K O D I K A S / C O D E 44 (2021) · No. 1 - 3 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity. Ex occidente Lux: Kontinuität. Überlegungen zur semiotischen Rekonstruktion der alteuropäischen Schrift. (1997) Abstract: This text reviews the recent history of archaeological research until ‘ 97. The archeological findings, based on a global body of research, are instrumentalized as examples of applied semiotics. The text builds on the abductive principle developed by Charles S. Peirce and gives an overview of theories and findings concerning the development of sign systems while positioning them in relation to semiotic theory. It discusses an essential problem in communication studies, namely, the genetic relation of verbal and nonverbal communication in general, and the relation of speech and writing in particular. Furthermore, this study on the emergence of writing systems is intended to illustrate that specific research problems cannot be grasped from the narrow perspective of individual disciplines, but only in an interdisciplinary way. I. It was just 141 years ago that Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a natural historian from Elberfeld, correctly determined that skeletal remains found in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf were relics of an ice-age human being. Professor Fuhlrott, however, did not receive approbation of his conclusion, which was as bold as it was correct; instead, the experts of his time - first and foremost the Göttingen professor Rudolf Wagner and the famous physician and prehistorian Rudolf Virchow - poured scorn and derision on the outsider and variously assigned the remains to a cave bear or a member of the defeated Napoleonic Russian army. How can such gross misjudgments be made? Nowadays, when even elementary school students are familiar with the basic principles of evolution, it is difficult to understand that there should have been an epoch in which homo sapiens conceived of themselves as being at the unchanging pinnacle of creation, owing to the existence to a creatio ex nihilo, and that precisely this mystical conception not only determined the thinking of our forefathers but was destined to be celebrated in the merry rites that accompany the US-American controversy over whether Darwin ’ s theory of evolution can be taught in school or not. Today we are incomparably better informed about the prehistory and early history of humankind than we were 150 years ago: We know that human evolutionary history reaches back into the hard-to-imagine space of 4.5 - 5 million years; we know that the evolutionary paths of the pongids and hominids diverged about 6 million years ago; we know that the modern human, who long ago possessed elaborate tool technology and was naturally gifted with language, left Africa about 100 - 150,000 years ago to start conquering the entire world. We know that a characteristic feature of homo sapiens, now widespread worldwide, is its ability to exist in contradiction to its ecological context. However, we also know that, although countless human fossils have been found, we still need more than 99.99 % of the pieces in the puzzle of hominid phylogeny to prove our origin story. Suppose we have sufficiently mocked the ignorance of the 19th-century paleo-anthropologists. In that case, we can move on to the next scandal, initiated about 100 years later by the work of the two archaeologists, Marie König and Marija Gimbutas. Marie König, in her carefully documented studies, speaks of the sign language of early mankind (König 1973), and Marija Gimbutas summarizes her extensive research in the treatises The Civilization of the Goddess (Gimbutas 1996) and The Language of the Goddess (Gimbutas 1995), which have recently become available in German translation. Suppose we inquire into what the actual scandal of these works was about. In that case, we would have to air several interrelated motives: 1. Marie König documents a continuous interpretative tradition from Neolithic times to the Celts and Romans, where up to now the consciousness prevailed that there was no way back to prehistoric barbarian times, which is why it seemed permissible to deny any interpretative connection between early modern humankind and the present time. More radically put, in the sense of the progress paradigm, this would mean simply denying Neolithic man almost any cultural achievement. 2. Marija Gimbutas, based on extensive archaeological research in Southeastern Europe, came to the conclusion that thousands of years before the immigration of Indo-European tribes to Europe, the area between Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Kyiv was inhabited by an early advanced civilization, which is now called Old European or Proto-Indo-European culture. 