The tablet has 60 characters inscribed in it, that correspond to no known language.
The basalt slab was discovered by accident in 2021 by a group of local fishermen who spotted it in the silt of Bashplemi Lake, Georgia.
Carved into the surface are 60 characters arranged in seven rows - 39 of which are unique.
Archaeologists say that these strange symbols aren’t found in any language known to science.
I know the meaning. It either means : Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. or PAGING MR. LOVECRAFT! You’re wanted on the telephone. PAGING MR LOVECRAFT! LINK
39 distinct glyphs, especially in such a short text, seems like too many for an alphabet. Seems more likely to be a syllabary, or maybe a system with logographic features.
While the articles suggest that it was found near datable objects, the fact that it was found and pulled out of a lake by fishermen suggests that no such context can be assumed.
The tablet does seem to have have a tally marking system as part of it similar to Babylonian. So I would suspect it’s like the Linear B inventory tablets. Symbols for items plus tally marks and a few “words” mixed in.
It would be funny if it turned out to be the ancient equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs,” although I guess nobody would bother carving that on a stone tablet…
This stone comes from somewhere near Colchis, which is where Jason found the Golden Fleece (and Medea).
This stone looks a bit suspect - the letters are drilled, using a bit. But they had that sort of technology in the Iron Age and earlier, so it may well be authentic.
One of the links suggested late Bronze or early Iron age, so very roughly 1500-1000 BCE. Not super ancient, although several centuries before the Greek Classical age. Near the same period as Linear B, apparently.
For what it’s worth, the script created for the game Tunic uses 42 distinct glyphs, and it is designed as an alphabet to phonetically represent English. That’s not to say that the glyphs on the tablet necessarily are alphabetic, only that it’s more plausible than it might immediately seem to those of us most accustomed to the multi-value representation of English phonetics in the Latin alphabet.
Some of the glyphs do strike me as possible tally marks or actual numerals, but without some further reference point, I doubt that we will ever know for certain.
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I had a history book in high school that included a photo of some ancient Hebrew text. The photo was upside down. And that’s a known language.
Yeah, i agree, that big spiral looks more important. It might be the name of a god ending the text ("in the name of Spiral, the Almighty… ") but I’d also have guessed it belongs on the top.
