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.
60 signs, 39 of them different
Doesn’t sound like an alphabet/abjad.
It does – in the Caucasus.
Only if they’d already invented a lot of new consonant symbols, which would be a non-trivial achievement at that (supposed) time, to say the least.
And two-thirds is a lot. Have to do the sums, though (and the numbers would be affected by the phonotactics of the language involved, which might well not have belonged to any modern Causasian group.)
The genre might be important too. If it was a list of names of exotic gods, it might well be different from something like “I, Ozymandias the Mighty, commanded this to be written to perplex the linguists of the future, that they might know confusion and fear.”
This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script
60 is merely the number of signs on this particular tablet. For all we are told here, it may be that a single sign occurs 22 times, all the other 38 signs (different from that one repeated sign) occurring only once.
How does this paucity of minimally described material justify speculation about “origin of a script” ? Is there an assumption that the 39 different signs represent different Georgian script letters ? If that were the case, why do so many occur only once ?
There must be at at least 39 – 21 = 18 signs that occur only once. Many of those may be emojis. The tablet would then evidence how moody the writer was at the time of inscription.
Or perhaps the writer was fond of elegant variation at the sign level, which would explain the lack of repetition. There’s no good reason to assume these people would not have appreciated Fowler.
Many of those may be emojis
It raises the question of the origin of the emojis.
Superficially, it just looks like alphabetical writing; it looks like it was scribed by someone with a consistent idea of how to use standard letter forms. Yet the stats also seem hinky. No symbol (the way they are being counted to give sixty*) appears more than four times, and only an isolated dot appears that many. A few appear three times and a few more twice.
* I don’t quite buy that count, either. One sign, the spiral at the bottom, defining looks decorative (or iconographic). There are two copies of a character that look like a two-stroke bet variant that have each disconnected element counted separately, even though they are nested. Three vertical dots (appearing thrice) are counted as one, as are variously angled triplets of lines, but three stacked chevrons (appearing only in the stack) are counted individually.
Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary looks pretty alphabetic too.
https://chr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8F%8D%E1%8F%8F%E1%8F%89%E1%8F%AF
Some of the characters look like a fragmentary cartouche around a closer set of more ‘literary’ characters.
Could the conical holes have been used to pin something like metal filagree or plate to the face of the stone, perhaps shaped to complete the letters, which in final form need not look exactly as we see them. The later local cleaning might have served to remove the pinned-on part. Perhaps it was a valuable metal, or it had rusted so badly it was taken for crud. I haven’t read the pdf thoroughly enough to know if they’ve tested for metallic residue.
I’ll shut up now.
This discovery and the attempts to connect it with the genesis of the Georgian script both remind me a lot of the Indus valley script and attempts made to connect it to the genesis of Brahmi. In both instances we do not know for a fact that it is a script, even if it is there a huge time gap (over a thousand years in both instances) between this ancient “script” and the later one, making it likely that there is in fact no connection.
In this light, I wonder: assuming the Bashplemi lake tablet indeed IS a script, we have no way of knowing what language it is written in. And even if it IS related to some language(s) of the Caucasus -not necessarily Georgian, nota bene!- this needn’t mean that the language of the tablet will be typologically similar to attested/present-day languages of the Caucasus (in phoneme inventory, phonotactics, morphosyntax…).
Exactly. As is, it’s nothing but a meaningless bunch of symbols, but people can’t abide meaninglessness so they supply whatever satisfies them.
It’s clearly in the same language as the Phaistos Disc.
pin something like metal filagree or plate to the face of the stone, perhaps shaped to complete the letters
An early form of decal, or at least letter templates for air-brushing ! But what is the origin of the templates (and per DE of the emojis and the rest of it) ?
David Eddyshaw: Do not forget Linear A!
Expanding on my last thought (“this needn’t mean that the language of the tablet will be typologically similar to attested/present-day languages of the Caucasus (in phoneme inventory, phonotactics, morphosyntax…”): Actually, if the tablet is in an ancestral form of Classical Armenian, one which had not yet undergone the radical sound changes which left Classical Armenian so unlike other Indo-European languages, then it would in key respects be much more similar to older (Homeric/Mycenaean) Greek than to Modern or Classical Armenian, Modern or Classical Georgian or Modern Chechen.
