Guillermo Carvajal writes about what sounds like an interesting, if frustratingly limited, discovery:
Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered a basalt tablet with inscriptions in an unknown language near Lake Bashplemi, in the Dmanisi region of Georgia. The discovery is significant not only because of the rarity of the material found but also because it could reveal unknown aspects of the ancient civilizations that inhabited the Caucasus.
The finding, made in 2021, is a tablet the size of a book, on which 60 different symbols have been recorded, of which 39 have no exact equivalents in other known ancient writing systems. Archaeologists, based on the archaeological and geological context, believe that the tablet may date from the Late Bronze Age or the early Iron Age, around the first millennium BCE. […]
The basalt tablet contains 39 unique symbols arranged in seven horizontal lines or registers. Some of these symbols repeat, allowing for a total of 60 characters on the stone’s surface. The arrangement and frequency of some of the characters suggest that they may have been used to denote numbers or punctuation marks. Researchers have suggested that the writing system may have been used to record religious offerings, construction works, or military inventories, although these interpretations are preliminary.
By “preliminary” is meant, of course, “completely imaginary”; it’s possible that further examples may come to light, enabling us to understand it better, but it will probably remain yet another mysterious fragment of the past. You can see the tablet, an image labeled “The symbols of the tablet, highlighted and numbered,” and a photo of the place it was found at the link, and you can download the recent paper by Ramaz Shengelia, Levan Gordeziani, et al., here; the abstract:
In Georgia, numerous sites date back to the Bronze Age. Nearby Bashplemi Lake, the site of the discovery of a basalt tablet bearing an inscription with unknown characters, is the site where the skull of a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, the first European, was discovered. This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian. While the basalt on which it is based is known to be of local origin, its meaning is unknown and there remains a long way to go to decipher it. An initial comparative analysis conducted with over 20 languages shows that the characters, which could belong to an aboriginal Caucasian population, beside proto-Georgian and Albanian writing signs, bear some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.
Thanks, Dmitry!
A tablet with an ancient, unknown script, found in a barely disguised Blasphemy Lake? I’ve seen that movie.
For pity’s sake, once your maverick whip-cracking adventurer symbologist has deciphered the tablet (as he inevitably will*), DON’T READ THE INSCRIPTION OUT LOUD!!!
* SPOILER
It turns out to be in Reformed Hattic.
“I make the first set of symbols out to read Iä…”
The lake’s name seems to also occur in the alternate transliteration “Bashplemy,” which is an even thinner disguise. That’s the spelling google maps uses, which enables one to see that the lake is barely two miles from the current international border between Georgia and Armenia. That border appears to perpetuate an early Soviet-era compromise with the area on both sides of the border in that region having been subject to competing Georgian and Armenian claims following the collapse of Czarist rule which had escalated into what wikipedia calls the Armeno-Georgian War of December 1918. I’m not sure whether a continuing claim to the location where this mysterious tablet was found remains an action-list item for your more vigorous Armenian nationalists.
Luckily for the hardy but indolent Georgians, the Armenian nationalists are far too preoccupied with the Turkish Menace (as represented by Azerbaijan) to shift their focus northwards.
… some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.
The shores of Vizcaya and Santander are replete with Brahmani?
Hace un ris que corta el pis. As in, “taking the Mickey”?
But apart from that, I was struck by the precision of the inscription, both in the regularity of the text, in the shape of the signs, and in the width and depth of the carved lines, especially when it’s found on a thing that’s not a huge royal monument.
So I’ll quote Carvajal a little more:
I can think of other ways to connect those dots… I’ll take more investigations of the tablet before I believe it.
Further complicating the priorities of any Armenian irredentists it appears that the “municipality” (probably not the best idiomatic translation for a territory more sized like a U.S. county although the Georgian word is almost certainly a borrowing of the Russian муниципалитет*) where the lake is located has at present a majority-ethnic-Azerbaijani population. Whether that was already the case just over a century ago when the Georgians and Armenians were fighting about where the border should go or is the result of more recent migration is not known to me.
*Apparently the “municipalities” were previously raions/rayons, but maybe that had more of a Soviet or at least Russo-centric vibe?
With a gap of 1000 to 1500 years in between?
Clearly, then, the Voynich Manuscript is impossible.