences teaching myself things. Some learning experiences are affectionately described as being like a walk in the woods with an experienced guide. This is not one of them. We will frequently ask naive questions and try to penetrate the dense underbrush, often hidden from casual gaze, of literature which might help us answer these questions. If we liken each book to a path through the woods, and consider each footnote or detail of the book as a trail marker pointing to yet another path, then instead of traveling a path, we are instead presented with a vast maze. It is for this reason that I have chosen the name Labyrinths as the name of this series of publications.

This first issue focuses on two main themes: Museums and Alphabets.

I have been going to museums and enjoying them for most of my life. A few years ago, I realized that in spite of this, I really wasn't learning much from going to them and I found this disappointing. So I decided to take my museum trips more seriously in the future and I believe this was a good decision. When I go to a museum now, I usually bring a notebook devoted to museums and take notes on what I see. I might draw something that catches my eye or I might copy down the explanations or I might make a list of the new vocabulary I learn there. Often I also note the numbers which identify a particular exhibit so that I can refer to it unambiguously (more on this below). As a result of doing this, I now get a lot more out of my trips to the museum. At the same time, people who go with me to the museum generally find themselves greatly inconvenienced by having to wait for me while I write things down, so I have worked out a compromise: when I go with others, I only make quick notes of what I might like to look at more closely on another occasion; when I go by myself, I take as long as I like.

WARNING TO PARENTS

Even if you like this idea, do not force it on your kids, lest they grow up hating museums. If you want to get the idea across, instead set an example by doing it yourself.

Projects inspired by museum trips

For example, in Boston, I went to the Goya exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. I copied down the descriptions of the paintings, and learned so many interesting things about Spanish history in the process that I subsequently read a book on the subject to learn even more. More recently, I have gotten interested in the inscriptions one finds on ancient statues and other artifacts. Often, they are written in dead languages and I am intrigued by the possibility of reading them. These include Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform writing and others. In this issue, I will discuss some of my primitive attempts to tackle these problems.

About the bibliography

I have included at the end of this issue a list of the books and articles that I have actually referred to while writing this document. Each one is listed together with an abbreviation that makes it easier to refer to the book or article in question. The references are arranged at the end of the issue according to the alphabetical order of the abbreviations.
A reference will typically have the form: "on p.17 of [Jens], we find..." Here, [Jens] is the abbreviation I am using for the book Sign, Symbol and Script, by H.Jensen, and the reference above tells you to look on page 17 of that book. You don't have that book? Neither do I. But the library has it. It doesn't have it? Go to the library and tell them to purchase it! This brings me to another point:

Non-bureaucratic Education

Most people tend to think of education as that which is in inflicted on them in schools. Indeed, one of the most pernicious effects of the education system is to leave people with this definition of education. This in turn makes it difficult to discuss any other meanings the word might have or to win support for them. Fortunately, there are institutions in society which specialize in what I like to call "non-bureaucratic education". These include the public libraries and the museums. I feel that they often leave considerable room for improvement, particularly the local libraries, but at least they help people to follow their own curiosity and they provide a glimpse at what a viable alternative might be to the presently funded definition of the term "education".

One of the ways one can nurture institutions such as libraries and museums is to give them money, since they always need money. But an equally important way, in my opinion, is to use them as thoroughly as one can and, when one finds that they are deficient in some way, to let them know. In the case of libraries, I have often in mind the romantic image of the man who, deprived of an education, educates himself in the public library, builds up a business and in gratitude leaves 3 million dollars to the library in his will. Nice image, but there are many libraries in which that man would not have been able to educate himself successfully. That is because many local libraries feel that their mission is to reflect the "level" of the communities they serve, as opposed to being a "research library".

I think that there is some middle ground and one way to reach it is to ask libraries to order the books that you need to teach yourself something. Maybe you can afford to purchase the book yourself, but after you have finished with it, consider donating it to the library so that it can grow with you (but first obtain a promise that they will put it on the shelf instead of selling it for 10 cents at a booksale on the grounds that it is too good for them). In the case of museums, one can study what is in them and then try to get answers to the natural questions that arise. By exercising the positive features of museums, I believe that one also contributes to their survival as institutions of non-bureaucratic education.

In this issue, I will describe my own experiences studying inscriptions in museums. I am only at the beginning of my studies in this area and I don't have a lot of time to devote to it. But I am pleased with the little progress I have made. I hope others will find it interesting, both in its subject matter and in its indications of some of the ways one can use a museum. As I learn more, I will revise the electronic master file. Therefore, correspondence regarding errors in the text or answers to questions will be welcome. Subsequent printings or distributions will then carry a version number, just as software does when new releases are distributed.

§2 Museums and Catalogues

The museums that I am focusing on in this issue are the following:

1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
2. The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris

Whenever possible, I have included reproductions of my own drawings of the exhibits I refer to. Due to copyright problems, it is not possible at this time to reproduce the photographs of the exhibits from the Louvre catalogues. Meanwhile, we will manage with my own quite imperfect drawings. However, the reader of this issue of Labyrinths can get a good look at the exhibits in question in either of the following ways:

(i) Go to the museum yourself and look at them.
(ii) Look at the catalogue of the exhibits.

