Tag: Grammar

Digitally Enhanced Images of New Pyramid Discovery Reveal Ancient Smurf

We all know that a surely proud couple from a village populated by irreducible Gauls still resisting the Roman invaders in 50BC gave birth to Asterix. But where do the Smurfs smurf from? Are they all Peyo’s imagination, or did a tribe of small, little blue men ever exist? One is inclined to think that those cute creatures, dated to the early Spiroe Age, are just a silly invention of a genius comic book writer. Or are they? Their primitive grammar seems to suggest a more ancient origin, and new evidence recently surfaced that Smurfs started smurfing back in ancient times.

The discovery of a 1,400 year-old pyramid in Peru seems to imply that the ancient Moche culture already smurfed blue-coloured antropomorph creatures as decoration on their walls. Digitally enhanced images of the mural found in the newly excavated pyramid suggest Moche artists drew rudimentary smurfs onto their buildings walls. The storyline might not have fully evolved, but on this computer enhanced image, the Smurf is definitely there.

digitally enhanced image of a mural find at the pyramid site

Researchers aren’t quite sure yet what this early depiction of the ‘Schtroumphs’ (that’s what the indigenous call them) means, and why the Smurf normally considered peaceful is carrying something that looks like a club. Scholars are still looking for evidence of female Smurfs, in comic book legend referenced as ‘Smurfettes’.

Its possible they were sacrificed but we dont know.

The Moche settlement does seem to have many features in common with the Smurfs, not at least their financial system. The researchers said it is possible that the settlement without city walls or any defence system was ruled by what might have been considered lords (Papa Smurf) or a corporation of say co-operative but high status practitioners.

The Spiroe-era Smurfs are famous for their sense of community, a form of cooperation without currency, where each Smurf contributes to Smurf society as he or she can.

Mystery still enshrouds the disappearance of the Smurf civilisation from record until their re-appearance in ‘Johan et Pirlouit’ in 1958. Legend has it they lived in a part of the world called ‘Le Pays Maudit’ (the cursed land), which could only be reached by using magic or travelling through dense forests and a high mountain range, quite similar as to the environment in Peru. In an interview with Owen, Professor Swenson of the University of Toronto excavation team smurfed: Its possible they were sacrificed but we dont know.

Disclaimer: This is obviously, I hope a parody story but the ‘Smurf’ is original. At least, the non-digitally enhanced image. But the Moche warrior just looked so much like a smurf, we had to see what happened if we added a little colour. We’re hoping someone will smurf us ancient graffiti of Gargamel next! 😉

Computer Helps Decode Harappan Grammar

Some scholars consider the ancient Harappan pictograms of the Indus Valley in South Asia to be random. Not so, says Rajesh Rao of the University of Washington. He calculated the conditional entropy – a measure of randomness – of the script and found that it is most likely a language. Next, Rao will analyze the texts structure using simple statistical software.

The ancient twin cities of the Indus Valley – Harappa and Mohenjo-daro – are part of one of the oldest civilizations known to man. They were huge metropolises holding over 30,000 people each. A series of symbols dating to around 2,500 BC has also been found in the area, yet historians are still unable to draw any meaning from them which could be construed as symbolic of an alphabet in the area.

Recent evidence suggests that the fertile Indus River basin could have been home to an empire larger and older than its more famous contemporaries in the Middle East, and thus be one of the cradles of civilisation. Up to now excavations in the Indus River Valley have provided us with roughly 5,000 seals, tablets and amulets, filled with about 500 different symbols, all created somewhere between 2600 and 1900 BC. But what do these tell us?

Rao imagines he could write in “flawless Harappan”, even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences might mean.

Despite numerous attempts to decipher the symbols – known as Harappan script – a full translation has long eluded scientists. Some archaeologists think to have found paralles with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia; others speculate an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the birdmen glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean at Easter Island.

A 2004 paper even suggested that the Indus Valley people were functionally illiterate and the Harappan symbols were political or religious symbols rather than writing.

To start the search for what meaning the text might hold, American and Indian mathematicians and computer scientists input the symbols into a computer program and then ran a statistical analysis of the symbols and where they appear in the texts. Time.com explains:

The group examined hundreds of Harappan texts and tested their structure against other known languages using a computer program. Every language, they suggest, possesses what is known as “conditional entropy”: the degree of randomness in a given sequence. In English, for example, the letter “t” can be found preceding a whole variety of other letters, but instances of “tx” or “tz” are far more infrequent than “th” or “ta.” “A written language comes about through this mix of built-in rules and flexible variables,” says Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked on the study. Quantifying this principle through computer probability tests, they determined the Harappan script had a similar measure of conditional entropy to other writing systems, including English, Sanskrit and Sumerian. If it mathematically looked and acted like writing, they concluded, then surely it is writing.

