A bunch of fishermen in the Dmanisi region of Georgia picked up an unexpected catch recently when they hauled in a stone tablet bearing an ancient inscription in a language that has never been seen before. Researchers aren’t entirely sure when the mysterious text was engraved or by whom, but suspect it probably dates back to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age.
The local anglers discovered the basalt tablet when out on the Bashplemi Lake in the autumn of 2021, before scraping off the grime on its surface using an iron nail. Fortunately, the scratches made during this basic clean-up did no damage to the original script, which was later compared to dozens of other ancient languages in the hopes of identifying the authorship and written tradition to which it belongs.
“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us,” write the authors of a new study about the perplexing artifact. “However, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the scripts of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and West Iberia.”
In total, the researchers identified 39 unique symbols on the “book-sized tablet”, several of which are repeated to give a total of 60 characters. “The script, some of whose 39 characters are numbers and punctuation marks, may have been an alphabet,” they explain.
Arranged into seven lines or registers, the text appears to flow horizontally although it’s currently unclear if it is intended to be read from left to right or vice versa. After cross-referencing the inscription against more than 20 other ancient written languages from across the Middle East and Mediterranean, the study authors found that the signs bore the strongest resemblance to the Proto-Kartvelian script, which appeared in the fourth millennium BCE in Georgia and Iberia.
A likeness was also noted with other Bronze-Age Georgian symbols known as the Colchian runes and the Georgian Mrgvlovani alphabet. Additionally, the researchers explain that “some similarities with Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek alphabets are not surprising as their role in the region and their relations to local scripts are well-known.”
Analyzing the characters under a microscope, the study authors found that the inscriptions were made using a conic drill to outline the contours of each letter, before these notches were then joined up “using some smooth and round-head tool.” While it’s impossible to date the mysterious item, the presence of other Bronze and Iron-Age artifacts in the area where the tablet was found suggests that it is probably several thousand years old.
As for the undeciphered contents of the text, the researchers speculate that “it may represent military spoils, an important construction project, or an offering to a deity.”
The study is published in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology.