Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Ancient World

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609  ▶ language introduction Most paleontologists believe that modern humans, called Homo sapiens, as well as their language or ...

and Khoisan. Until several hundred years ago most African languages lacked a written tradition or archaeological support that wo ...

ber of people who belong to this division are not reliable. A common number oft en cited is 200,000. Two small pockets of speake ...

alphabet was adopted to write Coptic, the fi nal stage of Egyp- tian. Th e last person who could read hieroglyphic writing proba ...

came to be more important than the cuneiform script. With the rise of Carthage in the sixth century b.c.e. the Phoenician langua ...

principal language of religion, literature, and philosophy in India for many centuries. Possibly the most important Prakrit lang ...

Chinese characters provide only indirect evidence of pronunciation, and even today the characters in the ancient and classical l ...

fi rst four centuries c.e. Th e Brythonic language known as Breton arrived in Brittany (France) around the fi ft h century c.e. ...

known as Iberian; these languages died out by the fi rst cen- tury c.e. and were replaced by Latin. People in the Pyrenees spoke ...

“masculine” group and females to the “feminine.” Inanimate objects, however, could belong to any category, and the fact that a t ...

Th e oldest surviving example of Latin is a brief inscrip- tion of four words on a cloak pin in Greek characters. Th is shows th ...

Further, historians dispute the origins of these languages. If the fi rst Americans arrived in North America by crossing a land ...

seafaring and navigation; social collapse and aban- donment; writing. FURTHER READING Martin J. Ball and James Fife, eds., Th e ...

customs and values of that society. When laws are respected, custom and tradition are also respected. Th e origin of law in Afri ...

specifi ed law. No formal Egyptian legal codes have been preserved, at least not until the seventh century b.c.e., when the demo ...

for investigating an accusation were sometimes identifi ed as “offi cials of the Place of Examination.” Th e only criminal heari ...

property disputes; injuries, both accidental and intentional; and labor matters. Aft er the body of laws came the epilogue, whic ...

In the 300s b.c.e. the province of Qin adopted legalism. Th ere its chief advocate was Shang Yang (d. 338 b.c.e.). He saw to it ...

laws from the descriptions of Roman observers and from laws that were written slightly aft er the ancient period. Th e best evid ...