#ancient scripts

CHAPTER ONE OF ONE

Pairing: Dewdrop/Swiss

Rating: Explicit

Words: 5073

Tags: Grief/Mourning | Isolation | Aether’s dead I’m sorry |Church Sex| Improper Use of Catholic Rituals | Dominate Dew | Altar Sex | vague mentions of suicidal ideation | Post-Break Up | Make up sex

He’d broken up with the pack, so his anger was entirely misguided towards them. They were doing what he’d asked, leaving him the fuck alone. There were other things he’d said, but they are best left unrepeated.

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What’s up, people?

I am finally back to get you that cultural meta teased in the 91-Men Emes MV review, oh yeah. Let’s kick it off with the Old Turkic script, shall we?

Old Turkic script aka Orkhon-Yenisei runes is the script used by the Göktürks aka the Original Turkic People of Altay.

Again, a little disclaimer here: please-please-please keep in mind Turkic does not equal Turkish, as Turkic refers to the large ethnolinguistic group that includes many different descendent nations and languages while Turkish are the people and the national language of Turkey. Hence, Turkish is a part of the Turkic ethnolinguistic group, as German is a part of Germanic group, not vice versa. We’re clear on that? Good, let’s carry on.

So, the Old Turkic script.

Was first discovered in the form of 8th-century stele inscriptions in the Orkhon Valley of the modern day Mongolia, hence the first part of the runes’ name. There is also a Yenisei variant from 9th century that was used by the Yenisei Kirghizs (aka the ancestors of the modern Kyrgyz people of Kyrgyzstan btw) in Siberia, hence the second part of the name.

The alphabet was used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic Khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries to record (guess what) the Old Turkic language that is, as you probably guessed, a direct ancestor of the Kazakh language. The scientists are not quite sure about the origins of the Orkhon script: some say it was derived from variants of Aramaic alphabet, others - that it was derived from Chinese characters, derivation from tamgas explanation holds its ground too (tamga - a seal or stamp used by Eurasian nomads as an emblem of a particular tribe, clan or family. Still sort of used by Kazakh tribes, I suppose? Very casually so, without much fanatism. I’ll touch on tamgas whenever I get to talk about the Kazakh tribal system.) As a Scandinavian history nerd, I personally always had strong associations with the Younger Futhark script of the Medieval Vikings.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the Old Turkic script was mostly inscribed on stone steles, hence comes the visual similarity with the Scandinavian runes as they were also carved on a stone block, and you must understand the logistics of writing anything on stone is much different from writing on a piece of parchment, for example. What were the content of those stele inscriptions? Pretty much boasting about “how cool the dude who leads us is”. I know, nothing new. Ah, and by the way, the words in Orkhon-Yenisei are written from right to left.

Nowadays, the Old Turkic script is usually used and pretty much worshipped by the followers of the Pan-Turkism ideology. For some Kazakhs the Orkhon script is sort of a way to discover, appreciate and go back to the ethnic pagan origins as it usually comes with rediscovering of Tengrism as a national and historical legacy, which, I think, is quite cool in its unique fashion.

Conclusion? Ancient runes are tight! hip and trendy.

A fascinating article in the BBC about using machine translation to decipher ancient cuneiform tablets. Excerpt: 

Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum. These tiny signs are the remains of the world’s oldest writing system: cuneiform.

Developed more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history.

They chronicle the rise of fall of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia, the world’s first empires. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground.

However, since cuneiform was first deciphered by scholars around 150 years ago, the script has only yielded its secrets to a small group of people who can read it. Some 90% of cuneiform texts remain untranslated.

That could change thanks to a very modern helper: machine translation.

“The influence that Mesopotamia has on our own culture is something that people don’t know much about,” says Émilie Pagé-Perron, a researcher in Assyriology at the University of Toronto. Mesopotamia gave us the wheel, astronomy, the 60-minute hour, maps, the story of the flood and the ark, and the first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. But its texts are mainly written in Sumerian and Akkadian, languages that relatively few scholars can read.

Pagé-Perron is coordinating a project to machine translate 69,000 Mesopotamian administrative records from the 21st Century BC. One of the aims is to open up the past to new research.

“We have information about so many different aspects of the lives of Mesopotamian people, and we can’t really profit from the expertise of people in different fields like economics or politics, who if they had access to the sources, could help us tremendously to understand those societies better,” says Pagé-Perron.

Apart from the clay tablets, there are also more than 50,000 Mesopotamian engraved seals scattered in collections around the world. For millennia, the people of Mesopotamia used seals made of engraved stone that were pressed into wet clay to mark doors, jars, tablets and other objects. Only some 10% of these have even been catalogued, let alone translated.

कोल्हापूर: शिलालेख हा भाषेच्या प्रवासाचे दाखले देणारे ऐतिहासिक आणि विश्वासार्ह वारसदार असून या शिलालेखांमध्ये भाषेची विविध रूपे सापडतात, असे प्रतिपादन शिलालेख अभ्यासक डॉ. नीलेश शेळके यांनी केले. शिवाजी विद्यापीठाच्या मराठी अधिविभागात ‘अभिजात मराठी भाषा सप्ताहा’निमित्त आयोजित ‘शिलालेखातील मराठी’ या विषयावर ते बोलत होते. कार्यक्रमाच्या अध्यक्षस्थानी मराठी विभागप्रमुख प्रा. रणधीर शिंदे होते. मराठी…

🐰 By Mr. Fluffernutter, the World’s Fluffiest Codebreaker! Picture this: a grand pyramid, filled with golden treasures, hidden tunnels, and walls covered in mysterious symbols. 🏹✨ The air is thick with the scent of ancient papyrus and warm stone, and every sound echoes through the vast chambers. That’s where I found myself today, standing in front of a puzzling wall of ancient Egyptian…