3. Even if the discovery of an early advanced civilization on European soil would be sufficiently significant in itself because this advanced civilization was completely unknown until the seventies and eighties, the astonishing achievements of ancient European culture do not only add up to a veritable scientific sensation, but also appear to have initiated a scientific paradigm shift: Long before the Neolithic agrarian revolution in the fertile Near Eastern Crescent, ancient Europeans lived in agrarian cities, undertook an astonishing degree of pre-industrial division of labor, manufactured their clay and metal products in serial production, and distributed them in long-distance trade. They possessed a rich religious life, developed humankind ’ s first writing system as far as we know today; and, as if all this were not enough, there is reason to believe that the ancient Europeans, who were not very warlike, lived in a horribile dictu matriarchy. The experts had probably taken note of Marija Gimbuta ’ s research results with benevolent approval as a broadening of knowledge and would have probably also accepted a shift in thinking about the origins of writing - from the orient to occident - were it not for the notion of an impossible matriarchy. Therefore, it is not very surprising that the experts - apart from Shann S. Winn, who carefully examined and documented the Vin č a script in his dissertation Minn 1995), as well as Harald Haarmann, who interpreted the Vin č a script Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity 43 in detail in his latest book - paid little attention to the actual cultural achievements of the first human civilization, yet pounced with ever greater howls on the matriarchal thesis, for which I would like to refer only to the Göttinnendämmerung (Dawn of Goddesses) of the three Freiburg archaeologists Brigitte Roder, Juliane Hummel and Brigitta Kunz (1996). In the following, I will only indirectly participate in the continuation of this, in my opinion, rather fruitless debate and instead single out the writing of the Vin č a culture and discuss it under the following perspectives: 1. The following discussion is to be understood as an example of applied semiotics; 2. Semiotic axiomatics, presented here as the axiom of continuity, are seen as a heuristic principle; 3. I will use the abductive principle developed by Charles S. Peirce, without explaining it in more detail in the present context; 4. The study of ancient European writing is intended to illustrate that specific research problems cannot be grasped from the narrow perspective of individual disciplines, but only in an interdisciplinary way; 5. I would like to discuss an essential problem in communication studies, namely the genetic relation of verbal and nonverbal communication in general and the relation of speech and writing in particular, from a semiotic point of view. II. An adequate understanding of the semiotic development of humankind has failed over a very long period of time because of the static prefabrication model that Jürgen von Kempski (1992: 21-43) has called the Zim-Zum principle: the creation out of nothing. “ In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, ” it says in Genesis 1.1. On the penultimate day of creation, the remarkably always speaking God created man in his image (Genesis, 1.2.5), so the fully formed man entered the earth speaking. Even if it is left to everybody to accept this account of creation literally or metaphorically or not at all, there can be no doubt that the word and the language in the sense of the occidental, logocentric tradition, determine the beginnings of the human race. There is no talk of writing for a long time here and in the following. Only after the reception of the ten commandments (Moses, 2.20 ff.) do we hear that Moses wrote down the words of the Lord; again, it should not be argued about a literal or metaphorical interpretation of this passage, as it is useless to think about the origin of Moses ’ sudden ability to write, because in the present context, as for the long following period, the only decisive factor is the fact that writing fulfills the function of a language-dependent, secondary system of tabulating what happened. Writing has always remained under the aegis of the linguistically composed thinking of our civilization in the subordinate function in which it appeared to us at the first historical encounter: as a secondary and derived notation system. From the point of view of the critical semiotics I represent, I have to reject the determination of writing as a notational system subordinated to language as fundamentally wrong, which I have justified in more detail in my treatise on the semiotics of writing (Eschbach 1993). The situation is not fundamentally improved even if we describe writing, with Elisabeth Feldbusch (1985), as an autochthonous system and promote writing to a 44 Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity position equal to language. We need a radically new, semiotic-communication-scientific perspective to justify that we need the graphic, the drawing, and the active gesture to reach language. Neither at the beginning of human history nor at the beginning of ontogenesis do we have the - innate - word at our disposal (no matter how much instinct theorists à la Pinker may lament), but only the indicative, deictic gesture. There seems to be no accidental peculiarity of the Indo-European etymology that in the etymon of ‘ deiknimi ’ = ‘ pointing ’ also ‘ fingers ’ and ‘ five ’ are contained. The bodily-apriorically bound to the pointing with the hand only allows us to mark a topomnestic space, as Karl Bühler (1934: 147 f.) states in his theory of language, and only after a long phase of speechless, though not soundless, pointing do we slowly get into the position of socially unfolding verbal language based on this