

The lost script: 1000-year-old African/Arabic writing system - davi
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/10/the_lost_script/

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ig1
This is slightly misleading, Ajami hasn't been particularly ignored. There are
a huge number of african manuscripts in a variety of languages including
Arabic which haven't been studied, it's been estimated that in Mali alone
there are something like 250,000 - 500,000 manuscripts from 1100-1800 AD in
private hands. Just in Timbuktu it's estimated their are upwards of 100,000+
manuscripts (Wikipedia has more details if people are interested).

The official libraries struggle to even catalogue the material they have. The
Ahmed Baba Institute is trying to digitize it's collection but has only manage
a tiny fraction of the 18,000 manuscripts they hold.

Largely it's a problem of money and staff, obtaining, preserving and
cataloguing these manuscripts isn't cheap, let alone studying them all. Even
preliminary analysis of the manuscripts available in libraries is a task that
will take millions of man-hours.

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ricosroughnecks
Hmm, I was under the impression Africa had no native written languages
(besides ancient Egyptian). Please tell me I'm wrong.

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mahmud
Are you kidding me? Ethiopia alone has multiple scripts. Amazighi family of
languages has a written form that's older than anything in use today.

~~~
ricosroughnecks
Unfortunately, I'm not. Growing up in the inner-city (Detroit), the ONLY thing
we learned about our ancestors' history was slavery. No desire to thread-jack,
but being influenced by such an education system does wonders for one's self-
esteem (especially at such a young age)... Seems I have a research topic for
the day!

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ZeroGravitas
The BBC had a good intro to this subject called _"The Lost Libraries of
Timbuktu"_. At least I liked it, but I had no idea about any of this stuff
before I watched it. It was repeated a few days ago and is available on
iPlayer for one more day:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkb0z>

I'm assuming that it was the inspiration for the new series, _The Lost
Kingdoms of Africa_ which just started and focusses more on art history:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1m4>

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julius_geezer
Remember that when Ventris figured out Linear B, the text turned out to be
mostly warehouse inventories.

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elblanco
<http://www.omniglot.com/>

