Dr. Robert D. Enzmann
Contents:
-Start Story-(Introduction)
-1- Ice Age Mother & Child
-2- Ice Age Hearth & Home
-3- Ice Age Textiles & Tools
-4- Ice Age Hunting & Fishing
-5- Ice Age Health & Medical
-6- Ice Age Calendars & Contracts
-7- Ice Age Chronology & Linguistics
-End Story- (Conclusion)
Start Story (Introduction)
Bølling Paleolithic Script
This work presents Ice Age inscriptions as language that can be and herein is, translated.
Quite aware of Grimm’s law of languages, acquainted with Collinder’s Ural-Altaic studies, and comfortable in several languages, I had a notion that there must be more to relationships between languages than is currently considered. It was only a vague notion, nothing else – until discovering the Nostratic scholars. In moments, I understood (aided by a linguistic background, a chronology, paleoclimatology, geography, extensive proto-histories, pre-history, archaeological data, and computers based on Nostratic), and constructed a linguistic sequence as a function of geography and climatological forces. The language is the late Nostratic, or archaic PIE -1- (Proto-Indo-European stage -1). The Nostratic Paleo Linguists are absolutely correct as to time, grammar, etc.
Titles are stated by the major cardinals. These pictorials are identifiable with today’s magazine covers, which suggestively illustrate the most interesting contents and their context. Nouns include major cardinals which are usually sentence subjects and are recognizable pictures such as images of four ladies, a teenage girl, and a baby of the Gönnersdorf hunting clan; minor cardinals which are usually objects in sentences; symbols which are usually fractions of recognizable pictures such as mammoths; and signs – conventional, usually barely-recognizable fractions of pictures.
Primary-cardinal noun subjects (immediately recognizable pictures, subjects in sentences, less often objects), include: ladies (arms, rumps, and breasts); mammoths (tusks, heads, trunks, ears, fat slabs, and foot); shoes (upper, sole, felt lining); textiles (spinning, plying, cording, loom, needles, quilting channels); and animals (mammoth, horse, antler, duck, goose, down, quills, and feathers). Most surprising in this series are the images of upright looms, rope beds, quilted clothing, needle manufacture, and carpentry (home building).
The grammar of this ancient language is beautifully detailed by sentences that are easily read along lead-lines (symbols and signs along a line), lead-lanes (lanes of symbols and signs), link-lines, and around radiants (clusters of link-lines). The translations herein are transliterated into grammatical English, unless indicated as Nostratic or very early Proto-Indo-European. Translation follows lead-lines, lead-lanes, and clauses, conditionals, modifiers, etc., which are connected to cardinals, or connected by link-lines.
Sentences sequence along lead-lines, lead-lanes, and link-lines; sequences serving as equivalents of verbs, usually running from a cardinal, through symbols and signs to another cardinal, often the next sentence of an independent clause. Associated with major thematics along lead-lines are single link-lines, or radiants. Single links and radiant linkages serve as adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions.
The inscriptions are pictorial writings, organized so the eye is caught by major cardinals then guided with link-lines through fragments of pictures. Sentences are strung along lead-lines (or lead-lanes, as the Paleolithic writer does not always sketch in a line). Modifiers attach with link-lines.
Format, Parts of Speech, Grammar
-1- Start-story,
-2- Lead-lines,
-3- Geographics,
-4- Link-lines,
-5- Calendrics,
-6- Major Cardinals,
-7- Minor Cardinals,
-8- Activities Radiant,
-9- Symbols,
-10- Phonetics,
-11- Registers
-12- End story
1) Start-story signs begin chronicles. Reading is usually from left to right and from top to bottom.
2) Chronicles (as functions of time) are related geographically along lead-lines, lead-lanes, and link-lines. Lead-lines guide through major and minor images, symbols, sequences of locations, actions, and things acted on. Word sequences are worked out along major lead-lines. When lead-lines are omitted lead-lanes may serve the same purpose.
3) Geographics are both, and either/or, followed and intersected by lead-lines. The geographics include watersheds, rivers, riverways, game trails, hills, cliffs, and bluffs. The geographics tell where events take place.
4) Link-lines connect major and minor cardinals, and activities radiants.
5) Calendrics define 365-day solar years, 364-day lunar years, 28-day lunar months, 14-day fortnights, 7- day lunar weeks, 3-day periods of dark-of-the-moon, and 5-day periods of bright moonlight. The calendrics also define the winter and summer solstices, and the spring and fall equinoxes. There are calendrics used with cardinals along lead lines, in an attempt to give symbols for the verb’s past, present, and future tenses. Often-used calendric cardinals and symbols include solar azimuth V, lunar circle, and horizontal (seasonal) lines.