original, gestural articulation, which is programmatically contained in Andre Leroi- Gourhan ’ s book The Evolution of Writing. Reviewing the recent history of archaeological research, we come across many remarkable, surprising facts that defy explanation by the standard anti-evolutionary model. I would like to present some of these surprising facts by way of example: 1. Recently, several throwing spears about 400,000 years old have been discovered in the lignite mining area of Schöningen by scientists of the Institute for the Preservation of Monuments of the Lower Saxony State Administration Office. The spears were each made from the trunks of thirty-year-old spruce trees in such a way that there was mainly hardwood at the tips. It is also remarkable that the proportions of the spears largely coincide with each other. As with a modern sports spear, the centers of gravity are at the end of the front third. With these finds, the previous view must be revised that organized hunting began only with the rise of anatomically modern man. 2. In the Coornamu Marshes in northern Australia, researchers have discovered a boulder covered with more than 6,000 rings about two centimeters in size that, taken together, form a kangaroo. With the help of suitable procedures, the Australian rock carvings could be dated to an age of 75,000 years. 3. A flute carved from a bone was discovered in a Slovenian cave in 1995. This musical instrument was determined to be 43,000 - 67,000 years old. The assumption is that the music-making human must have also possessed an articulated, vocal gesture. 4. 1994 saw the discovery of the stone-age Grotte Chauvet in the French Ardèche. With the help of the C14 method, the rock paintings of the Grotte Chauvet, have been found to have an unprecedented level of design. However, they are significantly older than all other cave paintings known so far, for example from Altamira, Lascaux, Cassis, or Niaux, which are dated back 32,410 years. 5. It has been known for some time that the creative will of Ice Age people not only manifested itself on the rock faces of their cow shelter caves but also found a remarkable plastic form of expression. For the most part, these are representations of women, which, due to their “ deformations, ” as Marie König writes, differ significantly from the contemporaneous, “ naturalistic ” rock drawings of, for example, the Grotte Chauvet. 6. In the so-called “ giant cave ” of the Brandberg on the eastern edge of the central Namib Desert on the border between Namibia and Angola, about 43,000 rock drawings have been preserved so far, aged around 27,500 years as determined using the C14 method. The Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity 45 human representations at the Brandberg partly show such an enormous detail that even conclusions about beard shaping are possible. 7. About 7,500 years ago, the ocean water level rose so strongly due to melting ice sheets that there was a breakthrough at the Bosporus in the direction of the Black Sea and a gigantic flood. With all necessary caution concerning the documentary content, one cannot help thinking about the catastrophic floods written about in the Bible, during the Gilgamesh epic. Those who were able to save themselves from the flood, which took around a kilometer of land every day, fled to southeastern Europe, carrying the achievements of the Neolithic revolution in the then flooded and salinated coasts of the Black Sea, to new settlements. 8. For a few years now, it has become common to consider the agrarian culture in Southeastern Europe, built by the “ flood ” refugees, as the first advanced human culture and call it Proto-Indo-European (PIE) or Old European culture. Besides numerous highly astonishing cultural achievements originating from the most important settlements of the PIE culture in Vin č a, Tripolje, Hódmez ő vásárhely, Sesklo, Karanovo, and Cucuteni, reported mainly by Marija Gimbutas (1995 and 1996), the first writing of humankind originated in this Old European, Occidental culture. In the sense of Peirce ’ s abduction, I consider the surprising facts presented under points 1 - 8 as the complex premise of a hypothetical conclusion. But if - as I have argued before - gestural-graphic articulation corresponds to a basic human need, there would be a reason to take PIE writing for granted. In the sequel, I will argue that the self-evidence of the previously formulated hypothesis is primarily supported, if not required, by the semiotic continuity axiom. When it comes to supporting the thesis of cultural continuity from the Paleolithic period to the recent past, numerous experts such as Marie König, James Mellaart, Marija Gimbutas, or Harald Haarmann can be named as authorities who unanimously emphasize that cultural development takes place in a continuous process: cultura non facit saltus! By the example of the net-like grid structures, convincing and evident proof can be given that specific structures and motifs have been preserved over a long period of time: Already in the oldest rock drawings, the grid structure appears. After many intermediate stations, which I do not document here, it still returns twenty thousand years later on numerous Celtic coins. Yes, we even find evidence for it on the Aachen imperial throne of Charlemagne. In the present context, this is undoubtedly an exciting finding, which remains so long in the superficial and decorative, until the question of the respective function and meaning does not receive a satisfying answer. To express this fact again a little more dramatically: If we come across a depiction of a deer in a French Ice Age cave and discover the image of a roaring deer in a living room in Essen, this coincidence does not justify any useful conclusions. In the search for the answer to the question of function and meaning, motif and style analyses and typologies must be transcended in the direction of a semiotic evaluation of the material at hand, as evidenced not least by Emmanuel Anati ’ s failed typologies in the Valcamonica project. My seventh semiotic axiom emphasizes the processuality of sign interpretation. The processuality of sign interpretation is characterized by being underpinned by delimitation and the transfer of what is already known. That is why there can be no presuppositionless 46 Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity sign interpretation in principle. Regarding the notorious issue of the origin of sign interpretation, I recommend with Peirce ’ s dictum of possible reflection that the beginning of sign interpretation is a process of beginning. In the semiotic interpretation of old European script, the axiom of continuity demands that we determine its preconditions and precursors to be able to grasp the specific interpretative progress that it achieved compared with earlier approaches. However, the continuation of the old European writing tradition must not be neglected either, because only in the demarcation of what is already known and the expansion to what is still unknown and therefore new, can the specific character of difference of the old European sign system emerge. What programmatically appears to be completely free of doubt and plausible raises quite considerable difficulties in practice, since we find ourselves in the most unfavorable starting position imaginable concerning the origin of Old European writing if we orient ourselves by the criteria of analysis systematized by I. J. Gelb (1952): 1. We do not yet know who spoke the ancient European language; 2. It is not yet known what language ancient Europeans spoke; 3. So far, no translation of an Old European text into another language or script is known from which certain conclusions for any reconstruction work. The various hurdles that stand in the way of the reconstruction of Old European writing require a whole bundle of interdisciplinary analytical steps, some of which I would like to present: 1. Genetic analysis of the PIE burials or a mitochondrial analysis (Gibbons 1993: 1249; cf. Forster 1995: 743-753) could in principle provide information about which ethnic substratum the PIE people belonged to. It would be conceivable, for example, that the PIE people were related to the few non-Indo-European ethnic groups that can still be traced in Europe today, namely the Raetians and the Basques. Should relevant data emerge from the genetic analysis, some promising linguistic hypotheses are likely to follow. 2. In a situation like the present one, in which neither the semantics nor the pragmatics of a linguistic community can be made in any significant way, it would make sense, following the example of the great typologist Joseph Greenberg, to bring order into the inventory of the characters of the Old European script with the help of a purely statistical procedure. Since Shann S. Winn in his exemplary dissertation has already worked up the entire character inventory of the old European script, nothing more stands in the way of the statistical script analysis. We must be aware, however, that this kind of analysis cannot transcend the narrow confines of syntax and morphemics until semantic and pragmatic data becomes available. If neither the PIE civilization nor the PIE script sank without trace, but instead were taken over by the Indo-European conquerors as well as by the Cretan Linear A and the Minoan Linear B and found their way into the Messapic script, there would be in principle the possibility of a back-transposition of the findings with the help of suitable procedures. The Germanist Derk Ohlenroth from Tübingen has just presented a stimulating study on this Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity 47 subject under the title Das Abaton des Lykäischen Zeus und der Hain der Elaia (Ohlenroth 1996), and promising investigations of the Messapic script, which Simona Marchesini Velasco is conducting at the Seminar for General Linguistics, also from Tübingen. In an idea-historical procedure, which Gert Meier (1988) not particularly happily calls ‘ language archaeology ’ , attempts have been made to reconstruct complex concepts linguistically, something carried out with ice-age people already. Concepts like space, ” “ time, ” “ life ” and “ death ” appeared to be behind the content of many cave paintings, convincingly demonstrated in a detailed line of evidence, which I must refrain from reproducing here. Language archaeology carries these proto-terms into early languages and tries on this bridgehead-like basis to form a continuous reading of written testimonies. The most adventurous theories have been put forward in the past for interpreting cave paintings and visual art