And if more inscriptions related to the Bashplemi lake tablet are dug up, with no bilingual ones among them, there would be only one hope of deciphering these inscriptions (assuming -again-that this IS writing!). They would have to be in a well-reconstructed language or a close relative thereof.
People here seem to be refuting much stronger claims than I see in “This tablet… raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian” and “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.”
I would have preferred it, though, if Carvajal had said which Albania and which Iberia he was talking about. The context suggests the Albania that’s in the Caucasus and the Iberia that isn’t, I guess.
Could English be reconstructed from Lolspeak and (say) bilingual French/Lolspeak comix ? How does one know when it’s time to stop reconstruction because it has been taken as far as is reasonable ?
@David Eddyshaw: I did not mean to suggest that it looked alphabetic as opposed to syllabic (or abjadic). I just meant it looks to have been created by someone with a clear idea of what a Near Eastern non-logographic writing system looked like.
Separately, remember that what makes the Phaistos disk remarkable is that it is type written. Unlike so many other Bronze Age documents in unknown scripts, it was produced with a set of stamps, which some Minoan king or priest had to have commissioned. Examples of the same writing system produced by hand are very, very few and only discovered after the disk.
I mean I would have preferred it if Shengelia, Gordeziani, et al. had said which Albania and which Iberia they were talking about.
How does one know when it’s time to stop reconstruction because it has been taken as far as is reasonable?
When you run out of evidence. Except it happens even sooner with syntax than with morphology and lexicon. No description of a reconstructed protolanguage even comes close to amounting to something that would pass muster for an adequate modern account of a living language.*
Of course, opinions may differ on what counts as “reasonable” …
* Maybe in some cases with a very shallow time depth, where you’re really just writing a sort of pan-dialectal grammar anyway. (Agolle and Toende Kusaal are mutually comprehensible – with a bit of effort – but it’s still not possible to say how proto-Kusaal formed free relative clauses with subject heads. Maybe it didn’t have any.)
Stu: to expand on David’s answer: it depends on the evidence. In the case of of pre-Classical Armenian we have the good fortune of having a VERY well-attested and extremely well-studied close Indo-European relative with a conservative phonology (Ancient Greek) as a point of comparison, on the one hand, and on the other of having a large corpus of Classical Armenian, whose history (especially phonological) since late Proto-Indo-European times is well-understood. So: if a corpus of inscriptions in pre-Classical Armenian surfaced it might prove possible to decipher it even if no bilingual text was available (Linear B was basically cracked with no bilingual text, after all: it was cracked through knowledge of Ancient Greek and its history).
Hmm. Another possibility: if a corpus of unilingual inscriptions in an Anatolian language surfaced, it too might prove possible to crack even if -again-no bilingual text was available.
Linear B was basically cracked with no bilingual text
Arguable. The breakthrough, after figuring out the general nature of the script and the language, came from figuring out that some place names (Amnisos, Knossos) would occur on the tablets. After these few phonetic identifications, Greek was identified as the language, and the rest of the phonetic identifications followed relatively easily.
So, no bilingual text, in the sense of translations written side by side, but there was something to compare the text to.
@Etienne: thanks for the extra examples. In the present case, the evidence apparently does not even include certainty that the tablet markings are writing, i.e. a written form of a language.
My question about “reconstructing English from Lolspeak and bilingual French/Lolspeak comix” was of course silly. In the absence of French/English texts, French/Lolspeak texts will help to establish the rules of Lolspeak. At that point there is no cause to wonder about a proto-form of Lolspeak (English).
Someone who studies English and Lolspeak might get the temporal succession wrong – English arising out of Lolspeak – but will recognize that they are related somehow. There is no need for any bilingual text involving French.
To this ignorant layman, the notion of “reconstruction” exaggerates what can be achieved – as if entire buildings were being rebuilt. It’s more like working out faded blueprint sketches on the basis of rubble.
People here have related stories of linguists becoming angry and defensive, but I’ve not yet heard a story about one in tears of grief and frustration. If there’s ever a movie about such a linguist, I will go to it pour y laper ses larmes.*
*I had to work this in somewhere. It’s from a preface to Le Père Goriot by Félicien Marceau: “À la cruauté du Tout-Paris qui se rue au bal de Mme Beauséant pour y laper ses larmes, répond la cruauté des pensionnaires de Mme Vauquer qui accablent Goriot de leurs sarcasmes et qui, dix minutes après sa mort, sont déjà retournés à leurs calembredaines.”
