the written word
The World's Best Fairy Tales -- page is open to show the illustration for the story "The Golden-Headed Fish", one of my favorites.For those of you who don't know why this book is so important to me-- I had a copy of it as long as I can remember and it was my favorite book of all time. I have read every story in there multiple times. It's most likely the reason why I have always liked stories/legends/myths about other cultures; my interest was cultivated since the start. This particular book is fantastic because it has an excellent variety of stories, 69 of them to be exact. Plus, the traditional stories are put in there with their proper, original, un-Disney-fied endings, which actually tend to be quite morbid. For example, in The Little Mermaid, someone else marries the prince and the mermaid turns into sea foam. There's another that has a girl who gets her feet cut off. You know, wholesome stuff for children. :) I loved it.
I was thrilled to finally find it so I could purchase it!! This book is rather uncommon--it's a 1967 version, so it's before books were given ISBN numbers--and I've only seen one for sale in the past year. My copy was destroyed in the hurricane--I tried to salvage it, but it was too moldy. I'm glad to have finally replaced it, it just arrived in the mail today.
Along the lines of old writings, check out this article:
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/stone-slab-bears-earliest-writing-in/20060914145609990007?ncid=NWS00010000000001
Some of this stuff is filtering to the popular press--on AOL news, no less. I had heard rumors about this, but I didn't know when the article was getting published. This one says it'll come out in Science this week and I'll be interested in reading that. Hmmm. I find the comments rather amusing and a bit eager. But I'll save my critique and leave that for the epigraphers/hieroglyph dabblers I know to comment on.
posted by archaesmd at 9:04 PM
1 Comments:
I was just in a discussion of Preclassic writing a day before this story broke, so we clearly were all on topic. There is some concern about the dating, since the context is messed up and there are both Early Preclassic (900 BC) and Terminal Classic (900 AD) pottery associated with it. However, it is definitely a Preclassic sculpture, with ties to Olmec iconography. Regardless of whether it is 900 or 600 or 500 BC, it certainly seems to look like writing (though perhaps very simple writing) and it is Olmec. Until know, all "Olmec writing" was either overblown iconography or a few isolated name/date glyphs. No large texts like this one.
I've been looking at the 'text' some, and there seems to be what could be a grammatical construction with a set of repeating glyphs, but my guess is that it is a name. It repeats three times on the stone, always beginning with the "bug" glyph and incorporating the "turtle shell" or "skinned hide" glyph, and a set of others. Were it a Maya text, my first reaction would be that this is a name, with multiple titles (some modified depending on the context). Another possibility, especially because the first cluster is at the "beginning" of the "text" is that it could be a date frame. Again, in Maya, sentences begin with a construct that tells the reader to either count forward or backwards from the events of the previous sentence, and then an amount of time and a calendar date. The problem is, nothing in this text looks at all calendrical.
Lastly, one section, not far from what appears to be a representation of an Olmect throne, shows a glyph reminiscent of a "seating" glyph in Maya and other texts, a verb refering to being seated in power on a throne.
This is obviously speculative, but I know I'm not the only one seeing some of the same possibilities and similarities.
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