6) Major Cardinals are usually of animals. Placed along lead-lines, facing forward or backward, they indicate times of migration. Major & minor cardinals are layered with solar-lunar calendrics.
7) Minor Cardinals are of secondary, recognizable pictures.
8) Activities Radiant connect cardinals with several activities.
9) Symbols and signs elaborate upon cardinals as functions of time, place, persons, trade, animals, & weather.
10) Phonetics and vocatives are few, and largely exclamatory.
11) Registers are linked groups of radiants.
12) End-story hall-mark-like signature? of author(ess)(s).
Initial Program Categories
- Calendric
- Geographic
- Marriage, Mother & Child
- Winter House
- Textiles
- Shoes
- Horses
- Fishing
- Tetra Fauna
- Mammoth
- Furnishings: Beds
- Tools: Stone Tools; Bone & Ivory Tools
- Trade & Contracts
- Needle Manufacture & Use
- Religion, Names, Myth, & Music
- Making Glue
- Rendezvous
- Soap, Anatomy (incl. animal), Medical
- Ducks & Geese
Under subject headings were tabulated: nouns (as document titles, subjects and objects); adjectives (abundantly associated with nouns); verbs; verb-tenses (usually along lead-lines modified by calendrics); adverbs (occasionally); and prepositions.
Time, lunar and solar calendrics, animal migrations, fish runs, human activity, clothing, and verb tense are almost always shown. Calendrics are repeated endlessly throughout the Bølling Magdalenian centuries from Iberia, through Europe to the Urals. Location (geographic) is usually shown, often very obvious, and often discoverable by studying regional maps and arrangement of symbols on the Magdalenian ivory, bone, and bone stamps. Who, what, when, where, and how are consistently shown in context with conditions.
Proto-Indo-European Bølling I, II & III, Late Magdalenian Culture, c. 13,000 to 11,750 BC
The grammar is essentially Nostratic. Magdalenian culture from Gönnersdorf on the Rhine spread globally during the Bølling. Whether we started with a single language or one powerful commercial language, both are still in the Golden Bølling. The grammar found on the inscriptions and the results from linguistic research are very similar.
There exists an extraordinary Proto-Indo-European archive of tablets at Gönnersdorf on the Rhine. This is one of the most extensive ever recovered, with a library of more than 1,000 chronicles on bone, stone, and ivory. Detailed drawings of the Gönnersdorf archives by Gisela Fischer are from the volumes of Die Menschendarstellungen von Gönnersdorf der Ausgrabung Von 1968. Writings with cardinal pictograms are elaborated upon with interlinked symbols. Lead-lines are then logically detailed with short link-lines, located with map symbols, and then dated with lunar-solar calendars. Individuals are identified with person symbols. Dwellings, tools, and utensils are identified, and stored foods, hides, furs, fabrics, ivory, bone, and stone are indicated. Verbal semi-symbolic actions show start and stop signs, leading the reader through daily, seasonal, and annual events.
The method is beautifully developed in the Gönnersdorf archive and is widespread, seen in Iberia, France, Italy, throughout the Balkans, through European Russia, along the Andronovo Corridor, and river-ways of Siberia, and through to the Pacific.
Bølling Translations
Translation is symbol by symbol. Most symbol translations are in bold print. Small superscript and subscript words are logically associated with the symbols or editorial.
Superscripts and subscripts in parenthesis are suggestions and guesses.
In reading the tablets, the grammar they used emerges in word sequences along lead-lines and link-lines. It’s consistent with what paleo linguists call Nostratic. Nouns are consistent with words from pre-agricultural millennia. This style of writing uses symbols and techniques common in the Solutrean, Gravettian, Aurignacian, and earlier cultures. The Bølling archive, written by Euro-Caucasians of the Rhône, Rhine, Danube, Don, and Volga, represents Classical Nostratic. The linguist Shevoroshkin triangulated back to create a Nostratic vocabulary of c. 12,500 BC, and it never occurred to him that countless thousands of inscriptions in this language exist.
To decipher these inscriptions, I worked with current languages, known ancient (often dead) languages, and dialects that scholars have reconstructed from Nostratic vocabularies and grammar as used c. 12,500 BC. Major Nostratic scholars include Aron Dolgopolsky, Illic Svityc – killed while quite young in a tragic accident – and Vitalij Shevoroshkin. It is they who have reconstructed Nostratic vocabulary, grammar and phonetics, and additionally World, which dates to the earliest Aurignacian times c. 45,000 to 29,000 BC.
