* The tablet featured 60 characters across seven rows.
Via Popular Mechanics.* 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.
The journal article and its abstract are as follows:
In Georgia, numerous sites date back to the Bronze Age. Nearby Bashplemi Lake, the site of the discovery of a basalt tablet bearing an inscription with unknown characters, is the site where the skull of a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, the first European, was discovered.
This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian. 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, which could belong to an aboriginal Caucasian population, beside proto-Georgian and Albanian writing signs, bear some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.
Ramaz Shengelia, et al., "Discovery of Unknown Script Characters In Georgia: The Bashplemi Lake Tablet" 11(3) Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology (2024) DOI: 10.14795/j.v11i3.1035
2 comments:
No links to early Chinese or Indus Valley or Vinca scripts? Great seeing the Dmanisi site hominins mentioned, possible continuity of residents of the Black Sea basin.
This is close enough to other forms of phonetic script that it is pretty clear that it isn't made up mostly of logograms, and it seems to be more than a proto-script.
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