I recently saw a reference to the Dispilio Tablet, about which I knew nothing, so I thought I’d quote some bits of that Wikipedia article and see if anyone knows more:
The Dispilio tablet is a wooden artefact bearing linear marks, unearthed in 1993 during George Hourmouziadis’s excavations of the Neolithic site of Dispilio in Greece. A single radiocarbon date from the artefact has yielded a radiocarbon age of 6270±38 radiocarbon years, which when calibrated corresponds to the calendar age range of 5324–5079 cal BC (at 95.4% probability). The lakeshore settlement occupied an artificial island near the modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Western Macedonia, Greece. […]
The archaeological context of the tablet is not known, as it was found floating on the water that was filling the excavation trench. The tablet itself was partially damaged when it was exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water in which it was immersed for a long period of time, and so it was placed under conservation. As of 2024, a full academic publication assessing the tablet apparently awaits the completion of conservation work.[citation needed]
Despite the lack of proper context, and the fact that no dedicated scientific paper has ever explained the tablet in detail, various archaeological and unofficial interpretations have surfaced, including the interpretation of the markings as some form of early writing.[citation needed] […]
A large number of sources in popular and social media, and even some scholarly articles, show a wrong image of the tablet, specifically, the modern artistic recreation. This photograph portrays an object which is a modern recreation of how the tablet may have looked like originally. It is an object hanging from the wall in one of the reconstructed house in the open-air museum nearby the archaeological site. The lines on the modern recreation bear little resemblance to the markings on the original artefact.
Sounds like a mess, with plenty of opportunities for ill-informed analysis. I am, of course, inherently skeptical about these things; does anyone think it’s likely to actually represent writing? (Dispilio, incidentally, has final stress: Δισπηλιό; before 1926 it was known as Δουπιάκοι. See this 2002 post for my objections to that sort of renaming.)
Here is the paper on the radiocarbon dating, which also has archaeological information and a photo of the tablet.
Regardless of the fate of Δουπιάκοι, it’s in the regional unit (περιφερειακή ενότητα) of Καστοριά (“place of beavers”), which sounds to have held onto that name for somewhere between ten and fifteen centuries (it may have first gone with the lake and only later with a town on the shore of the lake). I am pleased to learn from wikipedia that the place “is known as Kesriye in Turkish, Kostur (Cyrillic: Костур) in Bulgarian and Macedonian, Kosturi in Albanian and Kusturea in Aromanian.” The article fails to offer a Ladino version of the toponym although it sounds like there was once a Ladino-speaking population in the area.
which when calibrated corresponds to the calendar age range of 5324–5079 cal BC
Hey, that’s the exact time that iron-working was invented in Africa!
Depressing to think of all these lone geniuses independently inventing alphabet scripts millennia before anyone else, only for an unappreciative public to throw their proof-of-concept samples in the nearest lake.
I thought we’d discussed the Dispilio tablet before, but I can only find this mention in 2019. Maybe I just looked it up.
(An immensely interesting thread, so well worth the revisit.)
Edit: And now JWB’s comment gave me a sense of dejà-vu. But that’s of this post:
“You fool, if this catches on we’ll never be able to remember our epics and genealogies!”
Actually …
I’ve opined before that we probably owe the alphabetic writing principle to the fact that the first alphabets along with their inspiration, hieroglyphic, arose among Afro-Asiatic speakers, for whom vowels are like tones, and quite superfluous in writing.
But it occurs to me that there is another way of looking at this.
Suppose many a lone phonological pioneer genius actually did come up with alphabetic writing over the previous millennia.
Now, a writing system is no good for anything (except tortured-genius teenage diaries) unless you can teach it to other people. So:
Ug: See: C A T, “cat.”
Og: OK. But why is kuh ah tuh “cat”?
Ug: You just run it all together quickly.
Og: Mhm. So what does “kuh” mean?
Ug: Look … it doesn’t work like that.
Og: I see … that’s really brilliant, Ug. Bit beyond my speed, but …
… Come and see my picture of a moose hunt. The girls really dig it. And that Ig really likes you, I can tell. She’ll be there.
On the other hand:
Bil: See: C T, “cat.”
Bin: OK. Hey, same in C T “turned into a cat”.
Bil: You could even have C T T “made into a cat.”
Bin: Cool! How would you write “dog”?
Ultimately, the trick may have been the Egyptian practice of writing homonyms, but not synonyms, with the same character. That way, it was possible to reinterpret the character as not a word or even an abstract word root, but as pure sound devoid of inherent meaning.
In Mesopotamia, synonyms as well as homonyms were written with the same character…
There’s a literature that attributes astronomical (lunar monthly) day-names with having mnemonics for ordered arbitrary symbols strings about 20-30 terms long. The whole subject IIUC full of noise but it seems plausible enough to me (though I also ascribe to the feminist theory of aquatic apes).
Aquatic apes remain stubbornly absent from the fossil record, and the whole idea comes from unnecessary overinterpretations as far as I can tell.
Well, the aquatic apes weren’t in *our* lineage. They evolved into the Merfolk, of course.
As evidenced by the digs on Atlantis.
I like the subcutaneous fat.