CORRELATIONS IN THE ORIGIN OF THE ARMENIAN PICTOGRAMS AND THE ANCIENT WORLD WRITING SYTEMS

1. THE EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS

I. INTRODUCTION

1. The written language is one of the most important inventions of the mankind. The non- written ways of communication (voice, movement, mimicry and other) are momentary and transitory, and they connote the degree of intimacy and relationship. The written language wiped all the barriers in the time and space and made the spoken word of the humanity long-lived, even longer, than the human’s own life and allowed it to burst out of the man’s living space dimensions. This in its turn allowed to collect and summarize the experience of the people living on an immense distance from each other and to create a common spiritual-cultural living space, which is an important pre-condition for the formation of a nation. In the scientific world nowadays prevails the idea, that the most ancient writing systems of the world are the Sumerian and the Egyptian hieroglyphs created in ca. 3300-3200 B.C.
2. On the other hand the basic and yet unsolved question of the ancient history is the origin of the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. The Sumerian civilization counts back till the middle of the 6th millennium B.C. (the Ubaid period), while the Egyptian one starts from the end of the 6th millennium B.C (Badari, Mermide, Fayum). The founders of these civilizations brought developed cattle-breeding and agriculture with them to the Mesopotamia and to the valley of the Nile, as well as architecture, handicraft, mythology and a writing language. Archeological evidence states that before the 6th millennium B.C. the development stages of that culture were not present in the Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile. The questions formulated in the scientific world as “who were the initiators of that culture and where was their homeland?” are still open1.
3. As early as in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries some opinions suggested that the founders of the Sumerian and the Egyptian civilizations had come from the Armenian Highland2. This previously weakly supported point of view presently has got undeniable archeological bases. Archeological digs of the latest decades on the territory of historical Armenia provides for a developed united culture capable of building temples and using agriculture in the 12-7th millennia B.C. in the upper currents of the Tigris and the Euphrates3.
4. The most ancient by its origin and complete archeological material of the historical Armenia are the renowned pictograms. The pictograms of the Armenian Highland do not have a parallel in terms of their vast quantity, the technique applied, the variety of the signs and diversity of the images. At the same time, some peculiarities of the Armenian pictograms suggest that the pictogram signs were used as a written language, whereas complete compositions possessed spiritual and ceremonial meaning4. Unfortunately, the correlation between the Armenian pictograms and the ancient writing systems has not been studied thoroughly as of yet. This study is designed to partially fill that void.
802 pictograms of Ukhtasar and Djermadzor settlements which have been published in the “The Pictograms of Syunik” article are taken for study in this research work5.

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