From: "Ethel Jean (Kowan) Saltz" <macnietspingal AT airmail.net>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] comparative historical linguistics was Re:
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:31:44 -0500
About "mother's knee'. That stikes home when I took diction in the drama
department for voice music. I complained that my whole life everyone said I
talk like a New Yorker, even stangers in grocery stores. I was born in
Washington, D.C. My mom came to D.C. at the age of 14 from East Bronx. It
actually is used negatively. At American University as a Freshman the prof
the second semester in "speech" gave me a B instead of an "A" because I
didn't lose my Brooklyn accent. This caused me to lose my interest-fee loan
from a Jewish organization. 1947.
Well in the 21st century the diction prof said simply "blame your mother".
She said she has trained herself to use appropriate dialects but she prefers
her original "mother's knee" one.
So the fact that Hebrew ceased to be used orally by Hebrew moms sure makes
sense to me. The Babylonian and the Greek Hebrews. That really makes the
evolution from picture language to script significant in getting the feel of
ordinary communications in Mosaic times. Such communications data not
available to the Hebrews in Babylonia and Greece/Egypt but is available to
us today. That's because of that wonderful science called archeology.
I decided to see when archeology began. I thought I would share for those
list members who don't have time to look things up. Chronology of
scientific methods is important IMNSHO:)
Encyc Britannica DVD
History of archaeology
No doubt there have always been people who were interested in the material
remains of the past, but archaeology as a discipline has its earliest
origins in 15th- and 16th-century Europe, when the Renaissance Humanists
looked back upon the glories of Greece and Rome. Popes, cardinals, and
noblemen in Italy in the 16th century began to collect antiquities and to
sponsor excavations to find more works of ancient art. These collectors were
imitated by others in northern Europe who were similarly interested in
antique culture. All this activity, however, was still not archaeology in
the strict sense. It was more like what would be called art collecting
today.
The Mediterranean and the Middle East
Archaeology proper began with an interest in the Greeks and Romans and first
developed in 18th-century Italy with the excavations of the Roman cities of
Pompeii and Herculaneum. Classical archaeology was established on a more
scientific basis by the work of Heinrich Schliemann, who investigated the
origins of Greek civilization at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s; of M.A.
Biliotti at Rhodes in this same period; of the German Archaeological
Institute under Ernst Curtius at Olympia from 1875 to 1881; and of Alexander
Conze at Samothrace in 1873 and 1875. Conze was the first person to include
photographs in the publication of his report. Schliemann had intended to dig
in Crete but did not do so, and it was left to Arthur Evans to begin work at
Knossos in 1900 and to discover the Minoan civilization, ancestor of
classical Greece.
Egyptian archaeology began with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. He
brought with him scholars who set to work recording the archaeological
remains of the country. The results of their work were published in the
Description de l'Égypte (1808–25). As a result of discoveries made by this
expedition, Jean-François Champollion was able to decipher ancient Egyptian
writing for the first time in 1822. This decipherment, which enabled
scholars to read the numerous writings left by the Egyptians, was the first
great step forward in Egyptian archaeology. The demand for Egyptian
antiquities led to organized tomb robbing by men such as Giovanni Battista
Belzoni. A new era in systematic and controlled archaeological research
began with the Frenchman Auguste Mariette, who also founded the Egyptian
Museum at Cairo. The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who began work
in Egypt in 1880, made great discoveries there and in Palestine during his
long lifetime. Petrie developed a systematic method of excavation, the
principles of which he summarized in Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904).
It was left to Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon to make the most spectacular
discovery in Egyptian archaeology, that of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.
Mesopotamian archaeology also began with hectic digging into mounds in the
hopes of finding treasure and works of art, but gradually these gave way in
the 1840s to planned digs such as those of the Frenchman Paul-Émile Botta at
Nineveh and Khorsabad, and the Englishman Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud,
Kuyunjik, Nabi Yunus, and other sites. Layard's popular account of his
excavations, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849), became the earliest and one of
the most successful archaeological best-sellers. In 1846 Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson became the first man to decipher the Mesopotamian cuneiform
writing. Toward the end of the 19th century, systematic excavation revealed
a previously unknown people, the Sumerians, who had lived in Mesopotamia
before the Babylonians and Assyrians. The most impressive Sumerian
excavation was that of the Royal Tombs at Ur by Leonard Woolley in 1926.
---
Ethel Jean (Kowan) Saltz Beltsville MD
Re: [b-hebrew] comparative historical linguistics was Re:,
Ethel Jean (Kowan) Saltz, 11/23/2006