So, there’s been a new development concerning the Lead Codices where the Jordinian Government apparently has seized several of them.
In the article that announced this, the Jordinian Department of Antiquities Director Ziad Saad, is quoted saying,
“There has been a debate all over the net – some think they are fakes, some think they are very genuine – but we have yet to have a definitive conclusion based on a scientific approach.”
Overall, Saad’s words surprise me. There really hasn’t been anyone who thinks they are “very genuine.” The consensus among scholars and expert bloggers has been that they’re fakes from the very beginning.
Jim Davila has already voiced his opinions about this latest development as well as a lengthy list of the evidences against it. Looking over everything, Saad’s declaration of this consensus as “premature” is (in my opinion) refusing to call a spade a spade. The only shred of hope, at this point, for anything truly genuine is to investigate the pieces that haven’t been photographed yet.
So here’s where I’d like to share a funny thing I’ve been mulling over. I’ve come across a couple of characters on one of the plates which are certainly not Aramaic or Hebrew.
The only thing that it seems it could match would be Coptic, and if parts of this are in Coptic it would suggest that the initial claims by Elkington about their source were true (i.e. that they came from Egypt, and not Jordan).
Which would make the Jordinian Government seizing them look very, very silly.
However, since Coptic is a bit beyond my expertise, I’d love to hear some more learned opinions on this matter. 🙂
Peace,
-Steve
UPDATE May 2nd: I, showing how much I actually know about Coptic, didn’t get the dates right. 🙂
UPDATE May 2nd #2: I’ve contacted a few Coptic scholars about this and I’m waiting to hear back.
Okay, I’m definitely not a learned scholar on Coptic, but Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know) says, “Coptic flourished as a literary language from the 2nd to 13th centuries…” That’s 100 A.D., not 300–right? How long was the language in early stages of development before that? (Languages don’t change overnight, right?) So the dating could still be murky.
Well, this goes to show you how much *I* know about Coptic, actually (which is next to nothing).
Double-checking, I believe I may have mis-read the date of its development.
Time to update the post. 🙂
Peace,
-Steve
There we go, updated. 🙂
More interestingly, the Coptic-like characters that I have seen seem to be isolated in small chunks on some of the plates, with the surrounding script taking on a bit of a different hand.
I would really love to see what someone who is more familiar with the Coptic language has to say.
Peace,
-Steve
I sent your graphic to a Semitic language professor in Australia. He says Coptic is a distinct possibility. I will send now send this to a professor I know in America who translated some of the Nag Hammadi texts. Keep up the good work!
This is off-topic, but is CAL down for anybody? I can’t seem to access the site.
Steve, do you know anything about this?
Yikes! So it appears to be. Let me look into this…
Peace,
-Steve
“The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon is down for the next several weeks due to a hacker breaking into the server and loading malware.
We will have this server back up as soon as possible but do not expect it until after May 25th, 2011.”
Oh noes! 🙁
Aye, since Dr. Kaufman is out of the country it’s not going to get back up and running until he’s returned.
Some punk used an exploit to install a malware serving script, targeting the CAL for its high pagerank. It’s the second major hack against the project in the past year. 😛
I’m going to post some more about this as a separate entry.
Peace,
-Steve