Voynich Manuscript - Wikipedia Commons This is just the beginning of ‘deciphering’ the Harappan symbols. The international team hopes to compose a grammar of Indus signs, as they’ve already found that certain placements of characters in the text to be more likely: a “fish” sign most frequently appeared in the middle of a sequence, a U-shaped “jar” sign toward the end.

There are some who say the Indus Valley script can never be deciphered without a bilingual text like the Rosetta Stone or really long texts, but Rao is optimistic that given a few more years, the team may be able to at least narrow down the language family of the script by using computer analysis to gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying grammar.

With the help of the software, Rajesh Rao, associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington imagines he could write in “flawless Harappan” – even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences might mean.

Marcelo Montemurro, a scientist at the University of Manchester now wants to test the software on the up to know undecipherable medieval text known as the Voynich manuscript: “The text is not long, but these methods can be applied so we can at least obtain a list of special words that would presumably convey the overall meaning of the texts.”

With – amongst others – Proto-Elamite, Linear-A and Olmec still to go, the team won’t run out of Ancient Scripts to decipher anywhere soon! Luckily computing power gives modern-day scientists a huge advantage over their predecessors: not only for ‘breaking the code’ on mysterious ancient languages, but also in making documents thought long-time lost readable again.

How the Brooklyn Museum’s male mummies were misdiagnosed as female

When recently the mummy formerly known as ‘Lady Hor’ underwent a scan, researchers were surprised to find that it should have been ‘Sir Hor’ from the start. Yet, this case of ‘gender confusion’ is not a unique one. The same happened to ‘The Daughter of Amunkhau’ – actually a son – from the Birmingham Museum Collection and according to curator Edward Bleiberg on the Brooklyn Museum’s blog, no less than three of the five male mummies from that museum – including Lady Hor – that were CT-scanned in the last eighteen months were at one time thought to be women. How could such mistakes in identification of the mummies be made? Curator Edward Bleiberg blames ‘bad grammar, bad x-rays, and bad judgment‘:

Because of her size, ‘Lady Hor’ was not that easy to manoeuvre in place for her CT-scan. In the end, she turns out to be a big boy. Video: Brooklyn Museum on Flickr

Bad Grammar for Demetris: “Before Demetris became a mummy, he lived in the first century AD when many Egyptians had Greek names, the result of Alexander the Greats conquest in the 4th century BC Demetris was thought to be a woman because his name – written on his linen wrappings – ended in is, a feminine grammatical ending in classical Greek. Scholars early in the twentieth century thought that a man could only be named Demetrius. One early curator commented that Demetris portrait represented a particularly homely woman.” (Learn more about earlier findings on Demetris’ life and death on the Brooklyn Museum’s blog.)
Bad X-rays for Thorthirdes: “Thothirdes masculinity was questioned because of bad x-rays. In spite of the beard of Osiris on his coffin, in spite of his red face – which is a trait traditionally associated with portrayals of Egyptian men – an x-ray very early in the 20th century suggested to an early curator that he was clearly female. The most recent CT-scan showed, on the contrary, that Thothirdes is unquestionably anatomically male. This is a particular relief since it means that his beard and red face make better sense.”
Bad Judgement for Lady Hor: “She was identified as female because of her lovely face, clearly feminine in the judgement of an early curator. Again the face was red, but the lack of a beard on the cartonnage coffin and the faces delicacy was taken as proof that Hor was a woman. The CT-scan, however, left no doubt that he was a man. Sometimes judgement alone is too subjective to make this determination.”

I assume the staff at the Brooklyn Museum‘s Egyptology department can only be glad this was cleared out once and for all through ‘Mummy CSI’.

Yet these are probably not the most famous cases of ‘mistaken mummy identity’ ever. The most obvious one – one I was guilty of myself – you can watch happen in the British Museum daily. If you go stand next to the mummy of ‘Cleopatra of Thebes’ and you’d be surprised how many tourists shout out: “Look, it’s Cleopatra!” and “Oh my -insert deity depending on religion-, she was only 17?!” Maybe there, placing a big sign saying “This is not Marcus Antonius’ Cleopatra!” could be advised? At leat it would have saved me the embarrassment of stating ‘Why is Dr. Zahi still looking for Cleopatra if it’s obvious the British Museum has her and is – also obvious – not planning to hand her over?’ *blush*