So what’s the Straight Dope on the Dispilio Tablet. If you are not familiar, it’s a wooden tablet dated to a Neolithic site from about 7000 years ago that some people claim is an example of the first written language.
Wiki didn’t really go into detail. Other sites say it’s anything from a cutting board to a proto-Greek language with individual letters. I’m not really knowledge enough to know decipher the information on the various sites. So, what’s the deal?
This layman’s opinion is that it at least bears a superficial resemblance to both Linear A and B. It was certainly found in the right place for there to be a connection.
There are 4 columns with 10-11 symbols per column. It is tempting to state 10 per column with some symbols coming in pairs like “i”.
It seems that the layout was intended to almost, but not quite, have rows of 4. Carving in wood messes with stuff.
I’d guess that the 1st column is numeric in nature. The 2nd and 4th represents people/things. The 3rd one is more of a mix of stuff but could be more numeric than representative.
So it might be 2 pairs of columns of 2. Numbers and things in pairs.
Not writing but like some of the chicken-scratch marks I’ve made in the garage on parts, I am sure it meant something to someone once upon a time. It strikes me as some crude form of inventory and I believe at least a few much-more-qualified people have thought the same.
I believe some of the earliest writing we have is related to business – records of transactions or debts. Sounds to me like this might be something similar – accounting records of the time, maybe?
I’m not certain that even is the object in question.
Doing an image search for Dispillio Tablet shows two distinctly different objects.
Here’s one. It’s the same object that WAM linked to above, but this is a clearer picture. It looks like there’s deliberate carving there, but is it writing?
Here is the other. This is more clearly deliberately carved symbols.
anyone know what the deal is here? Which is the correct image? And what is the other one? I’m inclined to think it’s the second one.
I think the second wooden tablet may be a poor imitation version. It seems it can be found at a recreated neolithic settlement serving as a tourist attraction at the modern-day site of Dispilio, in Macedonia. It appears to hang by string on a mud wall in a recreated neolithic hut there.
Here’s the website, with photo of the second object:
I don’t think the second wooden tablet is a genuine historical artifact.
Yeah, my mind is sort of tuned into that kind of thinking due to my interest in such early writing systems. (E.g., I just re-read Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B.)
Interesting that the image in Peter Morris’s link has the tablet sideways from what I saw. Did I forget a link?
I assumed the 4 across by ~10 down orientation was correct due to the “tree” like symbols. These are common in early proto-writing. I saw a PBS show a couple months ago about early horse people in S. Russia and some artifacts had similar “tree” symbols.
Of course taking those symbols as literally trees is problematic. Why would you want to count/inventory trees? Seems like a hopeless cause. But then again there might have been some Golgafrinchans around.
It’s recently been revealed to be a black box warning for an ancient medication. Translated, it reads:
“Do not take Dispilio tablets if you are allergic to them or any of their ingredients. Serious events including whole body rash, large fungating tumors, and being run over by teams of oxen have happened.”
The origins of modern writing in Mesopotamia trace to accounting records. it goes something like this…
When sending a herd of sheep, goats, bales of wool, etc. by caravan, the sender would send some tokens - this shape meant 1 sheep, this meant 1 urn of wheat, etc.
To prevent the other end from being shortchanged, the next step was to include all the tokens together in a hollow clay ball.
To minimize the need to break open the ball, merchants would impress the ball with the number of tokens inside, and their personal seal.
Eventually they figured out tokens were redundant, just send a clay sheet with the count on it.
Additional impressions became shorthand for other details. From this evolved written language.
(One thought is much like those childhood pictogram puzzles - I see Beehives would be a picture of an eye, waves (for sea), a bee and a hive shape.)
Similarly, plains Indians would have painted hides where a series of pictograms were intended to jog the memory and so prompt the oral history of the events the tribe experienced. Messengers for the Inca used knotted strings to remind messengers of their complex messages.
So my totally amateur uneducated guess is that this is some form of mnemonic to remind someone of something, possibly their assorted assets or who owes them debts. “This sign means Ogg, and these are cows, the lines coming off are the number of cows he owes me.”
it’s a matter of debate when this sort of thing can be called writing.
Or you’re watching CNN. From Canada, all the US ads for medical products and services seems so bizarre and out of place… and more evidence that money in the system is severely wasted.