of the Ice Age, ranging from shamanism to hunting magic to a visual historical archive. The Stone Age female statuettes have also been included in this interpretive swirl, and while some suspected early sexist pornographers at work (cf. e. g. Guthrie 1984), others diagnosed obesity as a result of an overabundance of animal food, and while still others celebrated the level of design of the Stone Age artworks, hardly anyone has come up with a cultural semiotic interpretation that is characterized as much by simplicity as by plausibility: The Neolithic people did not “ wallpaper ” their cult sites deep inside their sharks with murals and decorate them in a homely way, and they did not perform hunting magic there, even if some spectacular examples (see bison man) seem to invite such misinterpretations. It comes to an integral explanation only at the moment when the supposed art or decoration or magic character of the ice-age objects is moved into the background and the elementary semiotic question is examined, whether there is a semiotic function above or beside the sheer physicality or materiality of the ice-age objects, which may have been motivating behind this “ ice-age art ” not only in the sense of a surplus of meaning but of a constitutive force. If we let ourselves be guided by the thought that Neolithic man ordered his universe semiotically, and expressed it in a sacred script because for the time being no other form of expression was available to him, if we regard the Ice Age products like the writings of other cultures (such as the Chinese) as a semiotic manifestation of fundamental problems of human existence, i. e., if we interpret the Neolithic products as a worldviewreligious signature, we have taken a decisive step to leave behind material thinking and to open the door to a semiotic interpretation of the Ice Age worldview. The ice-age human knows only what can be expressed in a characteristic signature, and if we want to understand, we must strive to learn to read this signature. Michel Lorblanchet, director at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and author of the recently published handbook Cave Painting (Lorblanchet 1997b), has come to a decisive step closer to the semiotic interpretation of the Ice Age signature during his extensive and creative studies. Based on his experience with Australian Aborigines, Maître Lorblanchet tried a spraying technique in which certain dyes are chewed and then sprayed by mouth onto a rock wall. In a field test, the French scholar depicted the dotted horses of the Pech Merle cave and individual figures from the sharks of Lascaux and Chauvet in their original size. Michel Lorblanchet describes his work, which lasted several days, and the experience he gained as follows: 48 Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity The experiment fully confirmed the use of the spraying technique. It provided important information about the duration of the work, the number of people involved in it, the imprints and the traces on the ground, and about the light used. [ … ] Where he uses this technique himself, the pre-historian experiences it physically. It has been of extraordinary symbolic importance: Man ’ s breath breathes life into the wall, creating an animal or sign on the rock face. There is no more direct and close oneness between creator and work. The experiment means the closest possible approach to rock art: the prehistorian puts himself in the place of the Stone Age artist and repeats his gestures. In this way, he learns to better grasp the intention behind the gesture, the motivation behind the action, or, even more, the spirit and sometimes the symbolic context in which these works were created. The attempt refutes the prejudice according to which the mural was the only goal of the artist and the production in his eyes was a secondary matter. On the contrary, it is possible that in some cases the painting was only the trace of a process that was as significant or even more important than its result (Lorblanchet 1997a: 36; - A. E.). Elsewhere, however, also concerned with the cultural semiotic capture and explanation of the maximally foreign, namely in Kurt Singer ’ s Semiotics of Japanese culture, I have described this kind of sign-theoretical analysis as a form of participant observation. Insofar as I place myself symbolically in my object, performing the bodily gestures made in the original production, I have the possibility of going through the same bodily experiences as the original producer, which is why it seems legitimate to me to claim that in this way I can gain a first impression of what the original producer meant. The semiotic analysis will of course not remain on this level of sensual certainty or still speechless firstness, but - strictly according to Peirce ’ s category theory - will put these first findings in relation to related data. For example, the data obtained in the tracing production of some stone-age products can be put in relation to another group of bodily experiences, which arise, for example, when that posture is assumed which is described in the literature as the “ adorant posture ” and is attested by a significant number of twoand threedimensional objects. Here, too, however, as with the previously described spraying technique used by Michel Lorblanchet, it is