#genevieve von petzinger

[ancestorsalive]

Geometric Signs: A brief history of space and time!

[handypolymath]

Mad Larry Disease Bed-In for Democracy - “about us” edition

Exhausted from doing laundry yesterday (a whopping 3 loads. took me all day. plus a nap.), I thought I’d catch up on a couple meme asks. I’m not trivializing, the last MLDBIFD post took me several hours, and kept me from pushing myself in stupid ways. Covid is the Gom Jabbar of fatigue/headache/fever for me. I’m trying not to worry about a lot of shit I can’t control right now.

@mikanis​ tagged me with these q’s:

nickname: feldman

height: 5′1″/154cm

last search term: ‘Randall Skeffington’

song stuck in head:

Devil Inside Me - Matt Berry

Green Tara mantra

Ugly Americans theme song

the tinnitus crickets are telling me my brain is warm

follower count blocked count: thousands upon thousands. i like to scroll through the notes on a lot of posts, and weeding that garden is key.

dream job: i’ve never dreamt of work, only being able to make something good, or make something better

wearing: men’s black satin pajama bottoms, Busty Girl Comics tee, resting : ( face; once i take a shower that is

book/movie that summarizes you: The Jerk

favorite song: Itsy Bitsy Spider, but only if you do the hand motions too

aesthetic: Aughra

favorite author: a couple times in my life I’ve encountered a story i had to get smarter (or softer) to process; very often fandom is the forest where that headtrip mushroom grows

random fact:

@khaleesa​ tagged with with these q’s:

3 ships: Nadja & Laszlo, Bruce & Natasha, Gonzo & Chickens

first ship: Gonzo & Chickens

consuming: are you implying i’m some kind of phagocyte? forgive me, i’m feverish. i have a bag of snacks in reach, and four active beverages

watching: aurora star projector on bedroom ceiling

last movie: Glass Onion, as I pick out layered glazes of mise en scene and shot composition, and confabulate the messy venture capital fueled polycule inferno sfumato of interpersonal dynamics. Birdie shazams the song when Yo-Yo Ma is in her Masque lockdown pod; he provides an explanation that highlights the themes of complexity out of simplicity, 3-act structure, puzzles, and also shows us Peg’s the curious cat while Birdie is the golden retriever wearing a lampshade. Oh, no, this isn’t Alpha it’s just a lamp.

last song: yoga nidra, after i get that shower in, which is after nachos

reading: half a page if i’m lucky, but “The First Signs” Genevieve Von Petzinger and about twenty stacked behind it in my kindle queue

craving: nachos just arrived

Took me all day, off and on, and it kept me out of trouble and taking it sleazy, thank you both : )

[sakuraswordly]

What can we make of a design that shows up over and over in disparate cultures throughout history? Theorist Terry Moore explores "Penrose tiling" -- two shapes that fit together in infinite combinations without ever repeating -- and ponders what it might mean.

Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.

[listeningto]

Schau dir "Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger" auf YouTube an

[child-of-hurin]

Not only were these people wearing foot coverings around the time of their arrival in Europe, they also invented bone needles, which allowed them to create finely made, weatherproof garments. In some instances they may have been sewing with sinew or gut string, but there is also evidence of twisted flax fiber from a site in Georgia (Dzudzuana Cave), in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.2 The very dry conditions there have led to the unusual preservation of more than eight hundred fragments of worked flax fiber, with the oldest dating to around 36,000 years ago. What I love most about this discovery is that these ancient people didn’t just spin the flax and use it. They dyed many of these fibers all sorts of colors, including black, gray, turquoise, and pink. The archaeologists studying this rare discovery think they may have been processing the flax to make string, and maybe even sewing some of their clothes with this material—which conjures up for me a mental image of these distant ancestors strolling around the tundra in their new winter collection with stylish pink and turquoise detailing.

