Message #738

[Brooke]

One of the most important finds are the several hundreds of stones dating from the final stages of the Ice Age in a cave at Mas d'Azil in France. The 12,000-year-old Azilian rocks are painted with designs "which show astonishing similarity with later Greek and Latin letters" (Behn, 1948). Some experts have speculated that the cave might have been a writing school for Ice Age children.

Also, there are the bone calendars (date 20,000 B.C.), which until properly analyzed, could possibly represent a form of writing according to experts in anthropology and paleography (Marshack, 1972). Can a relationship be demonstrated between some of the better known western "alphabetic" (syllabic) writing systems and our Glozel prototype? The answer is, "Yes!"

First, there are the inscriptions on the Canary Islands (especially those on Hierro and Grand Canary): the script resembles Numidian and appears to be composed of some twenty four characters and a number of ideograms (Cline, 1953). There is also a "kinship" recognized between some of these Canary Island scripts and the Iberian and Sinai "alphabets" (Wolfel, 1942).

The Numidian (Berber) writing is "alphabetic" (technically a syllabary; Gelb, 1974). The Tuaregs of North Africa speak Tamachek, but their written language, T'ifinagh, is also "alphabetic" (syllabic) and is closely related to the Basque language. T'ifinagh is being forgotten before it can be either properly classified or translated (Friedrich, 1957). The close similarity between all these "western" systems, and their difference from the "eastern" cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic) systems cannot be ignored.

Even the Aymara Indians living along the shores of Lake Titicaca in South America were in possession of an ideographic form of writing when the Spanish conquistadors appeared on the scene (in spite of a ban on writing put in effect by the 63rd Inca ruler, Topu Gaui Pachacuti). Some of these signs correspond exactly to the characters found on the Canary Island tablets and among the Tuaregs and Berbers in North Africa (Wilkins, 1946).

Does all this sound familiar somehow? Basques, Berbers, Tuaregs, Guanches, and even the Aymaras of South America? We are talking about the same areas, the same people, the same language, and the same culture called "Atlantic" by learned scholars. In other words, our Cro-Magnon-Atlanteans.

There must have been a "western" prototype (which I believe we have in the Glozel Tablets), completely independent of the eastern writing system which evolved later in Sumar, for all these "Atlantic" systems to be so much alike. Prof. W. Z. Ripley (1899) agrees: "A system of writing seems also to have been invented in western Europe as far back as the Stone Age." We will demonstrate the validity of this startling statement in the article entitled Ancient Alphabets Compared.

1It is demonstrated on this website that all the so-called "alphabets" before the Greek invention of the vowel signs are technically syllabaries, but the topic under discussion here is the characters which form the components of these early writing systems.

  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Vuara/EVOLUTION_OF_WRITING

THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING By R. Cedric Leonard

 http://www.atlantisquest.com/evolution.html 
 http://www.atlantisquest.com/classical.html 
 http://www.atlantisquest.com/tab6.gif 

The Greek Alphabet Written by Charlotte P.

 http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/OakViewES/harris/96-97/agespages/greece/alphabet.html 
 http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/OakViewES/harris/96-97/agespages/greece/images-general/alphabet.gif