Michael S. Lorrey wrote,
> WOW. Talk about a supersaturated memetic solution. No wonder there were so
many
> prophets and other religious madmen running around all the time there (not
that
> that has changed much). They were literally being programmed by their
language
> acting as a memetic compiler, creating executable memes based on the
gibberish
> of nature, like reading the random typing of monkeys and finding
Shakespeare in
> every sentence.
We used to believe that a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters
would produce great works of literature. Now with the Internet, we know
that's not true. (I don't know where I stole this from.)
Yes, the Hebrew glyphs are fascinating. I wrote an article on the evolution
of the alphabet many years back. The original writings evolved from little
clay figures of cattle that were used to track inventory of real herds in
Persia. After a couple of thousand years, someone figured out that you
could depress these figures on a wet clay tablet to make a record of them.
Later, they stopped pressing the little figurines into clay and drew the
impressions by hand. Original had drawings were pictographic, like Chinese
and Egyptian. Eventually they became more stylized for easier writing.
Concepts evolved from real-world objects, to effigy figures, to pictography
drawings to abstract cuneiform sigils. The old form Semitic alphabet that
the Old Testament was written in (which looks like cuneiform, not the curly
Aramaic letters of modern Hebrew) were the earliest alphabet that was
phonetically used to spell out other words and not just what the pictures
represented. Each letter has a real-world object name. The symbols in the
Phoenician-Semitic alphabet look similar to the Egyptian hieroglyphs for
those same objects. It now is believed that the Hebrews learned writing
from the Egyptians, but were the first ones to extrapolate to and phonetic
alphabet to spell out words instead of showing little pictures of things.
The Egyptians seem to have developed their phonetic symbology later. This
makes Hebrew the earliest alphabet in the world.
I forgot to mention that since letters have real world objects associated
with the, the mere spelling of a name contained objects. If an ancient name
was said to mean "God provides for his people", it literally meant that the
person's name was spelled something like
[Male][High][Spirit][Provision][Tribe]. Also, names and words were not
separated. In English, certain names are just names. In Biblical Hebrew,
all names are real words. It is the reader's interpretation whether they
are people, deities or what. The words might say "High Mightiness demands
vengeance", and it could be read as "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Most
High." While other words that said, "Wisdom dictates that a fool and his
money are soon parted" might be read without invoking a deity. It is up to
the reader to decide if this is Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom (Sophia is the
Hebrew word for wisdom), or if this is just a proverb. Male catholic clergy
translated male personifications as God, whereas female personifications
were ignored. Gnostic mystics translating the exact same Hebrew symbols
read their Goddess Sophia all over the Bible, being more of a major
character than the God of Moses. Simple sentences could be read by one
person to describe Deities and Persons, while another person reads it as
abstract concepts with no individual involved.
I also forgot to mention the mystical concept of writing in general. When
most people are illiterate and may not know about writing, the little
squiggly marks written by Priests and Shamans look like mystic art. Imagine
that a priest can take a clay pot and make all sorts of mystical artwork on
it while chanting words of his intent. Now take that pot to another priest
and he can concentrate on it closely and sense what the first priest had
enchanted (meaning to chant) into the object. Obviously, the first priest's
mental thoughts were somehow projected onto the pot and could be gleaned by
the second priest just by examining the pot. The initial beginnings of
writing obviously appeared to give magical abilities to those who could use
these special sigils.
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