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Race to decipher symbols on ancient tablet that'd redefine understanding of our ancestors
A tantalizing, but badly damaged tablet dating back to, at least, 5079 BC could predate the earliest known human writing by millennia.
That's if researchers can decode it.
Known to archeologists as the 'Dispilio Tablet,' this approximately nine-by-seven inch block of cedar wood was first dredged up from a bog in July of 1993, during the careful — and still ongoing — excavation of a late Stone Age village in Greece.
But this engraved tablet, whose 10 rows of apparent linear 'signs' are still debated as art or language, quickly began to decay upon its exposure to the open air, leading to a painstaking conservation effort that has slowed down study of this rare artifact.
Models and reproductions of the Dispilio Tablet, seen above, have also been made as part of the local museum and archeological park at the Dispilio site (photo credit - CC4.0 Мико). But the site does have true artifacts preserved and on display at its museum as well
The Greek art and antiquities preservationists still working to restore this tablet argue it may completely revise our definition of 'pre-historic man' — proving that 'Neolithic societies can no longer be considered "societies without writing."'
Comparative analysis of the Dispilio Tablet alongside symbols seen on Neolithic cave paintings and clay tablets, they argue, may yet decipher this lost language.
But such a breakthrough would require more and more similar discoveries with which to compare and contrast against the tablet, despite the known similarities between its signs and the markings on 'a large number of Neolithic clay finds.'
According to the late Greek archaeologist Dr George Hourmouziadis, who scrutinized the tablet until his death in 2013, its etchings resemble 'symbols' etched by a Neolithic people who once lived in the southern Balkans called the Vinca.
Dr Hourmouziadis saw parallels not only with the Vinca's three 'Tărtăria tablets' discovered in Transylvania, but also 'Linear A,' a form of writing associated with the Minoans who inhabited the Greek island of Crete much later, from 1800 to 1450 BC.
Given that the very definition of 'prehistoric' means 'the period before written records,' proof of a true language on the tablet would literally rewrite the Stone Age.
It could reset what we mean by 'prehistory' by at least two thousand years or more.
But the late Dr Hourmouziadis voiced some pessimism on the chances of truly understanding this ancient etchings as 'text,' as it's lost truly to the sands of time, calling them 'Neolithic "messages" that we will never be able to decipher.'
The duty remains to his successor at the Dispilio dig site, Dr Konstantinos Kotsakis, to improve upon what Dr Hourmouziadis called 'the scattered unscientific and rather naïve efforts made until now' to decipher the tablet.
The lakeside, late Neolithic settlement at Dispelio has become an educational tourism hot spot in Greece - adorned with recreations of homes once built by its Stone Age inhabitants (above)
The over thirty-year quest to explain the Dispilio Tablet, sometimes also called the 'Dupyak Tablet,' had its first breakthrough in 2014, when collaborative research by two Greek universities revaluated decades of radiocarbon-dating at the dig site.
'The piece of wood sampled from the wooden tablet gave an age of 5202 ± 123 BC,' wrote Professor Yorgos Facorellis, an expert in chemical analysis and the carbon dating of ancient artifacts at the University of West Attica in Athens, Greece.
The technique involves hunting for traces of differing versions, or isotopes, of carbon atoms, which are present in all living organic matter, like this wood tablet.
The rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope (C14) is constant and easily measured — making it a reliable tool for estimating the age of samples likely to be 'between 500 and 50,000 years old,' according to forensic scientist Dr Danielle McLeod-Henning.
Regardless, the dating suggests the tablet predates the previously oldest known language crafted by humans, ancient Sumerian, which dates back to, at least, 3100 BC based on artifacts unearthed from southern Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq.
And yet, while the tablet dates back thousands of years before Sumerian and still more thousands of years before the ancient Greek alphabet emerged around 770 BC, researchers said the Dispilio Tablet bears markings 'resembling the letters Δ, Ε, or Λ.'
