Phonetic Alphabetic Writing List
A viewset for viewing and editing Phonetic Alphabetic Writings.
GET /api/sc/phonetic-alphabetic-writings/
{ "count": 428, "next": "https://seshatdata.com/api/sc/phonetic-alphabetic-writings/?page=2", "previous": null, "results": [ { "id": 105, "year_from": -2000, "year_to": -1801, "description": " \"The alphabet seems to have been invented in Egypt by Semites living there (Hamilton 2006). Some suggest it reached the southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age (Hamilton 2006); others think this only occurred in the Late Bronze Age (Sass 2005). The exact period is of little importance to this discussion, since very few (if any) alphabetic inscriptions can be dated to this period. Again, this suggests that writing was not common during this period. Even if alphabetic script appears in the Middle Bronze Age, it is only at the end of this period, and does not represent an integral part of the culture.\"§REF§Shai/Uziel (2010:73).§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 103, "name": "IlCanaa", "start_year": -2000, "end_year": -1175, "long_name": "Canaan", "new_name": "il_canaan", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "_Short description_<br>Very little is known about the ancient Canaanites and what is known is often through references given by other cultures (such as the Egyptians). Even combined with what is known and not known from archaeological work the overall picture of Canannite society should be taken as a very provisional one.<br>Canaanites seem to have lived between 2000-1175 BCE, from a time contemporary to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, the Canaanite Hyksos Period of Egypt and their expulsion, through the New Kingdom of Egypt, to the invasion of the Sea Peoples (which have often been associated with the destruction of Canaanite cities).<br>Outside of the city-state organization the Canaanites did not achieve any territorial centralization in the Levant. The Canaanites lived in hierarchical city-states that would form alliances and fight opposing coalitions of Canaanites. The region as a whole was under Egyptian control after the invasion of Thutmose III.<br>One tentative archaeological interpretation of Canaanite government holds that Canaanite regimes were more similar to an household <i>oikos</i> economy than a Mesopotamian-style redistributive state: \"in sharp contrast to both the Aegean and the entire ancient Near East, there is not a single indication that literate administration ever played any significant role in the [Middle Bronze Age] Canaanite economy.\" §REF§ (Yasur-Landau et al. 2015, 609). Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, Andrew J. Koh, David Ben-Shlomo, Nimrod Marom, Alexandra Ratzlaff and Inbal Samet. 2015. \"Rethinking Canaanite Palaces? The Palatial Economy of Tel Kabri during the Middle Bronze Age.\" Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 6: 607-625. §REF§ <br>However, it appears at least some Canaanites did use writing to record laws. Two fragments of a larger clay tablet (designated Hazor 18) were discovered in 2010 at Tel Hazor, that would possibly have contained as many as 20 or 30 laws (which in turn could have been part of a larger collection of law tablets) in a format similar to the Code of Hammurabi. An earlier tablet, Hazor 5, contains part of the description of a lawsuit, judged by the king personally. §REF§ (Horowitz, Oshima, Vukosavovic 2012) Wayne Horowitz, Oshima Takayoshi and Filip Vukosavovic. 2012. \"Hazor 18: Fragments of a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor.\" Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2: 158-176. §REF§ It is likely that at least some Canaanite polities would have had formal law codes.<br>The population of the Canaanites probably never exceeded much beyond 50,000 people in a single polity, though more were likely present towards the end of the period than at the beginning.<br><br/>_Oren's long description_<br>During the Bronze Age, Canaan was composed of dozens of \"city-states,\" some strong enough to lead regional confederations against each other or against outside invaders. These city-states appear to have been significantly institutionalized, featuring standing armies, bureaucracies and public works, and official cults. The social structure was highly unequal; most of the land was concentrated in the hands of the small ruling class, with the vast majority of inhabitants being serfs, slaves, or landless vagabonds or nomads. The economy depended heavily on trade, with intensive agriculture of staples such as wine and oil meant for export in exchange for prestige goods such as imported pottery, and tin for making bronze.<br>Canaan of the Middle and Late Bronze was by no means a unified entity, even as its polities shared significant cultural elements. The varying landscape carried with it different geopolitical conditions for each local polity, strongly conditioning the development of each one and its various political/strategic needs. \"The Coastal Plain, the setting for the region's largest political and economic centers, conventionally seen as the hearth of Canaanite civilization, emerges as a hodge-podge of polities with highly variable structures and their attendant political connotations. The Jordan Rift, normally seen as a smaller-scale backwater off the Mediterranean littoral, features settlement patterns most consistent with a series of highly integrated peer polities or city-states, and subregional political coherence. In contrast to both of these lowland areas, the settlement clusters of the Hill Country are more dispersed, with consistent evidence of less settlement integration. When considered structurally, these results suggest three fundamentally different bases for political development in a region normally viewed as a single, albeit fractious, social and cultural entity during the Late Bronze Age. These distinctions help illuminate the foundations of the particularly volatile political dynamics of the southern Levant.\" §REF§ Savage/Falconer (2003:42). §REF§ <br>During the Middle Bronze, Canaanite polities were wealthy and powerful enough to extend their influence into the Egyptian Delta (via the so-called \"Hyksos). However, the end of the Middle Bronze is marked by the campaign of Thutmose I, who expelled the Hyksos and then campaigned into Canaan proper, imposing Egyptian overlordship over many of the Canaanite cities. As the Late Bronze progressed, Canaanite cities were marked with increasing social turmoil, wracked by repeated uprisings against Egyptian officials or against local elites, and facing periodic invasions from the sea or pressure from the Hittite Empire. The politics of this period are somewhat better understood thanks to the finding of the Amarna Letters, some 350 clay tablets of Egyptian diplomatic correspondence that date to about the middle of the 14th Century BCE. Many of them are from Canaanite \"mayors,\" sending groveling obeisances to the Pharaoh and pleading for military assistance in the face of urgent threats. Finally, during the 12th Century BCE, a series of poorly-understood calamities and city destructions brought the Bronze Age Canaanite civilization to a close; it would be succeeded by the Phoenicians to the north, and the Israelites in the Judean highlands.