CHARACTERS

The website of the Okinawa prefecture mentions two instances of the find of characters on Yonaguni, that are thought to be connected to the underwater ruins there. On rocks at the coastline near San-ninu Dai one found the ones in the pictures below:

San-ninu Dai coastline

Characters on rock face

Same set, other picture

An expert has noticed similarities to Phoenician characters, see here; more on this connection later on this page. Another feature, found underwater near a cave close to the monument, looks in first instance more like an image, see below right, but is also described in terms of a writing character, due to its similarity with an ancient Okinawan writing character called Kaida, see below middle. Here we point to a similarity of both finds with one done in India, on a clay tablet traced back to the Harappan culture, see below right, which recently got into the news due to underwater finds in the Gulf of Cambay, see here. Culture and tablet are dated back to around 5000 BC. The similarities are obvious.

Carved in underwater rock

Kaida character

Indian clay tablet

These characters can also be found on tablets found on Okinawa, the largest of which is called the Rosetta stone of Okinawa. There are two versions found, see below; the left picture is electronically mirrored, in order to reflect that it is probably the same object as the top right, being two sides of the same tablet. There is no known culture associated with it.

Rosetta Stone of Okinawa	Rosetta Stone, other side
	Other Okinawa tablets

Although both Yonaguni and Okinawa characters cannot be attributed to a specific origin independently, something can be said by tracking later developments. The islands of Okinawa have a cultural origin more or less separate from the Japanese main land, named Ryukyu culture, which is the old name of the islands. Below are three samples from the Okinawa prefecture website of studies of this culture:

From: Old Rykyu

From: Old Rykyu (?)

From: Ryukyu Sinto Diary

The left picture is from a book called Old Ryukyu (see source here), that counts as a standard on the history of Okinawa, and dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. The middle one may be from the same source, in an original and more complete form (source here). The sources do not describe what one sees, but one can guess that the left picture shows three columns that are three versions of character sets dating from different times, the left one being the oldest. The right hand picture is a page from a work called the Ryukyu Sinto Diary, written in the early seventeenth century (see here). It is the oldest known book on the Ryukyu version of the Shinto belief. The column of characters in the middle is possibly the subject of the writing alongside it, and again one gets the impression of older and younger characters. This character set has a great similarity to the left column in the left picture.

Another source that shows the development of ancient characters has been found in Europe, see the pictures below:

Glozel 1

Glozel 2

Glozel 3

These are some of the so-called Glozel tablets, found in 1924 in France by a farmer amidst a collection of archeaological and mystical finds various origins, with no apparent relation between.them (see here). The treasure was dismissed as a hoax, amidst much controversy. Later research proved the authenticity of many of the finds through more precise dating methods. The fact that so many various objects were found together can be easily explained in that they were collected by someone interested in mystic objects. The Glozel tablets with characters show a considerable similarity with the characters from Yonaguni and Okinawa, this similarity being greater with the younger Okinawa characters (one can now take the tablets to be authentic, it is hard to imagine how someone could falsify tablets using characters that were discovered decades later). However, note that the three tablets differ notably among each other, with the left one coming closest to the oldest Yonaguni/Okinawa finds, and the right one probably being the youngest of the three. Since they are probably part of a collection, the finding place in Europe says probably nothing about their real origin.

Other occurences of seeming related ancient characters stem from South America. The Fuente Magna bowl was found in the 1950's by a farmer in the neighbourhood of Tiahuanacu, known for its ancient ruins. Initially, this too was dismissed as a hoax, and found to be authentic later. An archaeologist noticed what looked Sumerian writing on it, see below. But also present are some characters of what is called proto-Sumerian, pointed to by the arrow (click on the picture for an enlargement). Again these are the same characters as the first two introduced above (note that mirror operations on characters have occured regularly in history, due to changes in the order of reading). In combination with the Sumerian characters they have been translated (see here), but note that characters have known to change meaning with time, while the shape remained the same.

Fuente Magna

Fuente Magna, detail

The second object is the Pokotia statue, see below, named after the place it was found, again near Tiahuanacu. Once in a museum, inscriptions were noticed all over its boby including the back side. The picture on the right is a handwritten copy of one of the sections as used in its translation, see here.

Pokotia statue

Pokotia statue, detail

Transcript

The final step to be made here is that towards the Phoenicians. As mentioned above, an expert noticed similarities between the characters found at San-ninu Dai and Phoenician characters, that are depicted below:

Again one notices tantalizing similarities with the other sets, now specifically with the Glozel ones. One also sees that the San-ninu characters are not as close to Phoenician as some of the others shown above, making the Phoenician connection doubtful.

The Phoenician characters are the last one that need be discussed here, because what happened afterwards is known well enough: the Phoenician characters developed into Greek and some other lines of development to modern times. This standard knowledge dates the Phoenician characters themselves back to about 2000 years BC.

The purpose here of this exercise is to say something about the origin of the Yonaguni symbols by arranging the different character sets more or less according to time. To do this, it is assumed that the older characters are the more irregular, most obviously by being different in size, and also by not being arranged in straight lines. The Glozel tablets show these differences clearly, they already having been arranged according to these criteria: nr. 1 comes quite close to the Okinawa tablets, while nr. 3 comes much closer to Phoenician set. The Phoenician set is usually dated at around 2000 BC. In between come the Glozel nr.2 tablet and the Indian tablet, the latter probably being older and dated at 5000 BC.

According to the criteria mentioned, the Yonaguni/Okinawa characters are older yet, dating them as older than 5000 BC. If one looks at amount of development from Phoenician (2000 BC) to Indian (5000 BC), and looks at the development from Yonaguni/Okinawa to Indian, there seems to be about the same amount of development in the two periods. This would take the Yonaguni/Okinawa ones around a few thousand years further back. This brings them in line with the dating of the Yonaguni ruins, situated more than 20 meters below sea level, which seems to date them back to at least 8,000 BC.

The possible relation between the Yonaguni/Okinawa writing, the Indian clay tablet, the finds at Peru, and the Phoenician end result leads to the conclusion that this is another piece of evidence pointing to a common cultural origin.

For a pictorial illustration of the proposed timeline, go here. More samples of ancient characters have been collected here (large file).