Newspaper Rock(s)

 

Different cultures carved their own recordings on Newspaper Rock Monument in Utah. The earliest known carvings were 2000 years ago.

It boggles my mind that early people without a written language, in so many different places, left pictures from their lives on rocks.

Do you think they also had carved them into trees, mud, and other mediums, but these are the only ones that survived so long? I do.

  Here's Judaculla Rock, right in my backyard, so to speak.  It's near Cullowee, NC, a little over an hour from my home in Black Mountain. This petroglyph was carved by unknown peoples about 1500 years ago. I'm standing by it, which wasn't allowed, but I just was showing the size, not touching it.

My friend Helen did touch it. 

The information given says the rock was used to form bowls as these three lumps show the beginning of carving away the basic shapes...about 3000 years ago.  The other marks are unknown but believed to have been carved 1500 years ago. No one has figured out what the symbols mean.

These nice interpretive plaques are arranged around the raised walkway overlooking the rock.  Seeing the Cherokee Syllabary, I remembered reading about Sequoia, who devised an alphabet so that their language could be written. Then I tried to remember visiting a site, New Echota, GA, where many Cherokee were housed before the "trail of tears," the genocidal removal of Native Americans to the west by white men.

Today's quote:

To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

MARK NEPO