ACCOUNTS FROM ETHIOPIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM (PART 2)

I wonder if any one will be able to read my blog postings in the year of 4500 - 2500 years from now?
Well, I could read this stone block posting from Ethiopians which is 2500 years old;
“SBHHM and LHV from the FQM family from the tribe of MRVB have dedicated to LMQH (the God) for the protection of their life”
This ancient method of “blocking” your views on life surely has a permanence which I’m afraid electronic media lacks. The stone block is an Altar of limestone and alabaster discovered in Gobospela, Tigray and the inscription is in South Arabic. A piece of paper translates the meaning into Amharic and English.
So what has happened here? A spoken language is expressed in a runic-like alphabet. The “blockers” state their names and dedication to the God for the protection of family and tribe. The function of the altar is to set a site for ritual performances of importance for the tribe and its culture. The weight of the block tells that this tribe were settlers with the means to travel, to maintain contacts at least with South Arabic cultures.

This was a statement that demonstrated the blockers command of stone quarrying, transport, language, writing, as well as a good standing with the God. By their wealth they could acquire these skills through the services of laborers and specialists (stone masons, merchants, slaves, animals, scribers, translators and priests).

There were security issues at that time too – clan fighting and foreign powers trying to invade. There were threats to their livelihood; loss of power and possessions. Even worse would be sickness and famine. The God could inspire the fight against these threats and by “acts of god” even intervene with forces of nature; meteors, earthquakes, draughts, floods and violent storms. The Arabic dialect indicates the blockers were Arabic or had acquired the ways of Arab neighbors and travelers. Foreigners mostly bring trade, wealth, new innovations and ideas - which improve life, but occasionally foreigners impose their will and ways by brutal force and slavery.

My blog in light waves and electrons is very much the same thing as this block in limestone and alabaster. The blog demonstrates command of digital media and a language which is not my own. My blog states my professional trademarks and dedication to the industry as well as a belonging to a global community. The function of this blog is to set a site for scripted communication and performances in audio and images (still and moving). I am far away from home but can still extend myself to talk with my family back home and stay in touch with events through media. Within a few years when internet infrastructure is fully developed here, I’ll be able more fully participate in life both at home and here in Ethiopia (skype, email, internet-banking and internet TV).

It is a paradox that this blog is blocked in Ethiopia and a peculiar illustration of the communicative power of media. It appears that Googles Blogger domains are blocked and filtered out by the national Telecommunication Corporation. I have no problem with my blog being inaccessible within Ethiopia - as only 0,2% of the people here have access to internet (and there are ways around the block). Still, blogs must be regarded as a potentially negative influence, through internet cafés and work connections. I do agree that there are uses of the internet which is a security threat – specifically terrorist propaganda and their killing manuals.

The Horn of Africa and Abyssinia is not only the origin of human colonization of Earth but has since also been a strategically important cross-road for many cultures and empires. There is evidence of ties with India and even as far away as China. The armies and fleets of Pharaonic Egypt, as well as the Persian, Greek and Roman Empires definitely also came here. (I will tell more of this in my next blog post). My point here is that it should be no surprise that AEthiopes (Greek for “people with burnt faces”) became Abyssinians (mixed people).

My heritage is also mixed, I come from Swedish civil servants educated in law and theology, Norwegian wood traders mixed with Greek nobility and claims to decent from the oldest man to be buried in the St Pauls cathedral on London. I’m especially proud of my one sixteenth Greek part and have even visited my Mediterranean relatives on the island of Corfu in the Adriatic Sea between Athens and Rome. When I stopped over in Istanbul in my first voyage to Ethiopia in January I visited Hagia Sofia mosque and Greek orthodox cathedral. I saw the graffiti runes of Halfdan the Viking (who very well could have been a Täby-guy, like me) and had a sense of being in a time-warping worm-whole connecting my Viking-Greek-Ethiopian ancestry.

I’m a European unionist not only by heritage, but also in practice; MrFootage is incorporated in the UK with partners in Paris and Munich. We trade globally in works of the film art. Film as a media is now becoming obsolete: Chemical photography has in just a few years transformed into a digital art. The variety and quality of film rolls has diminished and been replaced by ferro-magnetical/optical bits and bytes. Visual capture devices has been merged with audio recording and radio devices – enabling me to place recordings from my mobile telephone on this site – as still images and audio/video.

