Pre-industrial society refers to social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which occurred from 1750 to 1850. Pre-industrial is a time before there were machines and tools to help perform tasks en masse. Pre-industrial civilization dates back to centuries ago, but the main era known as the Pre-Industrial Society occurred right before the industrial society. Pre-Industrial societies vary from region to region depending on the culture of a given area or history of social and political life. Europe is known for its feudal system and Medieval era
1. Cave Painting (35,000 BC)
The minimum age for (the outline of the hand) is 39,900 years old, which makes it the oldest hand stencil in the world,” said Dr Aubert.
“Next to it is a pig that has a minimum age of 35,400 years old, and this is one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one,” he told BBC News.
There are also paintings in the caves that are around 27,000 years old, which means that the inhabitants were painting for at least 13,000 years.
In addition, there are paintings in a cave in the regency of Bone, 100 km north of Maros. These cannot be dated because the stalactite-like growths used to determine the age of the art do not occur. But the researchers believe that they are probably the same age as the paintings in Maros because they are stylistically identical.
The discovery of the Indonesian cave art is important because it shows the beginnings of human intelligence as we understand it today.
1. Clay Tablet In Mesopotamia
Ioana Crişan’s research (Reghin-Mureş, Romania) contributes to establish the continuity of Tartaria signs and Danube Script in the collective memory. The Danube Scriptappeared some 7,000 years ago in the Danube valley: in Serbia, Kosovo-Metohija, Southern Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and northern Greece. It flourished for one and a half millennia. Around 5,500 years ago, a social upheaval eclipsed this and other elements of the advanced culture of the Danube Civilization. Some researchers argue that there were devastating invasions of new populations from the steppes while others have hypothesised the imposition of new dominant elites.
Over the last seven thousand years, and continuing today, traditional pieces of folkloric art (from carpets to clothes) are being produced that continue these ancient signs. The lozenge, the X, the E, the b, the D, the M, the circle, the angle, the tree, the spiral, the angle, the cross, the rosette, short parallel lines are highly productive and persistent motives attesting to the Neolithic Script.
Whilst Tartaria signs have not lost their popularity over the millennia as decorative motives, it remains the case that in rural tradition they are not purely ornamental elements but allusive expressions of religious ideas, codes associated with magic powers and basic symbols relating to the divinity and its epiphanies.
Powerful geometric motives continue to be transmitted from mother to daughter, as Ioana Crişan witnesses herself as she inherited the beautiful collection by the mother who inherited from her own the mother. She continues working to complete the collection. That Neolithic-Chalcolithic Script also inherits this marked preference for abstraction and schematisation in the decorative design of folkloric art.
Close to Tartaria, a small rural Transylvanian village of 5,000 inhabitants some kilometres from the well-known site of Turdaş, Nicolae Vlassa (an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum) in 1961, unearthed three clay tablets, covered with strange signs, together with a small cache of offerings, accompanying the charred bones of a mature human, estimated to be 35-40 years old. The accompanying artefacts, suggest this person was a Great Priest or a Shaman and that he was cremated during a sacrificial ritual. The archaeologist, who made the discovery, suggested the (unproven) hypothesis that a cannibalistic ceremony took place in Tartaria.
These three small, inscribed tablets started a debate that is challenging the conventional wisdom of European prehistory, because they have been dated from around 6.500 years ago.¹ Some scholars argue they date even earlier at 7,300 years old.² More prudent researchers, date the stones to 6,000-5,800 years ago. In any case, the astonishing question is did the South-eastern Neolithic Europe develop its own script before Sumeria and Egypt?
Given the context of the finding, the tablets from Tartaria are probably amulets or votive tablets. The clay is grey-reddish and crystallised, to the point of looking like tuff. Careful observation and analysis is needed to ascribe to them their potential value as a written document as they contain much more than ascertained from a cursory examination.
Technical analysis of the Transylvanian tablets that the inscriptions are not simple signs or randomly distributed insignia, rather the inscriptions are characters from some type of writing system. There are three reasons for this conclusion.
Firstly, it is easy to find similar signs also on other artefacts of the Danube civilisation, pointing to the fact that the characters of the Danube Script follow precise standard shapes and that scribes made use of an inventory.
Secondly, the characters of this proto-European script, when compared to other archaic writings, are marked by a high degree of stylisation and a rectilinear shape. Thirdly, we may reasonably assume that the information communicated by each characterwas a specific one with a univocal meaning.
Finally, whilst the inscriptions have varied patterns (in horizontal, vertical or circular rows), this variety has a clear structure, evidenced by the specific sequencing of the signs. In the majority of the cases, the Danube Script had a linear organisation, a feature shared with other pre-classic writings (Minoan Linear A, Cypriot-Minoan and Cypriot Syllabic).³
Today, village life and its visual art and folk memory, has the capacity to reveal the heritage from Neolithic times through the importance of Tartaria signs, created thousands of years ago but of continued authenticity. As Crişan’s article documents, in some Balkan-Carpathian rural areas, the Danube Script characters occasionally revived to enjoy a popularity they originally possessed in the early period of Danube civilisation.
3. Papyrus in Egypt (2500 BC)
Papyrus is a plant (cyperus papyrus) which once grew in abundance, primarily in the wilds of the Egyptian Delta but also elsewhere in the Nile River Valley, but is now quite rare. Papyrus buds opened from a horizontal root growing in shallow fresh water and the deeply saturated Delta mud. Stalks reached up to 16 feet tall (5 m) ending in small brown flowers which often bore fruit. These plants once were simply part of the natural vegetation of the region, but once people found a utilitarian purpose for them, they were cultivated and managed in farms, harvested heavily, and their supply depleted. Papyrus still exists in Egypt today but in greatly reduced number.