The First Signs, Genevieve von Petzinger

[andromedaschmidt]

Can’t wait to read this! 🗿🤓

[roughlydaily]

The world’s oldest code-- its ur-language:? "Stone Age Cave Symbols May All Be Part of a Single Prehistoric Proto-Writing System." (Plus- the father of scientific archaeology) “We communicate through art with symbols that transcend the boundaries of time and culture”*…

Honor ancestral accomplishment: https://bit.ly/2VYE8X5

[brigdh]

Reading Wednesday

The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols by Genevieve von Petzinger. A non-fiction but breezily readable book about cave paintings. Many people are aware of the famous Ice Age paintings of animals – the horses and bison of Lascaux, the lions and bears at Chauvet – but less well-known are the abstract, geometric signs which pop up in this art just as often: dots, lines, X's, empty squares, etc. Mostly this is because the geometeric signs have been largely ignored by archaeologists themselves, who have a tradition of assuming that they're meaningless doodles, patches where the artists were testing their paints, or otherwise unimportant. Fortunately those assumptions are beginning to change. von Petzinger is an archaeologist herself, one whose research has focused on documenting and analyzing the geometric signs, but this book is very much aimed at a non-specialist audience. She does a great job at providing the background to understand why this is such a fascinating topic (short version: it's the beginning of humans' making art, and may well be evidence of the oldest human language and capacity for symbolism as well). She is also great at mixing her theories with more tactile, personal experiences of crawling around in dark caves or visiting obscure museums, keeping the book from spending too much time in the realm of the abstract. She covers various theories for what the art might "mean" (were they painting animals they wanted to hunt? painting their religious experiences? representing a battle between maleness and femaleness?), and though von Petzinger makes her own personal favorite explanation clear, she keeps from ultimately declaring any single one to be THE answer. Which I appreciate. I've seen some reviewers annoyed that the signs remain mysterious, but honestly, any book claiming to definitively solve a centuries-old scientific mystery is probably a book you should be suspicious of. Overall, a really great introduction to the topic, and one that I think could be interesting to a lot of people, especially if you like worldbuilding in fantasy or sci-fi. I always think that the Upper Paleolithic art is a great example of how utterly alien other humans can be while still being recognizable as ourselves, and it's endlessly fun to speculate on what they were like. Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade by Joe Lansdale. Hap & Leonard is a mystery/thriller series that I discovered a year or two ago and have been slowly making my way through. The basic premise is that Hap is a liberal white straight ex-hippie, Leonard is a black gay conservative Vietnam vet, and together they fight crime! And also are best friends in rural East Texas, despite the problems that caused in the 60s and 70s and sometimes still today. Lansdale writes with an ironic, self-deprecating tone that makes the series appeal to me much more than a more straightforward 'tough guys beat up bad guys' take on the same idea would. This book is collection of short stories, though Lansdale himself describes it as a "mosaic novel". In summary: Hap and Leonard spend a night driving around town, shooting the shit and doing nothing much in particular. As their conservation drifts along and they pass by places they used to know, memories spark off flashbacks which lead into short stories, mostly about Hap's childhood, his parents, and particularly his relationship to racism, but also covering the first time Hap and Leonard met and the first time they got into trouble together. (Two of the stories were published previously in another context, but they're integrated so well into the rest that I wouldn't have known if I hadn't already read them: "The Boy Who Became Invisible" and "Not Our Kind".) But despite mostly taking place in the past, I don't think this would make for a good introduction to the series; a lot of the power of the stories depends on already knowing these characters and having an emotional connection to them and their relationship. On the other hand, if you do know them, this is a wonderful expansion of their history. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

(LJ post for easier commenting | DW, ditto)

[kemetic-dreams]

In societies that hadn't yet developed writing, were people aware that handedness was a thing?

There are no societies that have never developed writing.It is myth, another Eurocentric myth.Writing is so much more than using letters. You can convey meaning graphically or sculpturally. New Page 1 This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them. http://www.zyama.com/woyo/ The Woyo possess a form of writing that has not yet been studied. A special application of this writing occurs in their “proverb covers,” the lids of their realistically carved wooden “storied pots,” which serve as an ingenious means of communication between husband and wife.

Why do many people say sub-Saharan never had any form of writing when all their languages have a word meaning to write?

For two main reasons. Reason # 1 : Because there is a difference between a writing system and a proto-writing system. You can inscribe meaning through a proto-writing system.Proto Writing SystemWhile going deep underground to make cave paintings of animals, early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents. Genevieve Von Petzinger has spent years cataloguing these symbols (many already documented) in Europe, visiting 52 caves in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The symbols range from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, known as tectiforms.

Reason # 2 : Many Africans refused to reveal their writing systems to European colonialists.

They kept them as secrets. Many of these scripts are being discovered lately. In addition, many of our writing systems have not yet been studied by Westerners like the storied pots used as a means of communication between husband and wife among the Woyo and Ngoyo, the proverb covers.