Above, the actual cedar wood Dispilio Tablet - carved with 10 rows of linear (vertical and horizontal) apparent symbols, some resembling the Greek letters Delta, Epsilon and Lambda
In Column A, above, are examples of the carved, possible 'symbols' detected on the wooden tablet and other clay finds from Dispilio; Column B shows samples of an ancient Minoan script called 'Linear A' and in Column C samples of Vinca culture engravings found in the Balkans
Markings from late Neolithic Greece resembling these classical Greek letters, Delta, Epsilon and Lambda, they argued, could further complicate prehistory's relationship to classical ancient Greece, linking it to the Vinca via their Tărtăria tablets.
'The dating of the Dispilio engraved finds is similar to those that appeared in southeastern Europe around 5300 BC,' Professor Facorellis and his team wrote in the journal Radiocarbon, 'some 2000 [years] earlier than any other known writing.'
'These signs and inscriptions,' they noted, 'are considered by some scholars a specific script of literacy.'
The question drags this tablet — and the lakeside Stone Age settlement of Dispilio from which it was excavated — into a heated debate over the origins of the written word.
Some scholars, like Paleolithic archaeologist Dr Alison Brooks of the Smithsonian and Professor Peter Mitchell at Oxford, contend that humans could have developed written language as far back as 70,000 to 90,000 years ago in South Africa.
But others, like Richard Klein of Stanford and Nicholas Conard of Tübingen University in Germany, have advocated for a theory called 'the Great Leap Forward,' which suggests a major renaissance occurred around 35,000 years ago in Europe.
Mitchell at Oxford has blasted the Great Leap idea as 'Eurocentric nonsense.'
Above, an elevated panorama of Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki's modern excavations at the dig site. The Dispilio Tablet was found northwest of the 'Eastern sector' in marsh mud
'When you look at the symbols on the caves in France and Spain, you have to realize that these are things our ancestors were already comfortable with,' according to Canadian Stone Age art and language expert Genevieve von Petzinger.
'They had been using them for a long time,' she contends.
Now an official explorer with National Geographic, von Petzinger visited caves across Europe to compile a database of the symbols scrawled on cave walls up to 25,000 years ago.
As she told The Guardian, she sees in these cave etchings direct echoes back to still more ancient symbols — including an 'open-angle' symbol seen carved into Blombos cave in South Africa, where 75,000-year-old artifacts have also been found.
'Previous symbols tended to be carved into perishables, such as wood and skins, which have now disintegrated,' according to von Petzinger.
In her study of European caves, the NatGeo paleo-anthropologist found 32 distinct symbols that appear to have remained almost unchanged for tens of thousands of years, suggesting Stone Age humans used a written language or alphabet of sorts.
'If these were random doodles or decorations we would expect more variation, but instead we find the same signs repeating,' she noted.
'[About] 65 percent of these signs stayed in use over the whole 30,000-year time period,' according to von Petzinger.
The vital importance of the Dispilio Tablet, or any other case of preserved 'signs' found on ancient wood, would be to help confirm exactly this theory.
In other words, the tablet could help prove that much more ancient language really did exist, only to be lost and written out of the history books because it had been written on perishable material.
Professor Facorellis's collaboration between his department and peers at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki 'reanalyzed' the tablet alongside other nearby 'finds bearing engraved "signs," together with new information.'
'However,' as the researchers noted, 'during the drying process most of their engraving depth has been lost.'
But their carbon dating has at least confirmed, in their words, that it is 'the oldest known engraved wooden tablet.'
Only further finds like it, prehistoric equivalents of a Rosetta Stone, could help confirm that the markings are truly symbolic language.
A 'full academic study regarding the Dispilio Tablet,' according to an article this month in the Greek Reporter, 'awaits the completion of conservation work.'
This painstaking process speaks to how precarious the fate of the tablet has been since it was first discovered.
According to Professor Facorellis and Dr Hourmouziadis, the wood tablet bore 'traces of fire' when it was first unearthed.
The tablet was dredged from 'a trial trench into the water very near the lakeshore' near the modern Greek city of Kastoria which is also along Lake Orestiada.
Water was continuously pumped away from 'an excavation square' held separate by wooden boards when, to the team's surprise, 'the wooden tablet appeared floating on the water surface.'
The Dispilio Tablet and the enduring mystery of how it might just redefine what we think of as 'prehistoric,' they said, was 'the most unexpected of the finds' at this site.