Part 5 – Looking for Clues

Part 5 – Looking for Clues

After some investigation and deliberation Boshevski and Tentov were in agreement that the center text on the Rosetta stone was written from right to left. The text had no punctuation marks and no capital letters to divide sentences from paragraphs. It had no blank spaces or markers to divide sentences into words. In other words, the entire text was a single long column or unbroken string of symbols.

Boshevski and Tentov’s search for answers began in 1990 when the academic Gane Todorovski, then ambassador to Moscow, sent a book home entitled “Slavianska Pismenost” (Slav Literacy) by Ganadii Sanistavlovich Grinevich. The book was passed on to Macedonian academics and thus came into the hands of Boshevski and Tentov. In the introduction Grinevich wrote something about the Rosetta stone which looked very similar to what Tsernorizets Hrabar had written about in the past.

Tsernorizets Hrabar was a Slavonic writer and an advocate of Slav literacy. His work, which consists mostly of the study of ancient Slav writing, is not well known but has been preserved in a large number of copies. In his writing Tsernorizets Hrabar refers to the ancient Slav writing as consisting of “cherti i retski” (lines and incisions). Tsernorizets Hrabar is believed to have been acquainted with Kiril and Metodi’s Macedonian pupils and lived during the time of Kliment, Naum and Konstantin of Bregalnitsa. He is also believed to have worked at the Ohrid Literary School in Macedonia.

The moment Boshevski and Tentov found a clue that there may be a connection between the Rosetta stone center script and ancient Slavic writing, they began their search. With some help from their colleagues, they began to surf the internet and gather information on the Rosetta stone. It was one thing to know that the Slavs had a language that predated Kiril and Metodi and it was another to be able to see it written on stone and what better than on the Rosetta stone, the world famous stone. More exciting yet was the fact that the writing on the stone was left there by the Ptolemais, a Macedonian dynasty.

Unfortunately due to other commitments, five years had passed before any serious work was done. The Russian book was a lot of help in that it defined some of the symbols on the Rosetta stone as being more than just “Egyptian”. What also helped is that the symbols found on the Rosetta stone were also present on a Vincha tablet which dated to about 7,000 BC. And as we know Vincha was not too far away from Macedonia.

It has been said that the Vincha culture was an early European culture that existed between the sixth and third millennium BC stretching around the course of the Danube River in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and other places in the Balkans and parts of Central Europe and Asia Minor. The largest and most significant prehistoric and Neolithic settlement was found in 1908 in a village called Vincha located on the banks of the Danube about 14 km downstream from Belgrade.

Ljubomir Domazetovich in a publication had documented a table of Vincha symbols from which seventeen were identical to those on the Rosetta stone middle text.

Who would have imagined artifacts found in the Balkans and in Egypt would have identical symbols?

Further research led Boshevski and Tentov to discover that similar symbols had been used in 16th century Europe by the famous mathematician Cardan in his work called ARS Magna “Systems for Writing Numbers”. Cardan had used asymmetrical symbols to represent all the numbers. A simple search also revealed the use of such symbols on the American continent by the Inuit (1) and other indigenous people in North America.

Given the evidence, it would appear that this type of writing predated the arrival of the Latin script and with the arrival of the Latin script it began to decline and was eventually replaced by the Cyrillic Alphabet.

From what they learned from applications of similar symbols as applied asymmetrically, Boshevski and Tentov deduced that the script of the center text on the Rosetta stone was a syllabic form of

the type consonant-vowel. A syllabic consonant is a phonetic element that normally patterns as a consonant, but may fill a vowel slot in a syllable depending on how it is asymmetrically applied.