From Toronto Globe & Mail, 16 December, 1998:
Egyptian find may be earliest known writing
Associated Press - Cairo
Clay tablets uncovered in southern Egypt from the tomb of a king named Scorpion may represent the earliest known writing by humankind, an archeologist said yesterday. If confirmed, the discovery would rank among the greatest ever in the search for the origins of the written word. But the subject the tablets mostly deal with may be no surprise at all: taxes. Gunter Dreyer, head of the German Archeological Institute, said the tablets record linen and oil deliveries made about 5,300 years ago as tithe to King Scorpion I. He said the tablets have been carbon-dated with certainty to between 3300 and 3200 BC. The discovery throws open for debate a widely held belief among historians that the first people to write were the Sumerians of the Mesopotamian region (modern-day Iraq), some time before 3000 BC. The time of the advent of Sumerian writing remains in doubt. The Egyptian writings - in the form of line drawings of animals, plants and mountains - are the first evidence that hieroglyphics used by later Pharaonic dynasties did not "rise as Phoenix from the ashes" but developed gradually, Dreyer said. "Linguists now have a larger history [of writing] to regard." An American archeologist called the tablets an "exciting" find. "This would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of writing and ancient Egyptian culture," said Kent Weeks, professor of Egyptology at the American university in Cairo. However, John Baines, a professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, was more cautious. "Undoubtedly, [Dreyer's] findings are very important, but I have an open mind on this" and would like to see more evidence on the comparative ages of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian samples, Baines said. He added that at this point, "I would say it is likely that writing was invented in both places." The bulk of Dreyer's discovery was from Scorpion's tomb in a cemetery in the province of Suhag, 300 miles south of Cairo. Like many kings in pre-Pharaonic times, Scorpion took the name of an animal. Records have been found of chieftains named Mouse, Falcon, double Falcon and Elephant before the first Pharaonic dynasty began in 2920 BC. The Great Pyramid of Giza was not built until nearly 400 years later. Since 1985, Dreyer and his team have unearthed about 300 pieces of written material on clay tablets barely bigger than postage stamps, and clay jars and vases with ink impressions. Dreyer said the writings were not a creative outpouring, but the result of economic necessity: When chieftains expanded their areas of control they needed to keep a record of taxes, which were paid in commodities.