Film making is a form of expression, which requires too much expertise, resources and infrastructure to compete with the direct and lightweight digital video cameras soon in the hands of every human. It is a change of technology just as stones and clay-tablets were made obsolete by papyrus, parchment and paper. Just as with the printing press now made available to the masses through computer based desktop publishing and Internet. With the emergence of HD formats the fidelity of digital video will match the eye– just as well as film has. I’ll come back to the issues this transition involves, but first I will explore how cultures expressed in languages– develop and disappear. Successful cultures often involve some media innovations or creative applications of media.

Even if languages dies, languages still prevails as the major vehicle of communication in all performing arts. A language is performed by combining a voca-bulary of tongue modulated sounds into words which represent things and concepts. A set of rules – a grammar – combine the words to convey meaning. People and things are organized in space, time, numbers, gender and most importantly into acts. Spoken language is the mechanism through which our senses are enlarged and thoughts expressed. It is the trait that separates us from animals, but also separates us from each other.
A living language changes constantly to stay functional in an ever-changing environment, as people moved and populated the continents of this planet. Over the million years that passed since offsprings of Lucy started to speak - billions of words has appeared and disappeared. Some of these vocabularies could be accounted for as a language, but if was not until hunters and nomads settled and languages started to be transcribed in a writing systems that languages could be defined and tracked by domains and time. Humans have the capacity to understand and speak multiple languages, which is also why languages can rapidly spread and die.

This process is described in a book by the Philologist Ola Wikander, entitled “In the company of dead languages – a book about very old languages” (my translation from Swedish). The book covers two important language groups; the Indo-European and the Afro-Asian languages. These languages stretch from around the Mediterranean sea all the way to India (with Abyssinia as a hub around which these turns in history revolves). The dead languages accounted for are Sumeric, Acadian, Hebrew, Coptic, Hittite, Sanskrit, Ancient Persian, Oscan, Etruscan, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon. In this list I miss Latin, Ancient Egyptian and Geez, but that is maybe because Latin never really died and Ancient Egyptian lives on in Geez – which is the language of the Coptic faith in Ethiopia and which actually is Coptic (?). Hebrew may no longer qualify as a dead language as it has been resurrected in Israel. The book tells about the dynamic nature of languages and the power of expression through media.

The oldest known objects with “writing” are bones with notches carved into them to represent numbers. These bones, which were discovered in the Cro-Magnon caves in Southern France are about 30,000 years old. This is the first evidence of a tally writing system. Also of interest is a piece of bone dating from around 8,500 BC, discovered in Africa, that appears to have notches representing the prime numbers 11, 13, 17, and 19.

Between 5000 and 4000 years ago the Sumers and the Egyptians separately developed tally tools into an image based writing system. The basic need was to keep records of possessions and commercial transactions. The first human to actually record numbers and hieroglyphic images in a storage medium (of clay) may have been a Sumerian accountant. The first letter may very well been A in Alef followed by the number representing the amount of ox cattle accounted for.
The hieroglyphic images are very much like modern media comic strips and film sequences, which illustrates the fact that all media are interconnected, stemming from expressions of language.
image from www.eyelid.co.uk
Later these “hieroglyphic” images were used to form rebus (picture puzzles) to represent new things. The sumers used syllables and Egyptians used consonants, to repurpose the image characters to letters representing a sound contained in the “hieroglyph”.
This is one of the reasons why hieroglyphs of Ancient Egyptian was so difficult to decipher. The language was dead and lost, but based on the hypothesis that it had close kinship with Coptic (which was also dead - but well known) – the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion managed to break the code a few decades after Napoleons conquest of Egypt and the finding of the Rosetta stone (containing the same message inscribed in hieroglyphs, Greek and demotic)

The applications of this new media were immense and became the basis for many empires. Laws, literature, liturgy as well as astrological tables, contracts, doctrines, courier messages and diplomatic notes were written reflecting the changes of power, fortunes, knowledge, beliefs and emotions.
The west Semitic Arab peoples picked up the idea of consonant based script and created the first alphabet (like the names in the altar dedication above). The Greeks added wovels (because semitic languages used guttural sounds making no sense for Greeks) and aLef became A, he – e., etc. Finally we had the alphabet most Indo-European languages use today.

From the middle of 2000 BC Indo-European tribes made their way from the north west towards India where they introduced Sanskrit (my Indian friends here denounce this and claim writing in India is 10.000 years old). Earliest knowledge of maths also dates from this time. Chinese writing system is developed around 1500 BC later empowered with the invention of paper to enable the long-lasting and vast Chinese empire.

The first computing information technologies invented dealt with counting, measuring distances, weights and time. Astrologers observed the stars - made recordings, calculations and even predictions. The Chinese invented the compass and Greek mathematicians calculated the circumference of the planet earth and even managed a fairly accurate estimate of its weight.

The oldest Water clock known was found in Egypt in the tomb of Amenhotep I, buried around 1500 BC. The Greek Ctesibius (285 - 222 BC) invents a whistling clock automat with pneumatics as the power source. There is little left of Ctesibius' work, apart from a mysterious tower in Greece. It would take engineers over 1800 years to surpass Ctesibius' precision with this water clock.

This image of modern information technology I found in the streets of Addis Adaba. For a Birr or two you can be measured and weighed (I’m 90 kilos here – which is 10% more than my own scale at home!). The man of measures also sell stick tooth brushes and I’m sure he would also sell information about Ethiopian time – if I knew the language to ask for it.
Each day starts 0.00 at 06.00 o’clock (my time) and ends at 12.00 (18.00 my time). When the 12th hour of day ends - 12 hours of night starts. Ethiopia is behind in time in more ways: They count the current year as 1999 and follow the Julian calendar system (introduced by Julius Caesar) with twelve 30-day months and a 13th month (of 4 or 6 days – to catch up). The Ethiopian millennium shift will be celebrated on September 9/11 – which is inevitable if you go strictly by the calendar.

It is now 5 o’clock at night - Ethiopian time. It is not raining anymore and water is out in my area due to the serious water shortage in Addis. In the neighborhood there is an electrified live band playing loudly the energetic and flowing beat of Ethiopian pop music. Dogs are howling and barking at the African moon.

THE SHORT HISTORY OF MANKIND FROM THE ETHIOPIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM

Walking the streets of Addis Adaba and seeing the faces of Ethiopia - I see the seeds of every human race on earth; some look African, some Arabic, some like Asian, some like Indian and some pretty much like me. That’s why Ethiopia was called Abyssinia – land of mixed peoples.

I, a pale Swede from the top of Europe, feel kinship with these peoples. Like most foreigners who come here I have also visited the Ethiopian National Museum to visit Lucy. It’s like a homecoming, where we return to the graves of our ancestors.

It is a fantastic little museum, with 4 levels, starting below ground in the basement, with fossilized remains of the creatures that lived in this world many millions years ago before us. The innermost chamber of these catacombs holds the Plexiglas sarcophagus of two Lucy replicas.

In the next level there are just a few rooms, in which we can follow the leaps in human development; from Homo Erectus to the last line of Ethiopian Emperors.

The second floor shows artifacts from the different peoples and tribes around Ethiopia and the top floor presents a tour of Ethiopian art, from coptic altar pieces to communist Derg period paintings and abstract modernism.

The museum is primitive and minimalist in its presentation. There are few objects and no curatorial concepts to guide the thoughts – which is quite refreshing and challenging. I walked through all floors from basement to the top floor in one hour. Beside the main attraction Lucy, there were a few things that captured my attention – I took picture of these objects as food for thought and to illustrate this blog.

In the center of the ground floor exhibit is a top modern High Definition wide screen above the cranium of a Homo Serensis.
Like an extension of this fossil brain which projects images of colored lights and shadows on High-Tech cave walls. The beautiful HD film tells the story of Ethiopia as the place on earth where life made a giant leap and started to evolve into intelligent life, which crossed the shores of the Red sea and populated the whole planet. This is how I’ve learned it happened:

Over 3 million years ago apelike creatures started to walk on their two legs to get a clear view above the high savanna grass.
Recently, in December year 2000 in Dikika in the Omo Valley a complete skeleton was found of 3-year girl of the same species as Lucy - Australopithecus Afarensis.
Below the waist they looked like us, but they had long arms and shoulder joints like gorillas, which allowed them to swing between branches high up in trees. The cranium was slightly bigger than that of chimpanzees. The most interesting finding was the tongue bone, which was fixed to the jaw. With us the tongue bone is disjointed to enable the vocal richness of spoken language.
There was a climate change and the forests were taken over by savanna. A flood swept away and drowned the little Afarensis girl and buried her deep in mud together with elephants, hippos and impalas. These creatures were prey for many large carnivores, giant prehistoric lions, wolves and bears. Normally the remains would have been eaten and scattered, like letters in old scriptures eaten away by paper moths. Fossilization chiseled this page of our history in stone, for us to see and reconnect with.

The upright walking freed the arms and hands to carry and handle things. With its evolving intelligence these beings first mastered the fire and later started carry stones and sticks as tools and weapons. They could protect themselves and successfully hunt for other prey. Their food became richer in protein, which allowed the brain to grow in size. The upright walking also improved the cooling of this now so essential organ that could apply the senses to manage more information about the environment and about itself. Like all mammals they could communicate with sounds, gestures and dancing. They would learn to mimic the sounds of nature, animals and each other. The stick in hand would slam on trees and rocks to scare off or communicate messages within their domains. Flocks started to form cultures, with a sense of time that went beyond living individuals and also included the spirits of dead ancestors in the community.

There is one of the informative posters in the cellar exhibition that ties everything together and explains what the whole museum is about:

“The explanation is simple:
Like a boy takes after his father, these animals look alike, because of their family ties; they belong to the same family.”

Here the poster shows the photos of Emperors and family ties between the Ethiopian Imperial family-line over the passage of time since year 1800. Next to it there are images of horses in various stages of development over time since some million years back.

“The differences between the horses and their ancestors are due to gradual changes in morphology through time.
Such changes happen within all living things on earth.
This is what we call BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION.

Evolution: How does it work? Example of the Geometer moth, a moth from England”

The concept of Morphology is not explained in the poster and neither are the workings of the moth from England.
As I remember from my own biology classes, an English moth living near coal burning factories would adapt to its environment where trees turned grey from the air pollution. The adaptation was in the coloring of its wings; all moths with wing coloring contrasting to the tree trunks would be eaten and only those with the right camouflaging would replicate. (The meaning of morphology I’ll have to google as soon as I get access to the internet).

Survival of the fittest is what it boils down to. Traits that give some kind of advantage for replication are favored.

How can the disjointing of the tongue bone give such an advantage, to qualify the human race to the finals of evolution?

As I understand this trait significantly expands the vocabulary of sounds that the vocal organ is capable of producing.
A loose tongue may also be useful in hunting, but my experience is that it gives huge advantages in mating. Romancing and moonlight serenades are basic components in the courting repertoires of pick-up artists throughout history.

Somehow body sign languages and whistling don’t have what it takes as the basis for cultural communication. Bees and ants - with a brain size of a pin head - can form complex communities with dancing as a basic form of communication. Birds, whales and dolphins can move their bodies in 3 dimensions AND whistle at the same time. They live in flocks and can maintain family ties to form communities that travel vast distances around the globe. Whales and dolphins have larger brain volume than humans and still don’t have culture or an intelligent life as we know it.

The meaning of speaking in tongues is fundamental and clearly imprinted in many languages. It means divine inspiration and is a heavenly communication – messages from our fathers, the Gods. Tongue modulated Hi-Fi sound offered a giant leap in the educational systems of early humans. The disjointing of the tongue bone could actually be the moment of Creation for Homo Sapiens – the wise and knowing man. After this creation all animals and things could be named to form a language.

The first talkers were stars - with fans, groupies and stalkers, just like today. I think they were pretty much like rap-artists performing a rhythmic mix of speaking and singing. The fan clubs transformed into churches, the stars became saint-like idols and their entourage became the clergy. The priests indulged in the idolatry trying to interpret the wills of Gods through its oracles.

I will continue my tour of the Ethiopian National Museum in my next blog post and try to trace the evolution of languages and culture. I’ve read a few books and articles about it and I like to share my thoughts in these matters. I also have professional experience and expertise in the areas of business development, media technology, art and accounting, which may contribute to shed light on the human predicament.