Many Westerners fail to understand that you can write or inscribe meaning without letters. Many of our scripts do not use letters but geometric forms like Mandombe, an alphasyllabary.

The Kongo learn to read, draw, write and count in initiation schools who also taught technology and medicine. There were four of them: Lemba, Kimpasi, Kimba and Ndembo. They were suppressed by the Portuguese and later the Belgians. They went underground.

Kongo writing system exists in many forms, the oldest of which are:

The "pictographic" form, which transcribes directly through the signs the sounds (verbal forms) of the language.

The phonographic form: The signs have kept the same phonetic value or a value very close to the graphic form hat inspired them. Used for historical archives some of which are maintained between the museums of Tervuren, Rotterdam and the Vatican.

The "logographic" / figurative form: signs are here associated with proverbs and understandable only in the context of the culture that produced them. This is the form that produces for example "proverb pot covers", "initiatory vases and masks" etc.

Amazon.com: Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign (9781439908167): Martinez-Ruiz, Barbaro: Books

he author argues “that multiple, varied communication tools, including written symbols, religious objects, oral traditions, and body language, have consistently been integrated by the Bakongo into structured systems of graphic writing” (p. 1). The complex has deep historical roots, “the earliest evidence” for which “is found in multiple archaeological sites around the border between Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area that covers close to two hundred kilometers”Wendy Laura BelcherEarly African Literature: An Anthology of Written Texts from 3000 BCE to 1900 CEContrary to the general perception, the African literatures written before the twentieth century are substantial. Whatever limits can be imagined—in terms of geography, genre, language, audience, era—these literatures exceed them. Before the twentieth century, Africans wrote not just in Europe, but also on the African continent; they wrote not just in European languages, but in African languages; they wrote not just for European consumption, but for their own consumption; they wrote not just in northern Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa; they wrote not just orally, but textually; they wrote not just historical or religious texts, but poetry and epic and autobiography; and they wrote not just in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth century and long, long before.Yet, the general public and even scholars of African literature are often unaware of these early literatures, believing that African literature starts in the late 1950s as the result of colonization. In this view, Africa is a savage Caliban who is introduced to writing by a European Prospero and Things Fall Apart is his first articulation. Westerns assume that whatever writing happened to be done on the continent was not done by Africans or in African languages and scripts until very recently. This lack of awareness of three thousand years of African writing is particularly surprising given the legions of pre-twentieth-century African texts that historians have uncovered and studied in the past fifty years. While historians labor to overturn long-held misconceptions about Africa as a place without history, literary critics have done little to overturn misconceptions of Africa as a place without literature. The extraordinarily rich trove of pre-twentieth century African continental literatures has yet to be written about in any depth by Euro-American literary critics. Certainly, no book addresses their work at length and almost no literary essays published outside of Africa address the continental works.African literature written over the last millennia remains largely invisible for several significant reasons. One, many of the texts written more than two hundred years ago have not survived, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars know they existed because travelers reported on them and extant texts make reference to now lost texts. Two, many were never published as print books and of those few manuscripts that were, most were published in obscure places. Three, very few of the texts written in an African language have been translated into any European language. For instance, the hundreds of Ethiopian indigenous texts remain obscure because only a handful have been translated into English. Indeed, in the dramatic cases of texts written in Meroitic or Libyco-Berber, the texts cannot be translated as the language and script is no longer understood. One of the great challenges of the twenty-first century will be archiving and translating the vast libraries of East and West Africa. Fourth, many continue to see sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa as geographic and literary domains separated by a gulf, rather than, as historians and archeologists continue to prove, having deep links to each other. As the origin of the human species, Africa is home to the most diverse peoples of any continent, one of its great strengths. That some of these Africans are lighter-skinned than others is an irrelevancy. All those born on the African continent, and whose forbearers were born on the