Paragraphing of ideas is there, but rather than being organized sequentially as in a novel or newspaper article, paragraphed concepts are arranged as would be seen with the organization of Markovian state-spaces, and transitions as information state-spaces.
Stories on some tablets remind me vividly of conversations with Hungarian novelist Koestler, only a few really appreciated him. We talked of fairy tales, legends, and fireside stories, agreeing that most were thousands, even tens of thousands of years old. To my knowledge, he never wrote of this. It wasn’t until recently that this information was published by Michelle Snyder, in ReVision, Unlocking Secret Knowledge.
During Bølling I, II & III, Late Magdalenian (c. 13,000 to 11,750 BC), at Isturitz in the western Pyrenees in late-summer, early-fall, beaters herd and spook horses over a horse-fall, then kill, butcher, and process them (No. 75155 by S. A. de Beaune (see Textiles & Tools). The engraved rock is a tool for scraping horsehides. Tightly held, it would be interesting to search for residue of human DNA where it was clutched. A few tools are certain to yield some measure of DNA. The cartographic migratory register shows the trail that horse herds follow seasonally. The horse fall register indicates three are killed and the rest escape. The trail and horse fall are indicated on a topographic map of Isturitz.
Bølling III, c. 12,000 – 11,750 BC, Magdalenian V people make willow-leaf shaped spear points for killing big game, but not for hunting gigantic mammoths, as mega-game is more easily killed with laurel-leaf points, which are abundantly manufactured by earlier Magdalenian and Solutrean peoples.
During the Bølling warm-interval, Magdalenian V people flourish. It’s pleasantly warmer compared with the glacial Dryas I centuries. Food increases bountifully as vast herds of horses, buffalo, antelope, deer, saiga, predators, and scavengers stream northward to graze and browse on rich grasses of the dry sun-swept steppe.
Arctic and sub-arctic mammoths, bison, wooly rhinos, wooly tigers, musk oxen, and reindeer are not lost to the hunters. For while they migrate north during summers to the treeless cold steppe, where only an occasional Magdalenian hunter ventures, they return during the cold months, migrating southward as the southern animals move back toward the Mediterranean. The Danube-Rhine-Rhône trails are a hunter’s paradise. Generations of survivors of bitter hungry centuries of the Dryas I glaciation are a hardy race, unusually intelligent, and devoted to childcare and welfare – those who are not, perish.
Civilization flourishes in the Aquitania Triangle and adjacent regions in Cantabria, S. Iberia, Italy, the Black Sea, and Caucasus. Of all locations, Aquitania is unsurpassed. Even of these years, some 14,000 years ago, one must acknowledge the equivalent of what this author has always cherished: that “French is a fundamental global culture, not just a language.”
Bølling civilization reached its zenith in the Aquitania region; however, the Gönnersdorf archive is so large, so well-preserved, so consistently written and extensive, that Gönnersdorf inscriptions – rather than the abundant Aquitania writings – are currently the best materials for translating Paleolithic writing.
Current knowledge of the language spoken at Gönnersdorf, and presumably in one or another dialect from the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar to east of the Urals) is shadowy but neither unknown nor unknowable. It’s a form of what today is called Nostratic (our speech), the Ur mother-tongue of the Caucasians.
Stories from the Bølling
A civilization extending from Spain and Portugal, across France, Germany, the Balkans, and Russia, lives along the Rhône-Rhine-Danube-Dnieper lowland riverway trails. Tetra fauna (herds of the four seasons) migrate over open, near-treeless lands, across windblown oceans of many-colored grasses. In legions, together in armies, hundreds of thousands – even millions – thunder northward. The greatest of them lead, the strongest protect the flanks. Mothers, aunts, and sisters run in formation around little ones. Tetra fauna are big game that migrate continental distances along watershed highland trails.
It’s a song. Some are animals are sick, a few injured, all must age. Predators follow, ghosted by scavengers hunting the stragglers. Above, snowy white water-bird armadas winging northward sing the songs of the wild ducks. They fly, they race to feast, to fatten, and thrive on the richest, most nutritious grazing lands that have ever existed. It’s not tundra; it’s the lost world of cold prairie long-grasses.
