Cultures Without Written Languages Not all ancient societies were well-known. We have no way of knowing how many ancient cultures have disappeared and have either been misclassified or have never been found. Sometimes some of the societies had no writing which made things even harder for us to discover. On other occasions we have found ancient writings which we have not been able to decipher. We don’t know if some of these writings are actually ancient or are some type of code. A case in point is the Voynich manuscript. It is described as an illustrated codex which has been carbon dated to the early fifteenth century, and is written on vellum which is an animal skin or membrane used as writing material. The Voynich manuscript was named after a book dealer purchased it in 1912. The book as many pages some of which fold out and have illustrations. Cryptographers have been studying this book for a very long time but to no avail. They believe it is a code, one has to wonder if it is something else. Could it be someone found an ancient language and decided to study it and became affluent in it and either copied or authored a book written in that language? The book rests in Yale Universities Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. When one finds a sophisticated culture, it is assumed they had a written language, but we cannot really assume this. Some cultures have accomplished incredible things without knowing the written word. One race which comes to mind is the Inca. It is so puzzling; it has become known as the Inca Paradox. One has to wonder how structures could have been created which are so precise without the written word. This has led some to believe there could have been writing and we just don’t know about it. Over the centuries, we have found priests have had an inordinate amount of power and perhaps in the case of the Inca, priests knew how to write and read and kept it secret from the rest of the population and when the Inca died out, so did the secret. The argument against this is no writing has ever been found which relates to the Inca, but perhaps the writing was destroyed after being used and was only used in rare instances. One of the oldest continuous races is the aborigines who live in Australia. Before the Europeans went to Australia the aborigines had no written language even though their culture extended back 40,000 years or more. One study claims they could be as old as 60,000 years. One of the things which confuses researchers is the fact the spoken language of the aborigines is only about 4000 years old. Why did they change their language? One strange thing about the aborigines is they didn’t seem to advance much over all those years. Everything the aborigines wanted to remember was kept in an oral history and retold by every generation. We tend to think of American Indian tribes as not having a written language but this is not true. One of the first tribes of Indians to have written language were the Cherokee. Other tribes which have a written language are the Apache, Navajo, Inuit and Cree. The Maya Indians of South and Central America also had a system of writing. It was composed of glyphs. These were pictures of words. In some ways it was reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian written language of hieroglyphs. The Indus Valley is located in parts of Pakistan and India. Advanced races lived there many thousands of years ago. It is said from 2600 B.C. To 1900 B.C. there were more than a thousand settlements in an area of 250,000 square miles. Some of the cities became famous like Mohenjo-daro. We have never been able to understand their written word and it was not for lack of trying for hundreds of years. Some believe the writing is composed of glyphs, but not all experts agree. Stones were discovered in Athens in 1893 which were believed to contain symbols from the language used in the Indus Valley. Later excavations at Knossos on the island of Crete turned up more stones which were similar in their inscriptions. One mysterious language was only recently discovered. Archaeologists were looking at a cliff wall in Wadi el-Hol, in Egypt. They recognized all of the writing on the wall except for one. They came to believe someone had made an early translation of some of the hieroglyphs on the wall into their language. No one has been able to decipher how to read that language. Could it be a language of a long dead civilization? Could a visitor have come from a place like Atlantis, saw some of the hieroglyphs and decided to interpret them to Atlantean so others from that country would be able to read them? There are a lot of puzzles in this world and one of them are unknown languages which have been written down. If you talk to some people, they credit aliens. As I’ve said many times before, when people don’t understand something some of them say aliens must have done it. To me this is a ridiculous statement, we can’t blame everything we don’t understand on aliens. There was a time when a very large stone was blocking the Singapore River. The stone was covered with writing and it has been said by the time of its destruction in 1819 it had been in the same place for over 700 years. Nobody at the time was able to understand what the writing stated. Unfortunately, it was felt the stone was in the way and workers were ordered to blow it up. The stone was destroyed and some of it went into the river while the rest which went on to land was mostly made into gravel. Some pieces did survive however, and to this day no one has been able to understand anything they say. There is a language known as Proto-Elamite. This writing system was said to have been used over 5000 years ago in Iran. It is completely unique. We know it is written from right to left and it has been suggested the system of using writing was borrowed from the Mesopotamian culture. The writing itself uses different symbols and to this day no one has been able to decipher it. It was so confusing the scientist trying to decipher it put it out to the public in hopes someone might hit upon the basis for this language and help to understand it. So far, no luck.
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