continent, are Africans and have contributed to its vibrancy. The obsession with the race or region of African authors has resulting in obscuring the literature of the continent and prevented productive comparative work.This lack of knowledge about early African literature torques the study of modern African literature. Analyses of contemporary writing in the United States, Britain, or Europe often take into account a centuries-old literary tradition rooted in different but related forms and themes. But research on African literature today tends to ignore the continent’s long literary history, with most scholars today focusing on African writing in European languages produced since 1950. For example, few situate later Nigerian experiments in English like Tutola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Iweala’s Beast of No Nation in relation to the English of earlier West African texts, such as the eighteenth-century diary of Antera Duke, an Efik slave-trading chief in what is now Nigeria. Likewise, few lay Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart alongside the work of Nigerian authors of the nineteenth century who were also concerned about the interaction of Christianity and local beliefs—including Egba clergyman Joseph Wright (1839), the famous Yoruba Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1837), and the Hausa writer Madugu Mohamman Mai Gashin Baki . Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s work on the Queen of Sheba is not considered in the context of the thirteenth-century Ethiopian text about her, Kebra Nagast.Selection of TextsWhatever the reasons that these literatures do not get the attention they deserve, the time is well past to start giving them that attention. This book therefore seeks to introduce these literatures and provide excerpts from a few. Influenced by recent trends in literary theory, particularly new historicism, I have selected texts using broad definitions of the basic categories. By “written text,” I mean anything inscribed by human hand or machine on any surface—whether parchment, paper, or stone—that uses a system of signs (symbolic or orthographic) that can be read by many members of a particular cultural group. By “Africa,” I mean the entire African continent and the peoples who originated there. By “African author,” I mean anyone born on the African continent to someone born on the African continent. I do not exclude authors on the basis of race, although I do note the author’s national or ethnic background. In the case of North Africa, I have been more exclusionary, focusing on African texts by those whose families were not originally from Europe or the Middle East. Thus, I have not included North African Roman or Greek authors. Since African diasporic literature written in the Americas has been collected and published frequently elsewhere, I do not include African diasporic authors unless they were born on the African continent. By “literature,” I mean any original text with elevated language or an active “I”, but specifically poetry, epic, romance, hymns, fictional narrative, epistles and belles letters, personal manifestos or philosophy, diaries, biography, and autobiography. Although many African translations vary significantly from their Arabic or Greek originals, I have not included any translations of texts written outside of Africa. By “written African literature,” I mean a text composed and written down in any language by an African author (or, in some rare cases, his or her amanuensis). I do not exclude texts written in European languages. I do exclude oral texts—although Africa has always had a vast unwritten literature in the oral forms of drama, epic, and poetry, that is not the subject of this book. A desideratum remains studying oral and written African literature together; I hope this book will aid that process.Our exclusion of certain authors or texts is never an argument about their importance or salience, but only due to such authors and texts finding adequate representation elsewhere. Thus, I do not generally include texts written by Europeans in Africa, although many

Europeans who lived on the African continent for long periods had imbibed local thought and can be seen as part of a larger African literature. Such authors are generally represented well in travel anthologies.Quite frequently, texts are omitted because no English translation is available, no translation is possible, or all copies of the text have been lost. It is quite clear that for every extant pre-twentieth century African text, a thousand others did exist but were destroyed by the elements or conquest.Categories of TextsIn practice, this means that four general categories of written African literature are represented in this text. A prominent category of early written African literature is that written by Africans outside of Africa, in particular those who spent the majority of their lives in Europe or the Americas and were trained in Western educational systems. This includes not only the literature written by the millions of Africans taken to the new world as slaves, but also that written by the hundreds of African youths whom Europeans sent from the continent every year to study in England, France, Portugal, Italy, Holland and Germany from the 1400s on. While the genre of the slave narrative has been widely explored by literary scholars, this later type of the writing done by free Africans in Europe has received less attention, perhaps because much of it was not written in English. For instance, a rich but almost entirely unexplored body of early written African literature is African scholarship in Latin for European universities. I suspect that many discoveries of African literature will be made as more material from European universities is digitalized and the African authorship of some of these theses becomes known. Likewise for early written African literature in Portuguese.Another category of early written African literature is texts written by Africans on the African continent in Arabic. These include medieval inscriptions in Arabic from eleventh-century gravestones in Mali; letters written by the Emperor of Morocco in the 1600s to various European heads of state; Tarikh el-Fettach, a fifteenth-century manuscript about Jews in Tendirma, near Timbuktu; Tarikh es-Soudan, a seventeenth-century manuscript written by Abd-al-Rahman al Sadi of Timbuktu about the lives and wars of the kings of Mali in the 1200s, Kitab Ghanja, a chronicle from the 1700s in modern Ghana, and so on. Various archival projects in West and East Africa are bringing to light even more African manuscripts dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, a tendency to see Arabic as a language foreign to the African continent, despite being in use there for over a thousand years, leads to dismissing Arabic African literature as not indigenous. This would be tantamount to dismissing British literature as Italian because of the Roman invasion 2000 years ago. Misconceptions of Africa as a savage, untouched paradise do not square with the reality of Africa’s millennia of trading relationships with non-Africans and its long traditions of Islam and Christianity.The final category of early written African literature is that written by Africans on the African continent in African languages, sometimes in African scripts. The African languages with the largest bodies of extant texts are Gəˁəz, Kiswahili, Hausa, Amharic, and Somali [more].We do not want to suggest that these categories cannot be fruitfully read together. For instance, if I look at some of the early writing by just one ethnic group in West Africa over just one century I find it occurring in several languages and over several continents. There were at least half-a-dozen eighteenth-century Akan writers (Gonja Chronicles?) whose manuscripts have survived. These texts by these Akan authors must be seen as the result of a particular African discursive system, not just as tainted by the European languages in which they were sometimes written. All these men were shaped by the same African culture and their texts should be read in light of each other.African ScriptsAs the