<br>(A word of caution is in order about coding methodology. Much of the evidence we have about this polity comes from archaeological finds. However, the brute fact of an archaeological artifact is often used as the basis for considerable interpretation and conjecture. Methods have been improving over time, but still some archaeologists tend to leap far ahead of what the evidence will support. Additionally, the meaning of many finds is hotly disputed by archaeologists, each faction insisting for its point of view: \"When any scholar defends the correctness or appropriateness of a singular point of view, or set of data, everything else tends to be analyzed accordingly - alternative views are intensely criticized, dismissed, or ignored entirely, while complementary views or evidence are presented with little critical reflection. Whether the evidence is archaeological or scientific, often it is only partial or ambiguous and so becomes easy to interpret or manipulate in a manner that serves to perpetuate a preconceived idea or point of view. The outcome is often a selective filtering of data and related information and an unwillingness to contemplate or envisage a counter position.\" §REF§ Knapp/Manning (2016:101). §REF§ <br>This is a particular problem with regard to establishing chronologies. While on a given archaeological site researchers are (usually) able to determine the boundaries of relative temporal layers, tying those layers to an absolute timeline, or even fitting them into a relative relationship with the layers of other sites, is a fraught business; and when the time period in question is as far back as the Middle Bronze, the available evidence becomes correspondingly scarcer and more difficult to correlate with each other. Unfortunately, many researchers are too quick to claim certainty where none exists. §REF§ See extensive discussion in Knapp/Manning (2016). §REF§ <br>In short, every data point that is backed up with archaeology must be considered provisional, and new discoveries can totally upend our picture of what happened—as can new interpretations that correct erroneous early interpretations, a <a class=\"external text\" href=\"http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">constant danger</a> with motivated archaeologists.)", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 10, "name": "Galilee", "subregion": "Levant-Mesopotamia", "longitude": "35.303500000000", "latitude": "32.699600000000", "capital_city": "Nazareth", "nga_code": "IL", "fao_country": "Israel", "world_region": "Southwest Asia" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 61, "name": "Levant", "subregions_list": "Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria", "mac_region": { "id": 11, "name": "Southwest Asia" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 106, "year_from": -1800, "year_to": -1550, "description": " \"The alphabet seems to have been invented in Egypt by Semites living there (Hamilton 2006). Some suggest it reached the southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age (Hamilton 2006); others think this only occurred in the Late Bronze Age (Sass 2005). The exact period is of little importance to this discussion, since very few (if any) alphabetic inscriptions can be dated to this period. Again, this suggests that writing was not common during this period. Even if alphabetic script appears in the Middle Bronze Age, it is only at the end of this period, and does not represent an integral part of the culture.\"§REF§Shai/Uziel (2010:73).§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": true, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "present", "polity": { "id": 103, "name": "IlCanaa", "start_year": -2000, "end_year": -1175, "long_name": "Canaan", "new_name": "il_canaan", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "_Short description_<br>Very little is known about the ancient Canaanites and what is known is often through references given by other cultures (such as the Egyptians). Even combined with what is known and not known from archaeological work the overall picture of Canannite society should be taken as a very provisional one.<br>Canaanites seem to have lived between 2000-1175 BCE, from a time contemporary to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, the Canaanite Hyksos Period of Egypt and their expulsion, through the New Kingdom of Egypt, to the invasion of the Sea Peoples (which have often been associated with the destruction of Canaanite cities).<br>Outside of the city-state organization the Canaanites did not achieve any territorial centralization in the Levant. The Canaanites lived in hierarchical city-states that would form alliances and fight opposing coalitions of Canaanites. The region as a whole was under Egyptian control after the invasion of Thutmose III.<br>One tentative archaeological interpretation of Canaanite government holds that Canaanite regimes were more similar to an household <i>oikos</i> economy than a Mesopotamian-style redistributive state: \"in sharp contrast to both the Aegean and the entire ancient Near East, there is not a single indication that literate administration ever played any significant role in the [Middle Bronze Age] Canaanite economy.\" §REF§ (Yasur-Landau et al. 2015, 609). Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, Andrew J. Koh, David Ben-Shlomo, Nimrod Marom, Alexandra Ratzlaff and Inbal Samet. 2015. \"Rethinking Canaanite Palaces? The Palatial Economy of Tel Kabri during the Middle Bronze Age.\" Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 6: 607-625. §REF§ <br>However, it appears at least some Canaanites did use writing to record laws. Two fragments of a larger clay tablet (designated Hazor 18) were discovered in 2010 at Tel Hazor, that would possibly have contained as many as 20 or 30 laws (which in turn could have been part of a larger collection of law tablets) in a format similar to the Code of Hammurabi. An earlier tablet, Hazor 5, contains part of the description of a lawsuit, judged by the king personally. §REF§ (Horowitz, Oshima, Vukosavovic 2012) Wayne Horowitz, Oshima Takayoshi and Filip Vukosavovic. 2012. \"Hazor 18: Fragments of a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor.\" Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2: 158-176. §REF§ It is likely that at least some Canaanite polities would have had formal law codes.<br>The population of the Canaanites probably never exceeded much beyond 50,000 people in a single polity, though more were likely present towards the end of the period than at the beginning.<br><br/>_Oren's long description_<br>During the Bronze Age, Canaan was composed of dozens of \"city-states,\" some strong enough to lead regional confederations against each other or against outside invaders. These city-states appear to have been significantly institutionalized, featuring standing armies, bureaucracies and public works, and official cults. The social structure was highly unequal; most of the land was concentrated in the hands of the small ruling class, with the vast majority of inhabitants being serfs, slaves, or landless vagabonds or nomads. The economy depended heavily on trade, with intensive agriculture of staples such as wine and oil meant for export in exchange for prestige goods such as imported pottery, and tin for making bronze.