From The Weekly Telegraph - No. 386 (Week of December 16-22, 1998)
OBITUARIES
BARON ROBERT ROTHSCHILD
BARON ROBERT ROTHSCHILD, the Belgian diplomatist who has died aged 86, was caught up in many of the world's conflicts, including civil wars in China and Congo. He helped to draft the Treaty of Rome, the foundation of the EEC. Robert Rothschild was born in Brussels on December 16, 1911. His father, a business-man of German-Jewish extraction, descended from Moses Rothschild, of Frankfurt, whose brother Mayer Amschel, together with his five sons, founded the Rothschild banking dynasty. He decided to become a diplomat, and luckily his father was a friend of Paul Spaak, whose son Paul-Henri became Belgiums' foreign minister in 1936. Rothschild passed the diplomatic service examination that year and joined the younger Spaak's private office the next April. As an officer in the Belgian army reserve on the outbreak of the Second World War, Rothschild returned to his regiment. In May, 1940, he was captured by the Germans and sent to Colditz. In 1941 he was sent back to Brussels in a cattle truck. With the help of underground organisations and the SOE he escaped to non-occupied France. He obtained an exit visa from a pro-Belgian official and travelled to Spain. He made his way to London to join the Belgian government in exile, which posted him to the legation in Lisbon. The city was crawling with spies, all of whom knew one another's identity. They lunched at the same smart restaurants, peering at one another over their menus. Rothschild remained in Lisbon until 1944, when he was sent, at his request - there was no competition from colleagues - to China. He became first secretary at the embassy in Chungking, the headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek's government. During the Japanese occupation there was a lull in the Chinese civil war. Mao's Communists even had an envoy in Chungking in the person of Chou En-Lai, whom Rothschild grew to like. After the Japanese surrender Rothschild flew to Shanghai, where in 1946 he was appointed consul general. The Chinese civil war revived and in 1949 the Communists entered Shanghai. Under pressure from the French, who hoped to protect their interests in Indo-China, Belgium declined to recognise the new regime for the next 20 years. Rothschild considered this a mistake and regretted the failure to comprehend the rivalry between Soviet and Chinese Communism. In early 1950 Rothschild left Shanghai for Washington as second counsellor. It was the time of the Korean War and the build-up of Nato and after two years in Washington, Rothschild went to Paris as a Belgian representative on the council of Nato. In 1954 Rothschild was appointed Spaak's chef de cabinet at the Belgian foreign ministry. For two years he worked with Spaak on the Treaty of Rome before the final signing in 1957. Shortly before the treaty was signed, Rothschild was standing beside Spaak gazing over the Forum in Rome. "I think," Spaak said, "that we have re-established the Roman Empire without a single shot being fired." Rothschild was due to join the Belgian delegation at Nato after the summit conference in Paris in 1960 between Khrushchev and Eisenhower. But, because of the U2 spy plane incident, the conference was a failure and so Rothschild was posted to Belgian's vast Congo colony as number two to the governor. Rothschild arrived in Leopoldville two days after the rebellion by the constabulary, egged on by the Pan-Africanist independence leader Patrice Lumumba. On July 11, Katanga, the richest of the six provinces of the colony, seceded, and the Belgians decided to make it their base for a campaign to bring down Lumumba. In Katanga, Rothschild had to steer his way delicately between Moise Tshombe the Rightist Katangan leader, who wanted Belgian support for the province's independence, and Belgium,'s reluctance to grant it. After two years as ambassador to Switzerland, where in 1966 he was president of the executive committee of the General Agreement on Tariffs and trade, Rothschild went as ambassador to Paris. In 1973 he was appointed ambassador in London, where he remained en post until 1976 and then lived for the rest of his life. He was appointed an honorary KCMG in 1963.

From The Weekly Telegraph, Issue No. 385, December 8-14, 1998:
OBITUARY
John Chadwick, who has died aged 78, succeeded, in partnership with Michael Ventris, in deciphering the mysterious ancient Minoan script known as Linear B. Cracking the code required extraordinary brilliance and patience, as there was no equivalent of the Rosetta Stone to assist in its traslation. Most examples of the Linear B scripts appear on clay tablets found at Knossos in Crete, at Mycenae and at Pylos in Messenia, dating from about 1,400 BC. When similar tablets were later discovered on mainland Greece, it became clear that the lords of Knossos understood a language known also in some cities on the mainland. But scholars continued to dismiss the possibility that the language might be Greek. It was Ventris who first claimed, tentatively in 1952, to have deciphered some of the strange scratches on the tablets as Greek. Chadwick wrote to Ventris offering his assistance. The two men joined up and over the next year began to work together deciphering the rules governing spelling in the script. Their findings were that Linear B was a syllabic script. Its signs are totally different from the later classical Greek alphabet.The inscriptions Ventris and Chadwick studied consisted mainly of administrative accounts and records kept at the Mycenaean palaces - "battered fragments of Civil Service ledgers", as Chadwick called them. The Greek dialect that they recorded - known as Mycenaean Greek - was spoken from around 1400 to around 1150 BC. Once they had been deciphered, the texts forced historians to revise the orthodox view that until the sixth century BC, Greece was engulfed in a dark Age, illiterate and primitive, from which Homer rose like a single sun. A newer picture emerged of pre-classical Greece history as a gradual development from about 2000 BC onwards, characterised by a high degree of literacy. John Chadwick was born on May 21 1920 and educated at St. Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied Classics, graduating in 1946 after wartime service with the Royal Navy. John Chadwick married, in 1947, Joan Hill. She and their son survive him.

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