table shows, ancient Africa had many indigenous scripts, including hieroglyphs and hieratic, both developed in Egypt around five thousand years ago to represent the ancient Egyptian language. Egyptians then invented Demotic, which was related to Hieratic, and Coptic, which was related to Greek and used to represent an African language. Nubians used all the Egyptian scripts, but also invented their own, Meroitic, to represent the African languages of Meroitic and Old Nubian. Meanwhile in North Africa and the Sahel, Africans invented the Libyco-Berber scripts to represent a variety of Berber languages, while East Africans invented Ethiopic (or Gəˁəz) to represent the African language of Gəˁəz. In the medieval period, Africans in East, West, and North Africa used the Arabic script, but in the early modern period, Africans invented Ajami, which is related to the Arabic script, for their East and West African languages. It is only in the twentieth century that the Roman alphabet came to be used widely in Africa. By the late eighteenth century, Africans also invented the secret ideographic writing system of Nsibidi. That Nsibidi was “discovered” by Europeans only in the twentieth century suggests that other unknown African scripts may have been used during the early modern period. It is also worthwhile to mention Adinkra, a pictographic script invented by 1817 in what is now Ghana, and Vai, an alphabet invented in Liberia in the 1830s. In the twentieth century, Africans invented over a dozen scripts, but only a few are still used.Last but not least, many Africans adopted or adapted writing systems created by Europeans or Arabs.The Kongo KingdomThe Kongo Kingdom: The Origins, Dynamics and Cosmopolitan ...Koen Bostoen, ‎Inge Brinkman -2018Literary Practices in the Kongo RegionAfrica has been considered ‘the oral continent’ par excellence (e.g. Derive 2008). Africa’s assumed orality has been related to matters ranging from the continuing relevance of proverbs, griots, and myths of origin to the appropriation of the mobile phone. This stereotype has been qualified already (Finnegan 2007), but especially for Africa’s pre- colonial past, studies of the spread of paper, books, and literacy are few and far between. Yet, books have been important in the precolonial history of various regions in Africa – Ethiopia, the Swahili coast, many West- African cultures, and also the Kongo kingdom.Soon after contact between Portugal and Kongo was established in 1482 there is evidence of the presence of books in the Kongo kingdom as the King of Portugal sent his colleague ‘everything that is necessary for a church’, crosses, organs, cruets, and also ‘many books’ (Brásio 1952 : 71). On other occasions as well, books were sent from Portugal to Kongo: a list of items sent in 1512 refers to ‘the books that are in the treasury to be packed and delivered to Álvaro Lopez, trained as a linguist’ (Br á sio 1952 : 252). Reportedly two German printers were also sent over, but they soon returned, as ‘the land was not healthy for Germans’ (Brásio 1954: 19).The Kongo nobility learnt to read and write in Portuguese and the upper layer of society studied Portuguese books related to Christianity .Apart from the letters written by King Afonso I to his Portuguese colleague (Brásio 1952 ; Jadin and Dicorato 1974 ), he himself was said to do ‘ … nothing but study and many times he falls asleep over the books, and many times he forgets to eat and drink for talking about the things of our Lord, and he is so absorbed by the things of the scripture that he even forgets himself’ (Br á sio 1952 : 361).There may be a hagiographic tendency in this letter, as it was sent by the king’s vicar to the Portuguese king. It is clear, however, that the king and his entourage were eager to become literate, and to put the new skills to use: the king took to writing letters and reading books. The quote falls within the parameters of classic studies on the acquisition of literacy, in which reading is viewed as a private and individual experience (Ong 1982). Other people in the Kongo