<br>Canaan of the Middle and Late Bronze was by no means a unified entity, even as its polities shared significant cultural elements. The varying landscape carried with it different geopolitical conditions for each local polity, strongly conditioning the development of each one and its various political/strategic needs. \"The Coastal Plain, the setting for the region's largest political and economic centers, conventionally seen as the hearth of Canaanite civilization, emerges as a hodge-podge of polities with highly variable structures and their attendant political connotations. The Jordan Rift, normally seen as a smaller-scale backwater off the Mediterranean littoral, features settlement patterns most consistent with a series of highly integrated peer polities or city-states, and subregional political coherence. In contrast to both of these lowland areas, the settlement clusters of the Hill Country are more dispersed, with consistent evidence of less settlement integration. When considered structurally, these results suggest three fundamentally different bases for political development in a region normally viewed as a single, albeit fractious, social and cultural entity during the Late Bronze Age. These distinctions help illuminate the foundations of the particularly volatile political dynamics of the southern Levant.\" §REF§ Savage/Falconer (2003:42). §REF§ <br>During the Middle Bronze, Canaanite polities were wealthy and powerful enough to extend their influence into the Egyptian Delta (via the so-called \"Hyksos). However, the end of the Middle Bronze is marked by the campaign of Thutmose I, who expelled the Hyksos and then campaigned into Canaan proper, imposing Egyptian overlordship over many of the Canaanite cities. As the Late Bronze progressed, Canaanite cities were marked with increasing social turmoil, wracked by repeated uprisings against Egyptian officials or against local elites, and facing periodic invasions from the sea or pressure from the Hittite Empire. The politics of this period are somewhat better understood thanks to the finding of the Amarna Letters, some 350 clay tablets of Egyptian diplomatic correspondence that date to about the middle of the 14th Century BCE. Many of them are from Canaanite \"mayors,\" sending groveling obeisances to the Pharaoh and pleading for military assistance in the face of urgent threats. Finally, during the 12th Century BCE, a series of poorly-understood calamities and city destructions brought the Bronze Age Canaanite civilization to a close; it would be succeeded by the Phoenicians to the north, and the Israelites in the Judean highlands.<br>(A word of caution is in order about coding methodology. Much of the evidence we have about this polity comes from archaeological finds. However, the brute fact of an archaeological artifact is often used as the basis for considerable interpretation and conjecture. Methods have been improving over time, but still some archaeologists tend to leap far ahead of what the evidence will support. Additionally, the meaning of many finds is hotly disputed by archaeologists, each faction insisting for its point of view: \"When any scholar defends the correctness or appropriateness of a singular point of view, or set of data, everything else tends to be analyzed accordingly - alternative views are intensely criticized, dismissed, or ignored entirely, while complementary views or evidence are presented with little critical reflection. Whether the evidence is archaeological or scientific, often it is only partial or ambiguous and so becomes easy to interpret or manipulate in a manner that serves to perpetuate a preconceived idea or point of view. The outcome is often a selective filtering of data and related information and an unwillingness to contemplate or envisage a counter position.\" §REF§ Knapp/Manning (2016:101). §REF§ <br>This is a particular problem with regard to establishing chronologies. While on a given archaeological site researchers are (usually) able to determine the boundaries of relative temporal layers, tying those layers to an absolute timeline, or even fitting them into a relative relationship with the layers of other sites, is a fraught business; and when the time period in question is as far back as the Middle Bronze, the available evidence becomes correspondingly scarcer and more difficult to correlate with each other. Unfortunately, many researchers are too quick to claim certainty where none exists. §REF§ See extensive discussion in Knapp/Manning (2016). §REF§ <br>In short, every data point that is backed up with archaeology must be considered provisional, and new discoveries can totally upend our picture of what happened—as can new interpretations that correct erroneous early interpretations, a <a class=\"external text\" href=\"http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">constant danger</a> with motivated archaeologists.)", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 10, "name": "Galilee", "subregion": "Levant-Mesopotamia", "longitude": "35.303500000000", "latitude": "32.699600000000", "capital_city": "Nazareth", "nga_code": "IL", "fao_country": "Israel", "world_region": "Southwest Asia" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 61, "name": "Levant", "subregions_list": "Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria", "mac_region": { "id": 11, "name": "Southwest Asia" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 107, "year_from": -1800, "year_to": -1550, "description": " \"The alphabet seems to have been invented in Egypt by Semites living there (Hamilton 2006). Some suggest it reached the southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age (Hamilton 2006); others think this only occurred in the Late Bronze Age (Sass 2005). The exact period is of little importance to this discussion, since very few (if any) alphabetic inscriptions can be dated to this period. Again, this suggests that writing was not common during this period. Even if alphabetic script appears in the Middle Bronze Age, it is only at the end of this period, and does not represent an integral part of the culture.\"§REF§Shai/Uziel (2010:73).§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": true, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 103, "name": "IlCanaa", "start_year": -2000, "end_year": -1175, "long_name": "Canaan", "new_name": "il_canaan", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "_Short description_<br>Very little is known about the ancient Canaanites and what is known is often through references given by other cultures (such as the Egyptians). Even combined with what is known and not known from archaeological work the overall picture of Canannite society should be taken as a very provisional one.<br>Canaanites seem to have lived between 2000-1175 BCE, from a time contemporary to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, the Canaanite Hyksos Period of Egypt and their expulsion, through the New Kingdom of Egypt, to the invasion of the Sea Peoples (which have often been associated with the destruction of Canaanite cities).<br>Outside of the city-state organization the Canaanites did not achieve any territorial centralization in the Levant. The Canaanites lived in hierarchical city-states that would form alliances and fight opposing coalitions of Canaanites. The region as a whole was under Egyptian control after the invasion of Thutmose III.<br>One tentative archaeological interpretation of Canaanite government holds that Canaanite regimes were more similar to an household <i>oikos</i> economy than a Mesopotamian-style redistributive state: \"in sharp contrast to both the Aegean and the entire ancient Near East, there is not a single indication that literate administration ever played any significant role in the [Middle Bronze Age] Canaanite economy.\" §REF§ (Yasur-Landau et al. 2015, 609). Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, Andrew J. Koh, David Ben-Shlomo, Nimrod Marom, Alexandra Ratzlaff and Inbal Samet. 2015. \"Rethinking Canaanite Palaces? The Palatial Economy of Tel Kabri during the Middle Bronze Age.\" Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 6: 607-625. §REF§ <br>However, it appears at least some Canaanites did use writing to record laws. Two fragments of a larger clay tablet (designated Hazor 18) were discovered in 2010 at Tel Hazor, that would possibly have contained as many as 20 or 30 laws (which in turn could have been part of a larger collection of law tablets) in a format similar to the Code of Hammurabi. An earlier tablet, Hazor 5, contains part of the description of a lawsuit, judged by the king personally. §REF§ (Horowitz, Oshima, Vukosavovic 2012) Wayne Horowitz, Oshima Takayoshi and Filip Vukosavovic. 2012. \"Hazor 18: Fragments of a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor.\" Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2: 158-176. §REF§ It is likely that at least some Canaanite polities would have had formal law codes.<br>The population of the Canaanites probably never exceeded much beyond 50,000 people in a single polity, though more were likely present towards the end of the period than at the beginning.<br><br/>_Oren's long description_<br>During the Bronze Age, Canaan was composed of dozens of \"city-states,\" some strong enough to lead regional confederations against each other or against outside invaders. These city-states appear to have been significantly institutionalized, featuring standing armies, bureaucracies and public works, and official cults. The social structure was highly unequal; most of the land was concentrated in the hands of the small ruling class, with the vast majority of inhabitants being serfs, slaves, or landless vagabonds or nomads. The economy depended heavily on trade, with intensive agriculture of staples such as wine and oil meant for export in exchange for prestige goods such as imported pottery, and tin for making bronze.<br>Canaan of the Middle and Late Bronze was by no means a unified entity, even as its polities shared significant cultural elements. The varying landscape carried with it different geopolitical conditions for each local polity, strongly conditioning the development of each one and its various political/strategic needs. \"The Coastal Plain, the setting for the region's largest political and economic centers, conventionally seen as the hearth of Canaanite civilization, emerges as a hodge-podge of polities with highly variable structures and their attendant political connotations. The Jordan Rift, normally seen as a smaller-scale backwater off the Mediterranean littoral, features settlement patterns most consistent with a series of highly integrated peer polities or city-states, and subregional political coherence. In contrast to both of these lowland areas, the settlement clusters of the Hill Country are more dispersed, with consistent evidence of less settlement integration. When considered structurally, these results suggest three fundamentally different bases for political development in a region normally viewed as a single, albeit fractious, social and cultural entity during the Late Bronze Age. These distinctions help illuminate the foundations of the particularly volatile political dynamics of the southern Levant.\" §REF§ Savage/Falconer (2003:42). §REF§ <br>During the Middle Bronze, Canaanite polities were wealthy and powerful enough to extend their influence into the Egyptian Delta (via the so-called \"Hyksos). However, the end of the Middle Bronze is marked by the campaign of Thutmose I, who expelled the Hyksos and then campaigned into Canaan proper, imposing Egyptian overlordship over many of the Canaanite cities. As the Late Bronze progressed, Canaanite cities were marked with increasing social turmoil, wracked by repeated uprisings against Egyptian officials or against local elites, and facing periodic invasions from the sea or pressure from the Hittite Empire. The politics of this period are somewhat better understood thanks to the finding of the Amarna Letters, some 350 clay tablets of Egyptian diplomatic correspondence that date to about the middle of the 14th Century BCE. Many of them are from Canaanite \"mayors,\" sending groveling obeisances to the Pharaoh and pleading for military assistance in the face of urgent threats. Finally, during the 12th Century BCE, a series of poorly-understood calamities and city destructions brought the Bronze Age Canaanite civilization to a close; it would be succeeded by the Phoenicians to the north, and the Israelites in the Judean highlands.<br>(A word of caution is in order about coding methodology. Much of the evidence we have about this polity comes from archaeological finds. However, the brute fact of an archaeological artifact is often used as the basis for considerable interpretation and conjecture. Methods have been improving over time, but still some archaeologists tend to leap far ahead of what the evidence will support. Additionally, the meaning of many finds is hotly disputed by archaeologists, each faction insisting for its point of view: \"When any scholar defends the correctness or appropriateness of a singular point of view, or set of data, everything else tends to be analyzed accordingly - alternative views are intensely criticized, dismissed, or ignored entirely, while complementary views or evidence are presented with little critical reflection. Whether the evidence is archaeological or scientific, often it is only partial or ambiguous and so becomes easy to interpret or manipulate in a manner that serves to perpetuate a preconceived idea or point of view. The outcome is often a selective filtering of data and related information and an unwillingness to contemplate or envisage a counter position.\" §REF§ Knapp/Manning (2016:101). §REF§ <br>This is a particular problem with regard to establishing chronologies. While on a given archaeological site researchers are (usually) able to determine the boundaries of relative temporal layers, tying those layers to an absolute timeline, or even fitting them into a relative relationship with the layers of other sites, is a fraught business; and when the time period in question is as far back as the Middle Bronze, the available evidence becomes correspondingly scarcer and more difficult to correlate with each other. Unfortunately, many researchers are too quick to claim certainty where none exists. §REF§ See extensive discussion in Knapp/Manning (2016). §REF§ <br>In short, every data point that is backed up with archaeology must be considered provisional, and new discoveries can totally upend our picture of what happened—as can new interpretations that correct erroneous early interpretations, a <a class=\"external text\" href=\"http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">constant danger</a> with motivated archaeologists.)", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 10, "name": "Galilee", "subregion": "Levant-Mesopotamia", "longitude": "35.303500000000", "latitude": "32.699600000000", "capital_city": "Nazareth", "nga_code": "IL", "fao_country": "Israel", "world_region": "Southwest Asia" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 61, "name": "Levant", "subregions_list": "Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria", "mac_region": { "id": 11, "name": "Southwest Asia" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 108, "year_from": -1550, "year_to": -1175, "description": " \"The alphabet seems to have been invented in Egypt by Semites living there (Hamilton 2006). Some suggest it reached the southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age (Hamilton 2006); others think this only occurred in the Late Bronze Age (Sass 2005). The exact period is of little importance to this discussion, since very few (if any) alphabetic inscriptions can be dated to this period. Again, this suggests that writing was not common during this period. Even if alphabetic script appears in the Middle Bronze Age, it is only at the end of this period, and does not represent an integral part of the culture.