By DIEGO IBARGUEN, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP)
- Archaeologists say an ancient civilization that thrived in Central
Asia more than 4,000 years ago may have developed a written language
or at least experimented with a form of proto-writing.
Evidence of
the accomplishments of the unknown people in what are now the
republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan began to emerge over
several decades of excavations by archaeologists of the Soviet
Union.
But it was
last summer that Fredrik T. Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University
of Pennsylvania, uncovered a small stone object engraved with
four or five red symbols, believed to be evidence of writing.
"They
had every aspect of civilization," Hiebert said in a telephone
interview Sunday, including urban features such as large buildings
and monumental arches. The only missing element, he said, had
been evidence of writing.
Since no one
knows who the people were or what they called themselves, archaeologists
have given the culture the name Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex,
or BMAC, after the ancient Greek names for two lands in the region.
Hiebert made
the discovery last June in ruins at Annau, Turkmenistan. He described
the findings a week ago at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania
and on Saturday at a conference on language and archaeology at
Harvard University.
Hiebert said
the artifact he found, believed to be a stamp seal made of anthracite,
is the "first evidence that we would have of a literate Central
Asian society."
Hiebert said
other archaeologists have said the symbols on the seal are distinct
from contemporary scripts in Mesopotamia, Iran and the Indus River
valley. Stamp seals were commonly used in ancient commerce to
mark containers by their contents and ownership.
The artifact
has been dated to 2300 B.C., when the pyramids of Egypt had been
standing for three centuries, power in the Tigris and Euphrates
valley was shifting from Sumer to Babylon and the Chinese had
yet to develop writing.
Hiebert said
that Victor H. Meir, a specialist in Asian languages and cultures
at the University of Pennsylvania, told him some of the symbols
resembled Chinese writing, which is thought to have developed
several hundred years later.
The dozens
of settlement ruins of the unknown civilization stretch east from
Annau across the Kara-Kum desert into Uzbekistan and perhaps the
northern part of Afghanistan. The area is 300 to 400 miles long
and 50 miles wide.
Hiebert described
a "vibrant debate" at the Harvard conference over whether
the symbols indicated a written language or an experiment in proto-writing.
"I don't
know," he conceded, adding that further excavations might
provide greater insight. "One piece of evidence is hardly
enough, but it has tremendous implications."
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