Within the last two years, a team of anthropologists and archaeologists from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, have been analysing and drawing interpretations from a handful of rock inscriptions from south-western Spain, the Canary Islands and at the heart of the Sahara Desert, in southern Algeria.
The inscriptions date from the 'Megalithic period', around 5000-3000 BCE, and display a marked similarity in form and context, despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart, across oceans, deserts, mountain ranges and archipelagos. The symbols themselves seem crude and rudimentary, and in all probability their authors were not taking great pains to ensure their scripts were legible. However, they are incredibly significant for one reason: not only are they the ancestors of later, non-Indo-European scripts such as Tartessian, Raetian (south Alpine) and ultimately the Runic script of Scandinavia, they also seem to be derived from much, much older Palaeolithic incised symbols.
The linear symbols of Iberia, the Canaries and the Sahara, all dating before 3000 BCE.
The research was mostly carried out by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena and Marcial Medina, who are seasoned experts on the rock art of the western Atlantic, particularly Iberia and the Canary Islands. What their results, obtained from several years in the field and in the laboratory, suggest is that lineal scripts (i.e. a language of symbols consisting of lines and geometric hatchings), were the lingua franca of Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic western Europe, maintaining a high degree of continuity over the millennia. The phenomenon of megaliths and stone tombs provided ample canvases in which to make these symbols. While they are not a lost language like Harappan or Linear A (both yet to be deciphered), they may have been tallies, descriptors of the landscape, epigraphs to an deceased individual or to a clan, a ritual invocation, or something in between. They are proof that literacy was more of a sliding scale, from simple etches to elaborate calligraphic texts, than a night-and-day transition between a primitive illiterate society to an advanced literate one.
The authors also present a link between the lineal scripts of the Canary Islands and the rock-cut inscriptions of the central Sahara, in places in modern-day Chad and Algeria. This was when the entire desert was a vast patchwork of savannah, tropical forest and wetland, particularly around Lake Megachad, which reached its maximum extent about 6000 BCE. The lush Sahara began drying around about two and a half thousand years later; it is possible that refugees from the region rowed, or sailed, to the Canaries, where they continued in their linear-script-writing traditions. The likely exoduses from the Sahara following its desertification have not really been studied as a research topic, and so the evidence is lacking.
An influx of migrants may have been a factor in the formation of states in predynastic Egypt, and might explain the very early conflicts against the 'Libyans' celebrated on the Narmer Palette and other artefacts. Genetic and palaeobotanical studies have shown that north African cattle and poppies were introduced to the Iberian peninsula circa 3500 BCE, from the south, which may be related to a post-Green Sahara migration. All in all, the linear scripts seem to be another challenge to the traditional picture of the Mesolithic-Neolithic in Europe and Africa. The last hunters were not wiped out by farmers from southwest Asia, but thrived and coexisted, carrying their ancestral language with them wherever they went.
The lineal language, called 'Ibero-Tartessian' by the researchers, lasted well into the early historical period. Their 'translation' of the scripts is on pretty sketchy ground; unlike what they claim (citing themselves a number of times), it is pretty unlikely that a secret Mother Goddess cult was communicated through the lines over thousands of years, based on the frequency of a symbol that apparently transliterates to the Basque word 'ama', meaning mother. But what is clear that the legacy of the script was enduring, and traces of it are found in historical scripts known not to be Indo-European, such as Venetic, Lepontic and Rhaetic, all in Italy. Strabo, the Roman historian, mentions that the Turdetani, a southwest Iberian tribe descended from the Tartessians of the early Iron Age, had preserved a writing system, encoding laws, poetry and other literature, that dated back to around 6000 BCE. This system must have been the lineal script, or else a version of it written on wood and bone that no longer survives today.
An even greater leap of faith taken from the evidence is a continuity between the Saharan-Canarian-Iberian script and the Palaeolithic, even Lower Palaeolithic, etchings of southern Africa and Indonesia, the oldest of which is thought to have been made by Homo Erectus, using a shark tooth, about 400,000 BP. More linear grooves are found on mammoth-ivory at Bilzingsleben, a Neanderthal butchering-site. All of these potential symbols are linear, and perhaps the anthropological implication is that from a very early date, hominids were capable of symbolic communication. However, to say that all the linear scripts are derived, from a common epigraphic ancestor in the Lower Palaeolithic, is a bit absurd. It does not take a mass migration to get one tribe to groove a few lines on a stone. Moreover, it is impossible to say whether the older engravings actually had any meaning. Early humans could have just been doodling during an idle moment, or teaching their children the right way to cut a hide open.
It's ultimately impossible to say. My own opinion is that the Ibero-Tartessian script was a native one, influenced but not imported from the drying Sahara, and had little to no bearing on later line-heavy scripts in eastern Europe and elsewhere. Although flawed, the research does at least wedge open an a new line of investigation: that the megaliths, rock art and languages of Atlantic Europe owe a great deal to the drying of the Green Sahara, and its thriving communities of fishermen and cattle-herders.
References:
Arnaiz-Villena, A., Palacio-Gruber, J. (2022). The Iberian-Tartessian semi-syllabary: possible evolution from Lineal Megalithic/Paleolithic Scripts and the Mother Goddess Religion. International Journal of Modern Anthropology, 2(17), 820-841.
Arnaiz-Villena, A., Juarez, I (2021). The Northern Migrations from a drying Sahara (6,000 years BP): cultural and genetic influence in Greeks, Iberians and other Mediterraneans. International Journal of Modern Anthropology, 2(15), 484-507.
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