\"§REF§Shai/Uziel (2010:73).§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "present", "polity": { "id": 103, "name": "IlCanaa", "start_year": -2000, "end_year": -1175, "long_name": "Canaan", "new_name": "il_canaan", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "_Short description_<br>Very little is known about the ancient Canaanites and what is known is often through references given by other cultures (such as the Egyptians). Even combined with what is known and not known from archaeological work the overall picture of Canannite society should be taken as a very provisional one.<br>Canaanites seem to have lived between 2000-1175 BCE, from a time contemporary to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, the Canaanite Hyksos Period of Egypt and their expulsion, through the New Kingdom of Egypt, to the invasion of the Sea Peoples (which have often been associated with the destruction of Canaanite cities).<br>Outside of the city-state organization the Canaanites did not achieve any territorial centralization in the Levant. The Canaanites lived in hierarchical city-states that would form alliances and fight opposing coalitions of Canaanites. The region as a whole was under Egyptian control after the invasion of Thutmose III.<br>One tentative archaeological interpretation of Canaanite government holds that Canaanite regimes were more similar to an household <i>oikos</i> economy than a Mesopotamian-style redistributive state: \"in sharp contrast to both the Aegean and the entire ancient Near East, there is not a single indication that literate administration ever played any significant role in the [Middle Bronze Age] Canaanite economy.\" §REF§ (Yasur-Landau et al. 2015, 609). Assaf Yasur-Landau, Eric H. Cline, Andrew J. Koh, David Ben-Shlomo, Nimrod Marom, Alexandra Ratzlaff and Inbal Samet. 2015. \"Rethinking Canaanite Palaces? The Palatial Economy of Tel Kabri during the Middle Bronze Age.\" Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 6: 607-625. §REF§ <br>However, it appears at least some Canaanites did use writing to record laws. Two fragments of a larger clay tablet (designated Hazor 18) were discovered in 2010 at Tel Hazor, that would possibly have contained as many as 20 or 30 laws (which in turn could have been part of a larger collection of law tablets) in a format similar to the Code of Hammurabi. An earlier tablet, Hazor 5, contains part of the description of a lawsuit, judged by the king personally. §REF§ (Horowitz, Oshima, Vukosavovic 2012) Wayne Horowitz, Oshima Takayoshi and Filip Vukosavovic. 2012. \"Hazor 18: Fragments of a Cuneiform Law Collection from Hazor.\" Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 62, No. 2: 158-176. §REF§ It is likely that at least some Canaanite polities would have had formal law codes.<br>The population of the Canaanites probably never exceeded much beyond 50,000 people in a single polity, though more were likely present towards the end of the period than at the beginning.<br><br/>_Oren's long description_<br>During the Bronze Age, Canaan was composed of dozens of \"city-states,\" some strong enough to lead regional confederations against each other or against outside invaders. These city-states appear to have been significantly institutionalized, featuring standing armies, bureaucracies and public works, and official cults. The social structure was highly unequal; most of the land was concentrated in the hands of the small ruling class, with the vast majority of inhabitants being serfs, slaves, or landless vagabonds or nomads. The economy depended heavily on trade, with intensive agriculture of staples such as wine and oil meant for export in exchange for prestige goods such as imported pottery, and tin for making bronze.<br>Canaan of the Middle and Late Bronze was by no means a unified entity, even as its polities shared significant cultural elements. The varying landscape carried with it different geopolitical conditions for each local polity, strongly conditioning the development of each one and its various political/strategic needs. \"The Coastal Plain, the setting for the region's largest political and economic centers, conventionally seen as the hearth of Canaanite civilization, emerges as a hodge-podge of polities with highly variable structures and their attendant political connotations. The Jordan Rift, normally seen as a smaller-scale backwater off the Mediterranean littoral, features settlement patterns most consistent with a series of highly integrated peer polities or city-states, and subregional political coherence. In contrast to both of these lowland areas, the settlement clusters of the Hill Country are more dispersed, with consistent evidence of less settlement integration. When considered structurally, these results suggest three fundamentally different bases for political development in a region normally viewed as a single, albeit fractious, social and cultural entity during the Late Bronze Age. These distinctions help illuminate the foundations of the particularly volatile political dynamics of the southern Levant.\" §REF§ Savage/Falconer (2003:42). §REF§ <br>During the Middle Bronze, Canaanite polities were wealthy and powerful enough to extend their influence into the Egyptian Delta (via the so-called \"Hyksos). However, the end of the Middle Bronze is marked by the campaign of Thutmose I, who expelled the Hyksos and then campaigned into Canaan proper, imposing Egyptian overlordship over many of the Canaanite cities. As the Late Bronze progressed, Canaanite cities were marked with increasing social turmoil, wracked by repeated uprisings against Egyptian officials or against local elites, and facing periodic invasions from the sea or pressure from the Hittite Empire. The politics of this period are somewhat better understood thanks to the finding of the Amarna Letters, some 350 clay tablets of Egyptian diplomatic correspondence that date to about the middle of the 14th Century BCE. Many of them are from Canaanite \"mayors,\" sending groveling obeisances to the Pharaoh and pleading for military assistance in the face of urgent threats. Finally, during the 12th Century BCE, a series of poorly-understood calamities and city destructions brought the Bronze Age Canaanite civilization to a close; it would be succeeded by the Phoenicians to the north, and the Israelites in the Judean highlands.<br>(A word of caution is in order about coding methodology. Much of the evidence we have about this polity comes from archaeological finds. However, the brute fact of an archaeological artifact is often used as the basis for considerable interpretation and conjecture. Methods have been improving over time, but still some archaeologists tend to leap far ahead of what the evidence will support. Additionally, the meaning of many finds is hotly disputed by archaeologists, each faction insisting for its point of view: \"When any scholar defends the correctness or appropriateness of a singular point of view, or set of data, everything else tends to be analyzed accordingly - alternative views are intensely criticized, dismissed, or ignored entirely, while complementary views or evidence are presented with little critical reflection. Whether the evidence is archaeological or scientific, often it is only partial or ambiguous and so becomes easy to interpret or manipulate in a manner that serves to perpetuate a preconceived idea or point of view. The outcome is often a selective filtering of data and related information and an unwillingness to contemplate or envisage a counter position.