If you are in New York and can't get to Paris as often as you like to look at exhibits, the second way is probably better for you. What do I mean by "the catalogue"? It is a book that contains descriptions, and often photographs, of the exhibits at the museum, or in a part of the museum.

The catalogues that I have relied on are [Lou] and [Syr]. If you can find these catalogues in your library, or perhaps in the bookstore of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can examine good photographs of the exhibits I refer to.

I will assume that someday you will have a copy of these catalogues near you and can look at them. In order for you to be able to find the exhibits I am refering to in these catalogues, I will in each case refer to it by its catalogue number and the pages that it is on in the catalogue. The catalogue number is listed not only in the catalogue but is usually also included in the description of the exhibit where it is displayed in the museum. If the libraries don't have it, you can perhaps order the catalogue from the publisher or on interlibrary loan.

It would be nice to have all of this on a compact disk. A computer could read the compact disk and display excellent images on the computer screen. This will probably be available one of these days, but I don't know what it will cost. The catalogues are often quite expensive (e.g. each volume at the MMA typically costs $50) and the same is likely to be true for the compact disks. I don't believe that the production costs are really that high, particularly for compact disks, but this is one of the few ways that museums and other scholarly institutions can pay their bills.

§3 Checking the blurbs

As I have mentioned earlier, the primary objects of study in this issue are the artifacts exhibited in the museums. One can learn a certain amount by just looking at them. For example, one can find out what they look like. One might make some other observations as well. But unless one is an expert on the type of object being displayed, one normally needs to rely on supplementary materials in order to study the artifacts. The handiest one to rely on is usually the description of the artifact, often found right near it. I will refer to these descriptions as "blurbs". Some blurbs are wonderful, presenting complete and lucid information about the artifact, including the catalogue number. Even these wonderful blurbs usually do not provide references to literature in which one can read more about the artifacts, and failure to do so must be considered a weakness, albeit an excusable one in view of the limited amount of space normally allocated for blurbs. Other blurbs are not as wonderful and might provide little or no information. And how about this for a paranoid thought: how do you know that the blurb is telling you the truth? Ha?

Well, being an ignoramus, I usually don't know and in the past, I would leave the museum wondering how the people who wrote the blurbs got so smart that they knew these things. The answer, one imagines, is that they went to school and studied that subject and became specialists in that area. But this is not a satisfactory answer, since there are many things one might like to know more than superficially and one can't go to school to devote one's life to all of them; such an answer is therefore discouraging. So I will persist in the idea that there must be another way.

In the case of inscriptions, one has writing in some ancient language and often the blurb tells you what the inscription says and in what language, among other things. Well, suppose one could read that language? Then one could see whether the blurb was correct. Whatever the language is, surely there are books on it one can study. And then, armed with more information, one can try again to read the inscription. That is more or less what I have been doing and what I am reporting on in this issue.

However, learning a language is itself a lot of work. Furthermore, if one is not experienced in learning languages or lacks exposure to concepts of linguistics, one might have a lot of trouble with it. In this issue, I am not going to assume that the reader is good at learning languages. Instead, I will focus mostly on the alphabets of the languages that I deal with. On another occasion, when I know more myself, I can try to go into more depth about the languages themselves.

§4 Code Breaking

Books are expensive, particularly if you need a lot of them. So let me start with an inscription that we can study without relying on any books. Below, you see a drawing I have made of a certain exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

in the inscription, the second letter from the right and the letter furthest to the left are the same. This tends to confirm that the writing goes from right to left and that we have identified the letter representing the d sound.

The first letter is an s sound, so we know that the letter most on the right is an s. Between the d and the m in sadiqum, there is the consonant q, and in the inscription there is only one letter between the one representing d and the one representing m. So we have found the letter representing q. The only letter in the inscription that we have not identified is the little circle which is the second letter from the left.

Our clue comes from the transcription again: the name is not "Sadiqum Madd" but "Sadiqum M`add". That left quote is actually a consonant. In Hebrew, it probably corresponds to a letter such as ayin or even aleph. The former, I believe, was pronounced in the throat in ancient Hebrew, and the latter like the sound that occurs between "uh" and "oh" in "uh-oh". When I was taught to read (but not to understand) Hebrew, I was told that ayin and aleph were silent letters; later I was told that oriental Jews pronounce ayin in the throat. Anyway, the left quote ` is a consonant and that consonant is the same as the little circle second from the left.

Well, that is certainly an accomplishment: starting with only the vaguest ideas about semitic languages and unaided by books, we have deciphered an inscription in a language we have never seen before! How did we actually do it? We compared the writing on the statue, in the unknown language, with the writing on the blurb, in a language we knew, aided by the hunch that the writing on the statue and the writing Sadiqum M`add on the blurb were both pronounced the same, more or less, being the man's name.

This same technique has been used for centuries to decipher inscriptions in unknown languages. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered thanks to some inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone that had the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra in Greek letters (which the deciphers knew how to read) and in Demotic and Hieroglyphic writing (which they were trying to figure out). So we actually find ourselves in very good company by doing what we just did.