In wave after wave, flowers blossom, glowing amidst cold prairie long-grasses. Ridges are sometimes powder blue; slopes are crimson to orange. Winds winnow and separate the seeds. With the moon in dark skies, grasses, flowers, and skies turn different colors each season. Ghosts of these lost lands linger locally during California, Chile, Namibia, and Western Australia’s flower seasons. Seeing the colors, great and small creatures, flowers, and skies of the Pleistocene’s last tattered remnants on the 1920s southern African High Veldt, hearing its winds and creatures, I want to cry that no travelogue can begin to describe what it’s like. There must be something genetic in mankind’s love of the world at our own dawning.
Continental glaciers – going-not-yet-gone – are a mile high about the icy Baltic salt sea. Mountains of ice, piled upon massifs of granite, shimmer indigo, and blue-white under summer’s fresh, clear, westerly winds
blowing in from the Atlantic. Rivers roar with fresh glacial waters. Salmon in unimaginable numbers race, shimmering and leaping upstream. Where today there are a few such streams, in the lost lands of the Bølling centuries they were countless – and the real story is endlessly whispered to us. It’s a story scratched by our ur-grandmothers on stone, ivory, and bone.
Winds shift abruptly in this extreme continental climate. Winter’s easterlies sweep across the enormous Amerasian continent from now submerged Georges and Grand Banks off New England, Nova Scotia, and Labrador, continuing on across the thousand-mile-wide Beringia cold prairies betwixt Alaska and Siberia, then over Central Asia and Europe, of which England is a broad peninsula. Dust-laden autumn skies flame red and deep crimson.
Glaciers grind rocks to powder. Winds raise dust storms. Across the drying long-grass prairies, first antelope, horses, red deer, bison, reindeer, caribou, and then mammoths thunder south. The fallen dust – ground from living rock massifs – is wonderfully rich in nutrients. Even as aerial armadas of herons, storks, cranes, and others wing southward; light snows (the poor man’s fertilizer, as snow collects nitrates in the air) further enrich the dusty loose soils. Wonderful will be the next year’s many-colored grasses and seasonal waves of flowers when spring returns. The very dust is a blessing. It still is. Today’s people know it as Mid-America’s farmlands, Russia’s black earth, or China’s loess-lands where “the Earth, tickled with a hoe, will laugh back with a crop”.
Paleolithic people gather from hundreds of miles about rendezvous sites, meeting grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and of course, boys meet girls; both have grown since they last met. Some even attend distant meetings. Rendezvous and fairs are held in the fall. Garments, embroidery, blankets, ivory, salt, tool stones, dried fish, lamps and lamp oil, flutes and whistles, semi-precious stones, tools, fishing lines and nets, dogs, and perhaps other animals are sold and traded. Hair is styled. Stories are told. Games are played. How much we have forgotten. In Boston, Massachusetts’ Norumbega Park, storytellers with magnificent voices (in the days before loudspeakers) could tell tales to hundreds at a time. In China till the 1930s, in their fast-breakfast cafes, a storyteller would stand and tell of wonders.
Stories told in these Magdalenian translations are to this day vaguely visible and include creation from chaos, a Yggdrasil-like version of dust-to-dust; child deities; incautious and disobedient children; and even animal fables. Paleolithic writers are overwhelmingly ladies, and while in no way are males denigrated, their civilization is matriarchal. During the Magdalenian centuries of the Bølling Golden Age hearth and home are female-centered, and tales are told around winter hearths and warming stones by magnificent women and their daughters.
Every day the sun drops in the sky, and nights grow longer. Every year at the winter solstice the sun stops, pauses, then begins its climb upward in the sky, bringing back spring, then summer. It’s woven together with wondrously important events to know about: moon, sun, stars, skies; and animals. Even better, as she writes and tells stories, the children watch, and they, too, learn to write.
From the Author
Some images of stones are seriously distorted by outdated reproduction processes. The real shapes of the images can only be appreciated by examining the original inscriptions with a magnifying glass or a low-power dissecting or metallurgical microscope. I have seen only a few stones, however, with the observations of the sizes of images, their positions, and context, helped by massive computer sorting (with assignment of probable values) I got reasonable results. The greatest contribution of this work is that it documents Magdalenian people, and how they record their search for, trading of, manufacturing of, hafting of, and use of stone tools, on the tools themselves.
Paragraphing notions evolved over decades of my: studying grammar; writing in prose all items to be tested in counting down Atlas Ballistic Missiles; reduction of prose to binary code; conversion of the code (involving millions of items) to Western Union Ladder Diagrams; converting Boolean Ladder Diagrams to sparse matrices; expansion of the sparse matrix system now used internationally in all rocket count-down APCHE (Automatic Monitoring Systems); adaptation of matrices to DYNAMO (Dynamic Automatic Monitoring Systems) used to continually, automatically monitor; and performing minor repairs on military systems of continental extent. Then, over fifty years ago, while observing some Magdalenian cave paintings, this author immediately remarked, “That’s not art – no person that paints that well would create such a mess. That’s a written language – and I can read it.”