\" §REF§ Knapp/Manning (2016:101). §REF§ <br>This is a particular problem with regard to establishing chronologies. While on a given archaeological site researchers are (usually) able to determine the boundaries of relative temporal layers, tying those layers to an absolute timeline, or even fitting them into a relative relationship with the layers of other sites, is a fraught business; and when the time period in question is as far back as the Middle Bronze, the available evidence becomes correspondingly scarcer and more difficult to correlate with each other. Unfortunately, many researchers are too quick to claim certainty where none exists. §REF§ See extensive discussion in Knapp/Manning (2016). §REF§ <br>In short, every data point that is backed up with archaeology must be considered provisional, and new discoveries can totally upend our picture of what happened—as can new interpretations that correct erroneous early interpretations, a <a class=\"external text\" href=\"http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst140/MotelOfMysteries.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">constant danger</a> with motivated archaeologists.)", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 10, "name": "Galilee", "subregion": "Levant-Mesopotamia", "longitude": "35.303500000000", "latitude": "32.699600000000", "capital_city": "Nazareth", "nga_code": "IL", "fao_country": "Israel", "world_region": "Southwest Asia" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 61, "name": "Levant", "subregions_list": "Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria", "mac_region": { "id": 11, "name": "Southwest Asia" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 401, "year_from": 1550, "year_to": 1699, "description": "The following quote suggests that Ajami script (see second quote) was used by a high-ranking minority; being derived from Arabic, Ajami is alphabetic. \"In southern Senegambia, where non-Manding populations predominated, Manding was a prestigious language of the pagan aristocracy and, on the other hand, the language of the Muslim merchant network of Jakhanke. The existence of Manding Ajami in that area was already attested in the first half of the 18th century (Labat 1728; cited by Giesing & Costa-Dias 2007: 63), long before the pagan rule of the ñàncoo elite of the Kaabu was definitely smashed by Muslim Fulbe troops from Fuuta Jalon. In any case, the emergence of Ajami is not related to the establishment of a Muslim political power in this area: the main holders of Islamic writing in the area, the Jakhanke merchants, were for centuries integrated into the social system of the Kaabu confederation and often served as advisers and intermediates for the political elites.\"§REF§(Vydrin 2014: 201-202) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/E8Z57DNC/collection.§REF§ \"A number of terms have been used in this volume to refer to the usage of Arabic script for languages other than Arabic. Crosslinguistically, such writing systems are often termed ‘Arabic literature’, ‘Islamic literature’ or ‘Islamic writings’, and locally they are known by a large number of names, such as Wolofal, or Kiarabu. The term Ajami in particular (or variations, such as Äjam, Ajamiya, etc.), derived from the Arabic word ʿaǧam ‘non-Arab; Persian’, has gained some degree of popularity in academic literature and is also encountered as a self-denomination for these writing systems in some languages, such as Hausa.\"§REF§(Mumin and Verstegh 2014: 1) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/PVIK4HGV/collection.§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": "2023-08-24T10:33:44.313690Z", "tag": "SSP", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": false, "drb_reviewed": false, "name": "Phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "unknown", "polity": { "id": 608, "name": "gm_kaabu_emp", "start_year": 1500, "end_year": 1867, "long_name": "Kaabu", "new_name": "gm_kaabu_emp", "polity_tag": "POL_AFR_WEST", "general_description": null, "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": null, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 7, "name": "West Africa", "subregions_list": "From Senegal to Gabon (Tropical)", "mac_region": { "id": 2, "name": "Africa" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 277, "year_from": 1632, "year_to": 1800, "description": " Distant ancestors of the Sakha may have been familiar with writing, but lost that knowledge during past migrations: 'Spindle whorls were made of a kind of hard stone coal (slate?). Of particular interest was one spindle, found in Kurumchinakh, which was covered with writing (letters). In comparing these characters with those of various alphabets, it may readily be observed that many of them are similar, as far as they can be deciphered, to the characters of the Orkhon alphabet. There were thirty-seven symbols of which twenty-one are letters and sixteen indistinct, effaced signs, including perhaps mere scratches. The twenty-one letters appear to be an exact reproduction of the Yenisei-Orkhon characters. There are eighteen consonants and three vowels. Some of the characters are repeated and in all there are ten different symbols. The discovery of these writings so far to the north is of great interest. The ancestors of the Yakut, who, in remote times, emigrated from northern Mongolia, undoubtedly knew the Orkhon alphabet and this may explain the Yakut traditions as to the loss of their writings on the way to Yakutsk Province.' §REF§Jochelson, Waldemar 1933. “Yakut”, 62§REF§ The first recent script for the Sakha language was developed by 19th century Russian missionaries: 'The Yakut speak Yakut, a Northeast Turkic language of the Altaic Language Family. It is one of the most divergent of the Turkic languages, closely related to Dolgan (a mixture of Evenk and Yakut sometimes described as a Yakut dialect). The Yakut, over 90 percent of whom speak Yakut as their mother tongue, call their language \"Sakha-tyla.\" Their current written language, developed in the 1930s, is a modified Cyrillic script. Before this, they had several written forms, including a Latin script developed in the 1920s and a Cyrillic script introduced by missionaries in the nineteenth century. Yakut lore includes legends of a written language lost after they traveled north to the Lena valley.' §REF§Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam and Skoggard, Ian: eHRAF Cultural Summary for the Yakut§REF§ 'Such was the culture of the Yakut people up to the October Revolution. Particularly important was the cultural assistance which the Yakuts obtained from the fraternal Russian people during the prerevolutionary years. In the 19th century it was mainly the political exiles, beginning with the Decembrists, who spread culture through Yakutiya. There were also other progressive Russian people who diffused the beginnings of a cultivated way of life among the Yakuts. In particular, they laid the foundations of the Yakut written language.' §REF§Tokarev, S. A., and Gurvich I. S. 1964. “Yakuts”, 283§REF§ Russian administrators communicated in writing and composed clerical documents: 'The people became rapidly impoverished, and the order of the voivode to the clerk Evdokim Kurdiukov in 1685 already mentions the arrears in the treasury and orders the yassak gatherers to treat the people in arrears in the following way: from them who have no cattle take, because of their povetry and extreme need one cherno-cherevyya and one sivodushatyya fox from each, and for a