Archaeologists Found an Ancient Tablet With 39 Letters That Don’t Belong to Any Known Language
Archaeologists uncovered a basalt tablet in the Bashplemi Lake region of Georgia with an unknown language carved into its face.
The tablet featured 60 characters across seven rows.
Experts said that the etchings showed excellent craftsmanship, even if they can’t yet determine the language’s origin.
There’s a new language in town. Well, actually, it’s ancient, and experts can’t even read it yet. But they’re excited to find out more.
Archaeologists discovered a basalt tablet about the size of a piece of paper bearing 60 unknown script characters expertly etched onto its surface in the Bashplemi Lake region of Georgia—the same site where some scientists believe the first European, a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, was discovered.
According to a study published in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology, the tablet—which measured 9.4 inches by 7.9 inches—was made from local vesicular basalt and featured seven rows of writing.
“This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian,” the study authors wrote. “While the basalt on which it is based is known to be of local origin, its meaning is unknown, and there remains a long way to go to decipher it.”
An initial comparative analysis conducted with over 20 languages shows that the characters bear some similarities with the written forms of the Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian languages.
“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us,” the authors wrote, “however, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the script of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt, and West Iberia.”
Some symbols may have taken inspiration from early Caucasian scripts—whether that be Georgian Mrglovani or Albanian alphabets—but there also seem to be ties to Proto-Kartvelian, Near East Phoenician, Proto-Sinaitic scripts. But without a direct link to any other known pattern of writing, this new find could be a completely unknown language.
“The script, some of whose 39 characters are numbers and punctuation marks, may have been an alphabet,” the authors wrote.
Researchers believe that the new find bears the strongest resemblances to the Proto-Kartvelian script from the fourth millennium B.C., which was used throughout Georgia and Iberia. But there are also likenesses to Bronze Age Georgian symbols, including “some similarities with Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek alphabets [that] are not surprising as their role in the region and their relations to local scripts are well-known.”
The area in which this tablet was found is already an archaeologically rich location, and adding a new language to the mix only furthers the intrigue of Bashplemi Lake.
The 60 total characters etched across seven horizontal rows also showed off intensely skilled craftsmanship, according to the study, and would have been done with advanced tools for the time. Researchers believe the person who crafted the writing used a conic drill to outline the contours of each individual character and a “smooth and round-head tool” to finish the job.
Speculation on what it all means—the authors hypothesize that the writing could explain “military spoils, an important construction project, or an offering to a deity”—is all anyone has to go on for now.
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