not a matter of simply reproducing or imitating a physical activity, but rather it seems absolutely necessary to pay close attention to the situational context: Without being able to offer here already a complete or even satisfactory listing of the situational context of the “ adorant posture, ” I would nevertheless like to mention that this posture is often assumed by mask wearers and that the mask used in this case shows a striking resemblance to the physiognomy of the great (bird) goddess. For a more precise understanding, it would be essential to know who was authorized or obliged to appear with this posture; likewise, it would be clear at which time of day and season this posture was practiced and at which place it was exercised. I will refrain from giving further examples in the present context. An elaborated semiotic analysis, however, will not be able to be content with two traps, but will, on the contrary, strive to establish as dense a network of relations as possible between a more significant number of singular phenomena. Since Peirce ’ s category theory is not satisfied with a positivistic data collection but demands the interpretation or explanation of the collected data as a final step of the investigation, we will continue the investigation and screen the collected data for regularities and rules. In the formulation of the explanatory regularities and rules, we have to be guided by the fact that the graphic gestures are ordered according to a particular system because some recur again and again, and others are very rare. Despite great realism, Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity 49 all animal drawings are schematized according to a certain pattern, which is why we may conjecture that the Stone Age people encoded mythological, genealogical, and social references in complex sign systems, or, as Danielle Stordeur writes: The animal outlines, lines, circles, and tridents represent a ‘ mnemonic landscape, ’ which refers to drawn mnemonic markers that indicate the ancestors ’ path. The ancestors crossed the land on “ dream paths ” and mapped the world, animals, plants, families, and clans of people. The symbols presumably guaranteed them only the reality of the symbolized (Stordeur 1977: 36). This brings me to the end of my remarks, but there is still a lot left unsaid and the whole approach has more of a programmatic character than the presentation of finished results. I very much hope to come a little closer to realizing this program here in Essen in the next few years. Note The fact that occasional momentary discoveries of hitherto completely unknown sign systems could give ancient European writing a certain competition does not affect my argumentation in the least. Still, it can rather be regarded as a confirmation of my thesis on the fundamental necessity of graphic articulation and notation systems for the intellectual development of man. Such a prescriptural sign system, about 10,000 years old, has recently been discovered by a French archaeological team in Jerf el Ahmar, Syria. Although the zigzag lines, dashes, and animal-like and crescent-shaped engravings carved on stone tablets are not writing, they are a coherent sign system. The excavation director emphasizes: The same signs appear again and again. Their arrangement and repetition serve no decorative purposes, but information alone. But serpentine lines, hooks, and circular arcs do not form sentences. Instead, they are a brief summary of references to specific events or contexts, a symbolic pictorial history, and a textogram (Weber 1997: 36). Helmut Brinker and Roger Goepper report on an analogous, albeit 5,000 years more recent phenomenon in the catalog of the Berlin exhibition “ Art Treasures from China ” : A sensational phenomenon and an essential link between Banpo and Jiangzhai is the occurrence of simple incised marks on several painted ceramic vessels and fragments. The marks usually appear on the rim of the vessel and are sometimes carved into the still-moldable clay before firing, and sometimes carved into the body after firing or after a period of use. These marks occur only singly; however, some appear repeatedly on different pieces. Based on the examined Banpo material, 22 different types can be distinguished in 112 cases. Their meaning is still uncertain, but the fact that a certain uniformity in size and application, a deliberate regularity, and a simple, clear structural design can be observed, suggests that it could be an attempt to fix elementary ideas or events with standardized emblems. Perhaps we are dealing here, as Kwangchih Chang suggests, with workshop or potter ’ s marks or owner ’ s marks. It remains to be seen whether the research begun in China on this question will one day enable us to imagine the scribe marks of Yangshao pottery as the cue or even the timid beginnings of Chinese writing. After all, Guo Moruo and Li Xiaoding have meanwhile succeeded in convincingly demonstrating in some cases the close relationship between the ceramic characters on the one hand and various minerals and clansmen of the Shang dynasty on the other (Brinker/ Goepper 1980: 6 f.). 50 Ex Occidente Lux: Continuity References Bühler, Karl 1934: Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Jena: Fischer. 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