Right next to the statue of the man, there is another exhibit, which I also drew and which I show below in Fig.2.

Alabaster stele on separate base South Arabia, Late 1st Millenium BC, with Sabaean inscription: Dharmat (of the clan) Safalia MMA Cat. # 1982.317.2

Fig.2

As you can see, it is also inscribed with Sabaean writing. We can therefore combine our skills as codebreakers with what he have already learned from the statue. Does what we have learned from the statue help us read the stele? Well, the letter m occurs on the top row, 2nd from the left in Fig.2. And the inscription is alleged to say "Dharmat (of the clan) Safalia". Without knowing the language, we couldn't be sure of the word order, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the m we have just found is the m in Dharmat. The word Dharmat has 4 consonants: (1) Dh (2) r (3) m (4) t

How is Dh a consonant? Probably, it is pronounced like the dh in "hardhat", instead of like the d in "mud". One would then describe dh as an aspirated d sound, since it is produced by pronouncing a d and then breathing. In English, we require two letters to produce this sound, but in some languages there is a special letter to describe it.

If we accept that Dh is a consonant then the four letters in the first row must be Dh, r, m, t respectively. The second row is not so transparent. We would expect it to contain the word "Safalia", but possibly modified for grammatical reasons.

The letter on the extreme right in the second row might plausibly be an s sound and does look a little like the character we identified as the s in Sadiqum, but it is not identical and we have to be careful. Also, if one doesn't write vowels, how do we find 5 consonants in Safalia?

At this point, one wishes one had a copy of the Sabaean alphabet just to know how to do the rest of it and to see how well one has done as a code breaker. Well, after searching through the library at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, I found a copy of the Sabaean alphabet! It is given in Fig.5a in §6, along with another version in Fig.5b.

Meanwhile, let us move on to another example of code breaking. In Fig.3 below, we have copied a picture from the catalogue [Lou], p.107.

Fig.3

Brick inscribed with name
Adad-Nadin-Akhe,

Bilingual Greek-Aramaean.
From Tello, II Century BC,

Cat. # AO 27962

of [Lou] Drawing based on [Lou], p.107

In this case, we have the name Adad-Nadin-Akhe in English (in the caption of Fig.3), in Greek and in Aramaean. We can pretend for a moment that we didn't find this in a museum catalogue and instead found it at an archaeological site at Tello. We see some writing on it, taking up four lines, and the last two lines have letters that are quite familiar. For example, we see a letter A at the beginning and end of the third row and also 3rd from the left. We see the letter N in each of the last two rows, and in the last row we see the letter I and what looks like the letters X and H.

Other letters however, such as the at the end of the second row are less familiar unless one has studied either Greek or mathematics. One is the letter Sigma and another is the letter Delta The letter that looks like is really Chi, which is an aspirated k sound, such as the kh in "look here", and the letter that looks like an H is really an Eta, which is a vowel with a sound like the long A ( ) in LAKE. Thus, the 3rd and 4th rows read:

Suppose we don't know Aramaean (which I don't). We can still guess that this is a bilingual inscription of a name and see if that assumption holds up. We also guess that this is a semitic inscription, reading from right to left without vowels, except that letters like aleph and ayin might carry vowels and letters like vav or yod might be used as vowels. I will now write the Aramaean part and for the convenience of the reader and the author, I will write the letters from left to right.

Now, if this is supposed to be the name , or without vowels, we would at least expect to find two consecutive symbols near the beginning representing the repeated D. And indeed, the second and third letters do appear to be quite similar. So we will guess that and are the same letter and that that letter is a D. They are preceded by the , so must be an aleph or ayin carrying the vowel. Let us now arrange the two rows against each other to facilitate comparison, using what we have guessed so far:

Note that there is consistency in this comparison: the three aramaic letters that correspond to D's do look quite similar, and the two aramaic letters that correspond to N's look quite similar. It is reasonable to suppose that the letter above the Kh really is a Kh sound.

We might also be tempted to conclude that is an S sound, but here we should be cautious since each language has its own ways of putting endings on words, including names, and we can't assume that the endings are the same in Greek and Aramaean.

At any rate, we have identified a few letters of Aramaean (the unknown language), armed (in principle) only with a knowledge of the Greek alphabet and a hunch that this is a bilingual inscription of someone's name. The catalogue [Lou] refers to [Par] and [Wil] for information about this bilingual inscription and about prince Adad-Nadin-Akhe.

§5 Time Line of Alphabets

One of the books I have found useful in some of my work is [Jenn]. On p.10 of [Jenn], we find a kind of time line of the development of alphabets. We have reproduced this in Fig.4. The comments in the picture are in German, so I enclose a translation.

I don't have time or space in this issue to go into all the writing systems described in this picture and their relations to each other. But the book [Jens] is quite informative. This is the book that I relied upon for most of the alphabets that I used.

Fig.4 Time Line of Alphabets, [Jenn], p.10

CopyRight 1999