sable, two red foxes from each. This same document orders him to make a census of the people, and their goods and cattle: collect the taxes for the current year, 193 (1685) in full, and collect the arrears for the past years, from each as much as possible. Similar censuses were taken earlier also, and their character may be judged by the census of Grishka Krivogornitsyn in 170 (1671) “for the Meginsk volosts” There we find mentioned not only the taxes and the amounts in arrears, but also the houses, wives, number of workers in the family. There is information about those who have died and those who have run away. Moreover the name and clan of every person is given. The personal and clan nicknames, of course are very much corrupted in these notes, and changed to conform with the Russian style, but it is not hard to determine what they actually are. The yassak books and these censuses were the materials out of which was later created the present system of Yakut self-government.' §REF§Sieroszewski, Wacław 1993. “Yakut: An Experiment In Ethnographic Research”, 780§REF§ But most of the Sakha population remained illiterate until the 20th century: 'In 1942 Yakutiya celebrated the end of illiteracy among the adult population. Over the years of the Soviet regime more than 155,000 illiterate people have been taught to read and write. Work continues with those who are only partially literate in the network of adult schools.' §REF§Tokarev, S. A., and Gurvich I. S. 1964. “Yakuts”, 298§REF§ We have selected 1800 as a provisional date of transition.", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 195, "name": "RuYakuL", "start_year": 1632, "end_year": 1900, "long_name": "Sakha - Late", "new_name": "ru_sakha_late", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "The Lena River Valley, also known as Sakha, is a territory in eastern Siberia over four times the size of Texas. §REF§ (Balzer and Skoggard 1997, 1) Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, and Ian Skoggard. 1997. “Culture Summary: Yakut.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV</a>. §REF§ One of the coldest places on Earth, it has been home to the Sakha people since at least the 13th century CE. §REF§ (Gogolev 1992, 65) Gogolev, A. I. 1992. “Basic Stages of the Formation of the Yakut People.” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 31 (2): 63-69. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/F428XZIE\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/F428XZIE</a>. §REF§ Cossacks first arrived in the 1620s, and after a long siege of a Sakha fortified settlement, the entire region was placed under tribute to the Russian czar in 1642. §REF§ (Balzer and Skoggard 1997, 2) Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, and Ian Skoggard. 1997. “Culture Summary: Yakut.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV</a>. §REF§ The region remained under czarist control until the Russian Revolution, when it was one of the last Russian territories to be consolidated under the new regime. §REF§ (Balzer and Skoggard 1997, 2) Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, and Ian Skoggard. 1997. “Culture Summary: Yakut.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV</a>. §REF§ <br><i>Population and political organization</i><br>Prior to Russian rule, the region was not politically centralized. Early Sakha communities were governed by lineage councils, clans, and elders rather than a bureaucratic state apparatus. §REF§ (Balzer and Skoggard 1997, 7) Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, and Ian Skoggard. 1997. “Culture Summary: Yakut.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=rv02-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/GD78HCEV</a>. §REF§ After the Russian occupation, the czarist administration imposed taxes and established an administrative infrastructure. §REF§ (Jochelson 1933, 220) Jochelson, Waldemar. 1933. The Yakut. Vol. 33. Anthropological Papers of the AMNH. New York: The American Museum of Natural History. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/FTJS2I4W\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/FTJS2I4W</a>. §REF§ For most of the rest of its Russian history, the territory was controlled by governors under the umbrella of the czarist regime. §REF§ (Jochelson 1933, 224) Jochelson, Waldemar. 1933. The Yakut. Vol. 33. Anthropological Papers of the AMNH. New York: The American Museum of Natural History. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/FTJS2I4W\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/FTJS2I4W</a>. §REF§ <br>It is difficult to find population estimates forSakha. It was very sparsely populated, and according to one account of a late 18th-century expedition to the region, the district of Gigansk (in the Lena River Valley) had 4834 'tributary natives' in 1784 but only 1938 by 1789. §REF§ (Sauer 1802, 112) Sauer, Martin. 1802. An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia. London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, in the Strand. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/WEZG6MTS\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/WEZG6MTS</a>. §REF§ The account unfortunately does not provide figures for the entirety of the province.", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 25, "name": "Lena River Valley", "subregion": "Siberia", "longitude": "129.379494854000", "latitude": "63.462822242300", "capital_city": "Yakutsk", "nga_code": "YAK", "fao_country": "Russia", "world_region": "Central Eurasia" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 11, "name": "Siberia", "subregions_list": "Urals, West Siberia, Central Siberia, Yakutia", "mac_region": { "id": 3, "name": "Central and Northern Eurasia" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 399, "year_from": 1650, "year_to": 1832, "description": "The following quote implies that indigenous writing emerged in the region in the 19th century. \"The first documented autochthonous, Mande script to appear in West Africa was the one created by Duala Bukere from Grand Cape Mount County in Liberia who created a Vai syllabary in 1833, which has been standardized to 212 characters (Dalby, 1967: 14-18). [...] Appearing first in the region, the Vai syllabary became the prototype for other writing systems that were created in the inter-wars among indigenous peoples in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Speakers of southern Mande languages such as the Mende (1921) and the Kpelle (1935), and speakers of the Kru languages such as the Bassa (1920-25) have based their writing systems on the syllabary (Dalby, 1967: 2-4).\"§REF§(Oyler 2001: 75) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/X7HQWWH9/collection.§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": "2023-08-24T10:29:18.796557Z", "tag": "IFR", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": false, "drb_reviewed": false, "name": "Phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 607, "name": "si_early_modern_interior", "start_year": 1650, "end_year": 1896, "long_name": "Early Modern Sierra Leone", "new_name": "si_early_modern_interior", "polity_tag": "POL_AFR_WEST", "general_description": "", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": "", "created_date": null, "modified_date": "2024-01-11T13:46:08.183001Z", "home_nga": null, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 7, "name": "West Africa", "subregions_list": "From Senegal to Gabon (Tropical)", "mac_region": { "id": 2, "name": "Africa" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 403, "year_from": 1700, "year_to": 1859, "description": " \"Literacy entered Uganda for the first time with the introduction of Islam in the late 1860’s and for nearly a decade instruction in Islam was progressing and flourishing at the royal court. When literacy was introduced into the kingdom of Buganda, it was confined to speakers of Arabic and Kiswahili. \"§REF§(Pawliková-Vilhanová 2014: 145) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/T7IMKZJJ.