| The front page of the Sunday New York Times for 11/14/99 has an article
on a discovery of Egyptian inscriptions believed to be the earliest writing
ever uncovered. At least some of these inscriptions appear to be hand-gestures.
Two people called us on the phone that Sunday morning, because the picture
accompanying this article, which was identified as the glyph for the letter
"H", shows a human stick-figure, which is standing with arms held
in the position looking very like the one that displays the letter "He"
in the Hebrew alphabet gestures we've uncovered. (See the AtBash
Gesture Chart at <http://www.meru.org/Gestures/Atbashgest.html>;
a side-by-side comparison is at <Wadi-el-Hol-He.html>
.)
This is the second independent area where we've received some confirmation
of the Hebrew hand-gesture system -- the first, being the work published
earlier this year by Drs. Jana Iverson at Indiana University and Susan
Goldin-Meadow at U. of Chicago, on how persons blind from birth gesture
while speaking. In this research, the gesture most commonly used to accompany
the idea of "pouring" matches our gesture for the Hebrew letter, Dalet,
that carries the meaning of "to pour out" or "to be poor" (as in "dissipated").
(See material posted on the Meru website at <http://www.meru.org/3220lecture/contents.html>.
And recent research in yet another field (anthropology this time) strongly
indicates that gesture language, not spoken language, was primary in human
development. (A summary article of this last, by Michael Corballis,
was published in the February issue of American Scientist, the Sigma Xi
magazine, and is available on the web at <http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/99articles/Corballis.html>).
Meru Foundation would like people to know that:
We have a coherent theory that makes sense of all these new findings;
We've been developing it for 30 years; and
We've been published in the peer-reviewed Noetic Journal (April 1999).
An earlier version of the published article, which sets forth the philosophical
derivation of the theory behind the Meru hand-gestures, is on the web at
<http://www.meru.org/GodofAbe/onegdpix.html>
(Noetic Journal reprints are available from us on request). Meru Foundation
can be reached at 781-784-8902 for more detailed information; or send email
to meru@meru.org.
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