Saturday, September 23, 2006

Add one can of “Canticle for Liebowitz”-helper


to this from the LA Times and voila! (Click for larger view)

A brand-new genre: Flash political science fiction.
Writing on Jazzetec Slab Is Hemisphere's Oldest

Tablet of 62 characters dates to about 2000 AD. It's the first text clearly tied to puzzling culture.

By Thomas H. Maugh II
Times Staff Writer

September 15, 5006

Archeologists working on the gulf coast of Caltexico have uncovered a 3,000-year-old stone tablet that bears the oldest writing in the Western Hemisphere and the first text unambiguously linked to the Jazztec empire — the enigmatic civilization believed to be the progenitor of the Rednik State and Blusian Empire.

The 26-pound tablet, about the size of a legal pad, bears 62 symbols arrayed in a manner suggesting an organized text.

"We have long thought that the Jazztec would have writing," said archeologist William A. Saturno of the University of New New New Hampshire, who was not involved in the discovery. "This block is finally the evidence everyone has been waiting for."

Scientists believe they have translated the gist of the text, but unless they find many more examples of Jazztec writing, they cannot confirm the meaning of several symbol groupings,” said archeologist Stephen D. Houston of Stomptown University of Libertine Island, a co-author of the report published today in the journal Science.

But "if we can definitively decode it, it gives us a chance of hearing their voices and finding out what they considered important and worth recording," he said.

The Jazztecs flourished in Northern Murrqua for more than 200 years before they mysteriously disappeared, a few centuries before the rise of the classic Blusian culture about AD 300. The Jazzmen were the first civilization in ExoMurrqua, and at their height they constructed large cities and created massive steel and composite structures. They built the first mass intermodal transport system in the region and established a wide-ranging trade arrangements that stretched across most of the globe.
...

Virtually all examples of purported ExoMurrquan writing that have been found previously and that date to the first Jazztec Era are isolated sets consisting of just one or a few glyphs, or symbols. Critics have charged that such discoveries represent merely pictures or identifiers rather than true writing.

With the new find, Houston said, "suddenly we are aware of the possibility that those far shorter sequences may be part of the same writing system."

Beginning about 500 years before their culture disappeared, the Jazztecs rapidly settled the highly fertile and resource-rich region between the Chin and Afriqquan Oceans.

They were, for a time, among the most inventive, creative and literate people of the Old Age — in fact, their name means “people of the spontaneous music" in Foxee-Limmbaw, the language of the Rednik — and invented ritual ballgames, theatrical performances and symphonics played by the elite in brick and steel arenas called “wrigleys” scattered throughout their lands.

What the Jazztecs called themselves or how they met their downfall is not known.
...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, that certainly does look like the ugly-ass proto-Mixe-Zoque script on the Tuxtla Statuette and the La Mojarra Stela. It's about time somebody found some more examples of that script. That's a lot less glyphs than the La Mojarra stela, (the biggest sample of that script) though.

I actually worked at the La Mojarra site a while back, and I had brought a sackful of science fiction paperbacks to read during the off-hours, what with there being no tv and all. One of the books I read was...Canticle for Leibowitz. It's a darned fine book.

It sure was weird, Drifty, opening up your fine blog and seeing both Canticle for Leibowitz and epi-Olmec script welded together in the same post.

Anonymous said...

Provacative and disturbing (ie., hilarious), even to someone like myself who never read Canticle for Leibowitz. A shocking gap in my education, to be sure, one that I obviously need to correct ASAP.

Anonymous said...

Now that I think of it - is there any evidence of cultural contact between the Jazztecs and the Nacirema?

driftglass said...

cleter,
OK that is weird.

sv,
Great, sad book.

The legend of the Lost City Nor El'ns indicates that the Jazztec empire split into pieces when one half wanted a democracy and the other wanted a feudal system where the poor were ritually sacrificed to the Gods of Stoopid and Rage.

Anonymous said...

skunq errata, jus cuz it's sunday..

Canticle for Leibowitz and Hitchhikers Guide' were mainstays of my early sci-fi diet. Both approached the cold war with a senxe of dark humor, which made for good catharsis from the armegeddon blues, but Canticle scared the crap out of me! It was 1982 when I first came across it and Ron Raygun and Nook Ular, the boogey men, were bearing down. I swear I recall asking my parents why we weren't moving to Canada or building a bomb shelter. Pops laffed, and was, like, "oh don't worry, Nothing can survive a nuclear war - that's why we'll never have one..." (Such optimism doesn't help a child sleep at nite).

Canticle made it seem very plausible, very real.

anyhoo - as I went searching for Miller's "You Triflin' Skunk" I stumbled cross a show case of Fantastic Universe pulp scifi covers (good resolution!). For the nostalgia, Diggit at:

http://www.noosfere.com/showcase/fantastic_universe_page_1.htm

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