§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": false, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": false, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "Phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 683, "name": "Classical Buganda", "start_year": 1700, "end_year": 1894, "long_name": "Buganda", "new_name": "ug_buganda_k_2", "polity_tag": "POL_AFR_EAST", "general_description": null, "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": null, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 2, "name": "East Africa", "subregions_list": "Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda, So Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea", "mac_region": { "id": 2, "name": "Africa" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 402, "year_from": 1700, "year_to": 1867, "description": " The following quote suggests that Ajami script (see second quote) was used by a high-ranking minority; being derived from Arabic, Ajami is alphabetic. \"In southern Senegambia, where non-Manding populations predominated, Manding was a prestigious language of the pagan aristocracy and, on the other hand, the language of the Muslim merchant network of Jakhanke. The existence of Manding Ajami in that area was already attested in the first half of the 18th century (Labat 1728; cited by Giesing & Costa-Dias 2007: 63), long before the pagan rule of the ñàncoo elite of the Kaabu was definitely smashed by Muslim Fulbe troops from Fuuta Jalon. In any case, the emergence of Ajami is not related to the establishment of a Muslim political power in this area: the main holders of Islamic writing in the area, the Jakhanke merchants, were for centuries integrated into the social system of the Kaabu confederation and often served as advisers and intermediates for the political elites.\"§REF§(Vydrin 2014: 201-202) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/E8Z57DNC/collection.§REF§ \"A number of terms have been used in this volume to refer to the usage of Arabic script for languages other than Arabic. Crosslinguistically, such writing systems are often termed ‘Arabic literature’, ‘Islamic literature’ or ‘Islamic writings’, and locally they are known by a large number of names, such as Wolofal, or Kiarabu. The term Ajami in particular (or variations, such as Äjam, Ajamiya, etc.), derived from the Arabic word ʿaǧam ‘non-Arab; Persian’, has gained some degree of popularity in academic literature and is also encountered as a self-denomination for these writing systems in some languages, such as Hausa.\"§REF§(Mumin and Verstegh 2014: 1) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/collections/GWWIKDDM/items/PVIK4HGV/collection.§REF§", "note": null, "finalized": false, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": false, "drb_reviewed": null, "name": "Phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "present", "polity": { "id": 608, "name": "gm_kaabu_emp", "start_year": 1500, "end_year": 1867, "long_name": "Kaabu", "new_name": "gm_kaabu_emp", "polity_tag": "POL_AFR_WEST", "general_description": null, "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": null, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 7, "name": "West Africa", "subregions_list": "From Senegal to Gabon (Tropical)", "mac_region": { "id": 2, "name": "Africa" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] }, { "id": 309, "year_from": 1714, "year_to": 1831, "description": "See above.", "note": null, "finalized": true, "created_date": null, "modified_date": "2023-08-02T12:44:29.809578Z", "tag": "TRS", "is_disputed": false, "is_uncertain": false, "expert_reviewed": true, "drb_reviewed": false, "name": "phonetic_alphabetic_writing", "phonetic_alphabetic_writing": "absent", "polity": { "id": 102, "name": "UsIroqL", "start_year": 1714, "end_year": 1848, "long_name": "Haudenosaunee Confederacy - Late", "new_name": "us_haudenosaunee_2", "polity_tag": "LEGACY", "general_description": "The Finger Lakes region of the modern-day state of New York was once part of Iroquois territory. On the eve of European contact, this territory stretched from Lake Champlain and Lake George west to the Genesee River and Lake Ontario and from the St. Lawrence River south to the Susquehanna River. Originally, the League of the Iroquois was a confederacy of five Native American tribes (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca), joined by a sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, in 1722, following its northward migration from the Roanoke River. This confederacy was created between 1400 and 1600 CE. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the confederacy was overall able to exploit the establishment of the European fur trade to its advantage, playing French and English interests off against one another, and gaining a major role in economic and political affairs. As a result of this, the Iroquois - particularly the Seneca - also frequently clashed with other Native tribes, such as the Huron, Petun, Neutral and Susquehannock. Eventually, the Iroquois also came into conflict with the Europeans, first with the French, then with the American revolutionaries. Starting in the 19th century, the Iroquois tribes settled on reservations in western New York state, southern Quebec and southern Ontario. §REF§ (Reid 1996) Reid, Gerald. 1996. “Culture Summary: Iroquois.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE</a>. §REF§ <br><i>Population and political organization</i><br>The central Iroquois League Council dealt with common affairs, while tribal chiefs and councils (as well as the female elders of their respective lineages and more recently created non-hereditary positions) occupied an intermediary position. The council included 50 men and women representing the five original tribes and had legislative, executive and judiciary powers, but it only deliberated on matters relating to foreign affairs (for example, peace and war) as well as matters of common interest to all five tribes. §REF§ (Reid 1996) Reid, Gerald. 1996. “Culture Summary: Iroquois.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE</a>. §REF§ <br>According to Gerald Reid, there were around 5,500 Iroquois at the beginning of the 17th century. §REF§ (Reid 1996) Reid, Gerald. 1996. “Culture Summary: Iroquois.” eHRAF World Cultures. <a class=\"external free\" href=\"http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=nm09-000</a>. Seshat URL: <a class=\"external free\" href=\"https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/itemKey/ZHZI7ZTE</a>. §REF§ ", "shapefile_name": null, "private_comment": null, "created_date": null, "modified_date": null, "home_nga": { "id": 29, "name": "Finger Lakes", "subregion": "East Coast", "longitude": "-77.021375000000", "latitude": "42.704980000000", "capital_city": "Seneca Falls", "nga_code": "USNY", "fao_country": "United States", "world_region": "North America" }, "home_seshat_region": { "id": 22, "name": "East Coast", "subregions_list": "East Coast of US", "mac_region": { "id": 7, "name": "North America" } }, "private_comment_n": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" } }, "comment": null, "private_comment": { "id": 1, "text": "NO_PRIVATE_COMMENTS" }, "citations": [], "curator": [] } ] }