kingdom may also have read books, letters, and other materials on a private and individual basis. At the same time, ‘the book’ may not have been limited to this.By far most books concerned Christian literature, although Afonso I also studied the entire book of Portuguese law, after requesting the Portuguese king for a copy, as the judge in Kongo told him it was no longer in his possession, he only having books in Latin (Brásio 1952: 356, 374– 5). This hints at private ownership of books: they were in individual possession and could only be borrowed with the owner’s consent. Another reference of non- Christian character is the letter by the Portuguese king that told Afonso I to keep a record book as a form of administration: ‘As in your kingdom there is reading and writing, you must adopt the manner of all Christian kings.To have account books and inscribe all the taxes and the names of the nobles’(Br á sio 1952 : 530). Yet Christian literature, including the Bible, hymn books, mass books, and catechisms, constitute the most frequently mentioned books in the Kongo kingdom. Apart from the spiritual books meant to inspire the Christian congregation in the Kongo kingdom, church life was also registered in books. Thus each baptism was noted in a book, as described by Dionigi Carli when he fell ill in 1668 in the province of Mbamba and still baptized ten to twelve children per day from his sickbed: ‘two blacks support me under the shoulders, another holds the book, and a third the baptistery’(du Cheyron d’Abzac 2006 : 134). Similarly, each matrimony was written down in a book (Jadin 1970: 437). There were books that listed all confessions made (Zucchelli 1712 : 175) and the names of people becoming knights in the military Order of Christ were listed in liuros da matricula (registration books) (Brásio 1955a : 553).Books in Kikongo were clearly in demand: the Spanish Capuchin Antonio de Teruel requested the printing of as many as seven books in Kikongo: ‘a manual for the people of Congo’, a catechism , a book of sermons and calendar ‘following their customs’, a book of feast days for the Virgin, a book of prayers for lay congregations, a ‘vocabulary in four languages, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Congolese’, and finally a ‘grammar and syntax to learn the language easily’ (Saccardo 1982 : 378; Thornton 2011d ). Books in other regional languages also became available: a first catechism in Kimbundu was printed in 1642 (Tavares and Santos 2002: 477).Kongo people integrated the notion of ‘books’ into their history, even if books remained rare and costly. Books were indeed precious items in the Kongo kingdom and highly valued. A document written by the end of the sixteenth century, found in the archives of the Vatican, stated: ‘Nearly all of them learn how to read so as to know how to recite the Divine Office; they would sell all they have to buy a manuscript or a book and if they have one, they always carry it by hand with their rosary which they say often and with devotion’ (Cuvelier and Jadin 1954: 131).Early references mostly concern the kingdom’s capital, Mbanza Kongo. Numerous references indicate the spread of literacy throughout the kingdom: Afonso I and his successors implemented an educational system for the nobility, largely led by the intellectual elite of the already mentioned mestres. Letter writing and literacy –usually in Portuguese – became important political instruments.Paper, ink, stamps with inscriptions, written certificates and permits, etc. were used in the administration of the church and of the court. Letters were exchanged between the capital and the provinces to ensure communication among the political- intellectual elite (Hilton 1985: 79– 80). In other words, literacy came to play a role in the process of centralization of the kingdom: cohesion in the kingdom was partly established through the Christian church, education, and the spread of literacy.Writing and literacy spread not only through the Kongo kingdom. After Luanda had been founded in 1575, Angola also formed a centre from where literacy spread,

