Re: Mandombe

Den 10. jan. 2007 kl. 18.28 skrev Paul Bennett:
>
> I've never heard about that before. I understood that Canaanite
> Phoenecian texts existed roughly a thousand years before the first
> Demotic texts, though there are some claims that an almost-entirely
> undeciphered script seemingly based on Heiratic (as such, an older
> "sister" to Demotic, perhaps?) was a major inspiration of the
> Canaanite Phoenecian system, though parallels can also be found in
> Sumerian and Ugaritic. Indeed, parallels can also be found between
> Sumerian and Early Egyptian, so the waters seem to be at least a
> little muddy.
I meant (or should have meant) Egyptian writing, not Demotic. Isn't
there an agreement that all those Levantine scripts have Egyptian
origins, then? There may be a handful of characters here and there
that were taken up from Cuneiform or invented, but generally the
source is Egyptian, that's what I have always heard. For most of the
characters we know it's easy to find the Egyptian parallels as well,
in Hieroglyphs and Hieratic as well as in Demotic. You are not
suggesting that the Phoenicians invented the whole thing?

LEF

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