The papyrus of Egypt is most closely associated with writing – in fact, the English word ‘paper’ comes from the word ‘papyrus’ – but the Egyptians found many uses for the plant other than a writing surface for documents and texts. Papyrus was used as a food source, to make rope, for sandals, for boxes and baskets and mats, as window shades, material for toys such as dolls, as amulets to ward off throat diseases, and even to make small fishing boats. It also played a part in religious devotion as it was often bound together to form the symbol of the ankh and offered to the gods as a gift. Papyrus also served as a political symbol through its use in the Sma-Tawy, the insignia of the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt. This symbol is a bouquet of papyrus (associated with the Delta of Lower Egypt) bound with a lotus (the symbol of Upper Egypt).
4. Acta Diurna In Rome (130 BC)
The first form of Acta appeared around 131 BC during the Roman Republic. Their original content included results of legal proceedings and outcomes of trials. Later the content was expanded to public notices and announcements and other noteworthy information such as prominent births, marriages and deaths. After a couple of days the notices were taken down and archived (though no intact copy has survived to the present day). Sometimes scribes made copies of the Acta and sent them to governors for information. Later emperors used them to announce royal or senatorial decrees and events of the court. Other forms of Acta were legal, municipal and military notices. The Acta, originally kept secret, until then-consul Julius Caesar made them public in 59 BC. Later rulers, however, often censored them. Publication of the Acta Diurna stopped when the seat of the emperor was moved to Constantinople.
The Acta Diurna to some extent filled the place of the modern newspaper and of the government gazette. Today, there are many academic periodicals with the word acta in their titles (the publisher Elsevier has 64 such titles). Acta Diurna introduced the expression “publicare et propagare”, which means “make public and propagate.” This expression was set in the end of the texts and proclaimed a release to both Roman citizens and non-citizens. Acta Diurna was also used as the title of a Latin newspaper, published by Centaur Books.
5. Dibao in China (2nd Century)
Dibao (Chinese: 邸報; pinyin: dǐbào; Wade–Giles: ti3-pao4), literally “reports from the [official] residences”, were a type of publications issued by central and local governments in imperial China. While closest in form and function to gazettes in the Western world, they have also been called “palace reports” or “imperial bulletins”. Different sources place their first publication as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) or as late as the Tang Dynasty (June 18, 618–June 4, 907).[1] They contained official announcements and news,[2] and were intended to be seen only by bureaucrats(and a given Dibao might only be intended for a certain subset of bureaucrats). Selected items from a gazette might then be conveyed to local citizenry by word of mouth and/or posted announcements. Frequency of publication varied widely over time and place. Before the invention of moveable type printing they were hand-written or printed with engraved wooden blocks.[2] The introduction of European-style Chinese language newspapers, along with the growing intersection of Chinese and global affairs generally, applied pressure for the Dibao to adapt, and circulation of the Beijing Gazettewas in the tens of thousands by the time publication ceased altogether with the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.[2] The gazettes from Beijing at this time were known as Jingbao (京報), literally “reports from the capital”.[3]
6. Codex in the Mayan Region (5th Century)
The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s.
But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a startling conclusion: The codex is both genuine and likely the most ancient of all surviving manuscripts from ancient America.
Stephen Houston, the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and co-director of the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University, worked with Michael Coe, professor emeritus of archeology and anthropology at Yale and leader of the research team, along with Mary Miller of Yale and Karl Taube of the University of California-Riverside. They reviewed “all known research on the manuscript,” analyzing it “without regard to the politics, academic and otherwise, that have enveloped the Grolier,” the team wrote in its study “The Fourth Maya Codex.”
The paper, published in the journal Maya Archaeology, fills a special section of the publication and includes a lavish facsimile of the codex.
The study, Houston said, “is a confirmation that the manuscript, counter to some claims, is quite real. The manuscript was sitting unremarked in a basement of the National Museum in Mexico City, and its history is cloaked in great drama. It was found in a cave in Mexico, and a wealthy Mexican collector, Josué Sáenz, had sent it abroad before its eventual return to the Mexican authorities.”
7. Printing Press Using Wood Blocks (220 AD)
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD, and woodblock printing remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until the 19th century. Ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the block-books produced mainly in the 15th century.
Reference
- Cipolla, Carlo M. Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700. New York: Norton, 1976
- ^ Jump up to:abc d Persson, Karl Gunnar. Pre-industrial Economic Growth: Social Organization, and Technological Progress in Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
- Ghosh, Pallab. “Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art”. BBC News. BBC News. Retrieved 8 October 2014.
- Ioana Crişan; Marco Merlini. “Signs on Tartaria Tablets found in the Romanian folkloric art”. Prehistory Knowledge. The Global Prehistory Consortium, Euro Innovanet. Retrieved 5 November 2010.
- Joshua J. Mark published on 08 November 2016
- Brian J. Wright, Tyndale Bulletin 67.1
- Encyclopædia Britannica 1911: Acta Diurna (dead link)
- http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761564853_4/newspaper.html9.
- ^ a b c Irving Fang, A History of Mass Communication: Six Information Revolutions, Focal Press, 1997, p.30
- ^ Lamont, Ian, “The Rise of the Press in Late Imperial China”, November 27, 2007
- “13th century Maya codex, long shrouded in controversy, proves genuine | News from Brown”. news.brown.edu. Retrieved 2016-09-07.
- An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, Arthur M. Hind,p64-94, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1935 (in USA), reprinted Dover Publications, 1963 ISBN 0-486-20952-0
- ^ Jump up to: a b c Shelagh Vainker in Anne Farrer (ed), “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” , 1990, British Museum publications, ISBN 0-7141-1447-2
Site Title 