as testified by reports of pombeiro traders and Portuguese travellers (Tavares and Santos 2002: 475, 499). While some of the letters from and to the various regions of the kingdom can be found in Brásio’s volumes, the spread of books is more difficult to trace. Even so, the presence of books is attested to. Thus Queen Njinga of neighbouring Matamba brought ‘crosses, medals, rosaries, and spiritual books’ taken by her troops from the battlefield in the 1640s to Christian prisoners of war (de Castro and du Cheyron d’Abzac 2010 : 112).In the regions further north, in the polities of Kikongo , Ngoyo, and Loango , documents say very little about books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was only with the upcoming overseas trade relations in the later seventeenth century that books came to play a more central role in these more northern regions. The broker states that were based on trade relations came to relate to books in a very different manner from the earlier Kongo Christian book tradition. Literacy was here related to trade: logbooks, inventories, account books, and contracts This later ‘bookness’ in the wider Kikongo- speaking regions took various, novel directions, not necessarily coinciding with European ideas about a book. Many of these belonged to non- syntactical, non- textual uses of writing (Goody 1986: 54).While the earlier Christian book traditions in the Kongo kingdom had not astonished European visitors, in the later eighteenth century and nineteenth century, Europeans often mocked local book- related practices. Thus a German traveller ridiculed not only the material state of a book that the sons of the Kongo king showed him, writing that it concerned ‘the rudiments of a book, lacking the beginning, the end as well as the title’, and the fact that they ‘of course’ could not read it, he also referred ironically to one of the noblemen’s ‘glassless glasses that could find no resting point on his broad nose’ (Bastian 1859 : 119– 21; see also Tavares and Santos 2002 : 490, giving an example of the Portuguese travellers Capelo and Ivens). The possession of ‘glassless glasses’ points to the notion that the idea of reading and writing could be appreciated beyond the process of creating or deciphering texts.The meaning of the word ‘book’ in the northern regions came to include anything written: a ticket, a letter, a contract, a book, accounts, etc. ‘With mukanda the Fiote indicate everything that is written or printed, especially letters and the notes that one hands them for hiring contracts, with specification of the negotiated payment’ (Güssfeldt et al. 1888: part 1 : 153). Trade on the coast between the Congo River and Ambriz took the following procedure: ‘As each bag of coffee (or other produce) is weighed and settled for, the buyer writes the number of “longs” that has been agreed upon on a small piece of paper called by the natives “Mucanda”, or, by those who speak English, a “book”; the buyer continues his weighing and purchasing, and the “books” are taken by the natives to the store’ (Monteiro 1875 : 107– 8).The usage of such ‘books’ or mikanda (plural of mukanda) was widespread, according to Julius Falkenstein: ‘A Mukanda was issued for everything thinkable’ (Güssfeldt et al. 1888: part 2 : 18).In some cases, the word mukanda shifted and came to mean ‘letter’ exclusively, while for book another term was used, in nearly all cases buku (cf. infra). There was a shift from largely Christian, European- based ways of experiencing books in the Kongo kingdom especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to new, local meanings in the realm of trade, with a nodal point in the coastal regions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This broad spectrum on books and book- related practices can be related to linguistic evidence from the Kikongo Language ClusterBooks entered the region through various domains: Christianity, trade and political administration. The history of the translation of book- related concepts will be considered in connection with the spread and employment of books in the

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Proto Writing System Proto Writing System: report on research being carried out on Ice Age symbols and the possible link to a proto-writing system. http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/news/rock_art.php?id=Proto-Writing-System

While going deep underground to make cave paintings of animals, early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents. Genevieve Von Petzinger has spent years cataloguing these symbols (many already documented) in Europe, visiting 52 caves in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The symbols range from dots, lines, triangles, squares and zigzags to more complex forms like ladder shapes, known as tectiforms.

[watercolourferns]

thanks for sharing it @kobresias . We loved it!

[aura-loveshine]

Ted Talk - Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.

[tordenvejr]

What books would be in your dream library

the best question! women who run with the wolves by clarissa pinkola estes, a language older than time by derrick jensen, the feminine mystique by betty friedan, the great secret of mind by tulku pema rigtsal, teutonic myth and legend by donald a mackenzie, the origin of humanness in the biology of love by humberto maturana romesín, coyote medicine by lewis mehl-madrona, the sign and the seal by graham hancock, entangled minds: extrasensory experiences in a quantum reality by dean radin, the templar revelation by lynn picknett and clive prince, myths and symbols: aboriginal religions in america by stephen d. peet, a handbook of symbols in christian art by gertrude grace sill, ancient pagan and modern christian symbolism by thoman inman john newton, mythos by stephen fry, the first signs by genevieve von petzinger, the sirius mystery by robert k g temple, symbolism by michael gibson, sacred symbols by lydia hess, arthurian myth and legend by mike dixon kennedy, in the beginning: creation stories by virginia hamilton, celtic cosmology and the otherworld by sharon paice macleod, sacred symbols to the dogon by laird scranton, symbolism of the biblical world by othmar keel, shatki woman: feeling our fire and healing our world by vicki noble, dragons and dynasties by yuan ke, tree wisdom by jacqueline memory paterson, inkheart by cornelia funke it has always been dear to my heart. everything of mary oliver, albert camus, rumi, anaïs nin, toni morrison, dolores cannon, vadim zealand, edgar cayce, nikola tesla, thich nhat hanh, erich von däniken, da vinci, simon sinek, carl sagan, yuval noah harari, howard bloom, paulo coelho, yung pueblo, eckhart tolle, tolkien, c. s. lewis. and everything on atlantis (and other lost civilizations), the story of atlantis and the lost lemuria by w. scott elliot, the lost empire of atlantis by gavin menzies, atlantis the antediluvian world by ignatius donnelly. would also love documents like the dead sea scroll, the popol vuh, the oera linda book, the grand grimoire the red dragon by tarl warwick 🧡🛶