Reading, which has been foremost a matter of intuition, was helped along by decades of life in Central Asia and the African High-Veld where animals teemed, and human population was near vanishingly sparse, as well as concurrently having the world’s greatest computers available. Having thousands of Magdalenian inscriptions, combined with being able to automatically comprehend patterns by scores of millions at high speed, I was surprised to realize that almost all of the writing was done by ladies.
It’s well-said that, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” It’s true indeed. This is why illustrated children’s books, comic books, and lovingly illustrated nursery rhymes and fairy tales are so excellent for teaching reading; carefully planned illustration with text is enormously popular. When illustrations follow carefully studied classical concepts concerning the golden mean, and use prismatic colors, they draw the reader to the psycho-optical point called the “major cardinal.”
In this author’s work to decipher stone-age scripts centering largely on and about the Bølling, it has become manifest that the scripts, though often seeming to be much palimpsest, are done by writers who have an instinctive grasp of the classical art techniques credited since Minoan, through Greek and Roman times, flourishing in the Renaissance, into the early 1900s. What’s done by the stone-age artists is so fundamental that it must somehow relate to mankind’s very genetics.
So-called Modern art is really nothing of the sort. How sad that the endlessly touted “Avant-Garde” illustrators and writers, rather than equaling the work of Paleolithic artists and writers, have regressed to pre-Paleolithic attitudes. Lest this author be accused of enjoying overtures of “sour-soul cantata,” it’s worth mentioning that several of the most magnificently and well-planned publications are in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Top of the list must be The New Yorker. Consider the illustrations, and read the illustrated text; it’s extraordinarily well-done, and one of the few publications that not only matches but often surpasses Paleolithic authors and editors. However, The New Yorker just tries to look at the world as it is.
A picture is certainly worth 1000 words; and returning to the Ice Age pictographs, at their best their combined art and narrative is worth much more than words. This is because the Paleolithic artists-authors not only instinctively understood techniques used in classical art, but at the same time had to write. The most interesting writings are chronicles. In this work, I offer a translation of an annual mammoth hunt which certainly ranks as drama at its best.
And are we different today? In Ireland and across Celtic Europe paychecks are collected by wives who portion their husband’s allowances. Slavic Europe is epitomized by women who organize most things and are devoted to child welfare. My memories of Russia are of Babushkas whom I was escorting on the wintry sidewalks, stopping on the street to adjust a child’s hat, mittens, and coat. And what of old Holland where it’s so often said: they esteem their daughters more than their sons. Translations of the Magdalenian inscriptions tell us that the culture during the Bølling warm interval esteemed their daughters, and was skilled at weaving, insulated building, calendrics, astronomy, medicine, and map-making. Artifacts throughout Europe exhibit inscriptions of tools and methods of weaving.
These inscriptions tell of mothers and children, hearth and home, textiles and tools, hunting and fishing, health and medical, calendars, and contracts. One of the most important points this author makes is that all writing begins with sequential arrays of symbols. This observation can be derived from the analyses of Magdalenian writings. In brief, writing began with a symbol. Major cardinals are recognizable images that show what the story is about. On a record of how to use a horse for food, clothing, etc, the outline of a horse (the cardinal) is clearly visible. Inside the horse-cardinal are also calendrics and instructions, the when and how.
The translations of these image-stories tell us that the subject of Paleolithic writing was centered on textiles. These translations bring to us records of women making and trading textiles and caring for their children. Much, indeed, most of the Magdalenian writings concern textiles; likely all of it written by women. Their writings show that the most personal and important modern comforts of home were invented and used well over 14,500 years ago. Long before we had electricity, today’s versions of heating, laundry, childcare, cooking, lighting – all of these necessities – existed in other forms. These records from the Bølling concern the same kinds of things that are important to us today: textiles, seasons, childcare, cradles, diapers, and clothing.
We are not significantly different in our modern world. Standards in normal society are set by the women, and rightly so. Here, on scraps of ivory, bone, and stone is our own story. Consider the little that is translated, and from this, imagine what our lives were like at Saut-du-Perron – at modern man’s technological dawn. Even now we work, build, discover, and improve, and soon wagon-trains to the stars will voyage out. Let the Wagons Roll!