[jkottke]

44,000 Year-Old Cave Painting in Indonesia Is World's Oldest Figurative Art

A team of archaeologists has found a massive painting in a cave in Indonesia that uranium dating analysis shows to be around 43,900 years old, which they say is "currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world".

Cave painting was assumed to have originated in Europe, but these Indonesian paintings are thousands of years older. From an NPR piece on the discovery:

Genevieve von Petzinger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria, says the discoveries in her field are happening very quickly, thanks to newer technology such as the technique used to date the hunting scene. "I think the overall theme here really is that we've vastly underestimated the capacity of our ancestors," she says.

She says the oldest cave paintings in Europe and Asia have common elements. And she thinks that even older paintings will eventually be found in the place where both groups originated from.

"Personally, I think that our ancestors already knew how to do art before they left Africa," von Petzinger says.

Von Petzinger is the scientist behind one of the most intriguing things I learned this year, that the Stone Age symbols found in caves all over the world may be part of a single prehistoric writing system.

[spaceintruderdetector]

Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe ?

Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.

Paleoanthropology

[child-of-hurin]

In the early 1960s, influential researcher André Leroi-Gourhan proposed a grand theory to explain most, if not all, of the art. He divided the imagery, including the signs, into a unified binary system that classified everything at a given site as being either male or female. For Leroi-Gourhan, animal species such as horses represented the masculine, while bison had a feminine aspect; the signs were also divided into male (linear and angled) and female (rounded or curved) categories. This theory was widely accepted, and for the next three decades or so, most studies that included signs tended to approach them with this preconceived notion in mind. In general, though, researchers both past and present have felt that the abstract nature of the geometric signs made it difficult, if not impossible, to study them properly, resulting in a lack of knowledge about this intriguing type of imagery. (....) On top of the spatial organization, this famous French researcher came to believe that there was also a sexual division to the imagery, with some animals or signs representing the masculine aspect, while others represented the feminine. As I mentioned earlier, he interpreted bison as being female and horses as being male, and when they appeared together, which happened quite often, he saw this as the two aspects achieving equilibrium. All the images were divided up this way, but the category where it probably had the most impact was in the geometric signs. Overnight they went from having a broad range of interpretations to all being considered either male or female signs, with many of them having a sexual interpretation. Linear and barbed signs were classified as male, owing to their supposed phallic resemblance, and all the rounded and triangular signs were identified as being female and collectively came to be known as “vulvas.” The identification of certain individual signs as vulvas, or, more discreetly, as “female fertility symbols,” has an even longer history. Early rock art researcher Henri Breuil first started identifying some of the circular or triangular imagery as such, but it was Leroi-Gourhan’s sweeping classification system that really took off (these were the days of the Sexual Revolution, after all). Many other researchers from that time also adopted this description, and before you knew it, circles, half circles, ovals, open-angle signs, and triangles were all being lumped into this category. This made my life pretty challenging when I first started building profiles for each of the rock art sites in my database, because I would regularly run into site descriptions which listed off image inventories somewhat like this: three bison, one possible horse, two red deer, and six vulvas.

- The First Signs, Genevieve von Petzinger

[kgdrendel]

Reading the Writing on the Cave Wall

Reading the Writing on the Cave Wall

  Genevieve Von Petzinger speaks at TED Fellows Retreat 2015, August 26-30, 2015, Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Genevieve von Petzinger, a paleoanthropologist, has a TED talk that is garnering some attention. She speaks on her findings from the exploration of art and geometric signs in caves around Europe. Most people have long known about the cave…