Arrival has a weepy frustrated linguist. I don’t think that it’s primarily problems of historical reconstruction of protolanguages that have upset her, though. (Could be wrong. I didn’t see the plot twist coming despite having previously read the short story it’s based on. What do I know?)
I didn’t see the plot twist coming despite having previously read the short story it’s based on.
Same here! But then I just watched an Olivier Assayas movie I had seen only last year and remembered nothing of the plot, only a few striking shots and locations (and irritating characters).
I had forgotten about that movie. I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. My first clue was her fear at entering the spaceship from below – a dark birth canal if ever there was one in a film. Neurosis ! At the end, the spaceships faded away between the clouds, instead of zipping off into space as they should. That decided it for me – the whole thing was an overwrought dream, full of guilt, weepiness and fantasies of soldiering on.
Still, I require a real linguist. Well, not really. I just like the idea of laper les larmes out of meanness, it’s more sensual than Schadenfreude.
where the lake is located has at present a majority-ethnic-Azerbaijani population. Whether that was already the case just over a century ago…
Apparently, the name of Dmanisi appearing on Russian imperial and then Soviet maps until 1947 was Başkeçid, or in Azeri, ‘head pass; head crossing; head ford’ : baş ‘head, end, main’ + keçid ‘pass, ford’ (referring to a ford on the Mashavera River?). If the baš- in the name ბაშპლემი bašp̕lemi is Azeri baş ‘head’, then what is the -პლემი -p̕lemi, I wonder? The consonant პ [pʼ] is not the usual rendering of p or any other consonant in loanwords from Turkic, it seems, although it often renders Armenian պ, originally unaspirated p.
Flailing around for soundalike possibilities… maybe syncopated from Azeri pələmə, designating structures like pergolas or sheds built in gardens or fields (Turkish çardak, Persian چارطاق čârtâq)? Or metathetic from Azeri dialectal pəlmə, ‘fog, mist’, ‘gloom’ and the like? Not very satisfactory.
@xerib
Russian wikipedia links to a 2-volume alphabetical toponymy. In the first volume there are a number of placenames baş-X, but nothing resembling bashplemy. In the second volume there is an entry “pilişimyarq”, but I don’t know if this form is relevant. Maybe there is a russian version of the toponymy, the linked volumes are scanned and in Azeri.
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C_%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%90%D0%B7%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%B4%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0
http://anl.az/el/Kitab/252514.pdf
https://www.lib.az/users/1/upload/files/Azrbaycan_toponimlrinin_ensiklopedik_II.pdf
People here have related stories of linguists becoming angry and defensive, but I’ve not yet heard a story about one in tears of grief and frustration. If there’s ever a movie about such a linguist, I will go to it pour y laper ses larmes.*
somehow, nobody has yet made the epic series of films that the Foreigner series by c.j. cherryh* deserves – its protagonist has linguistic training, but starts out as more of an interspecies dragoman than a linguist proper, and as of the most recent volume has become significantly more politically important. along the way there is a book that turns in part on the (perhaps improbably fast) establishment of communication with a second species of non-human extraterrestrials. the series certainly has its flaws, but i quite enjoy it (more so after cherryh un-stuck herself from an initial Meiji Restoration In Space trap, and her aliens became more alien). it’s perfect movie material, and i think could make a studio very happy (read: “bring in buckets of cash”).
—
* the “h” is silent, and was added for genre-reasons: to make her surname fit sf better than romance.
I’ve only read some of her Alliance-Union series. It’s very well done. I was particularly struck by the way that the Union people regard their horrific society as just, well, normal, and can still be highly honourable or dishonourable within the norms of that society.
I should really give her a try, I guess. Where would I start?
I started with Cyteen, myself, but it sounds like rozele is much more knowledgeable about this.
When I saw “Cherryh” just now, my first association was Neneh Cherry.
(Whose name I know, whose music I don’t.)
I’ve liked some of what I’ve read of hers, but I haven’t read enough to recommend a starting point. I’m just going to say that I hated her Hugo-winning novel Downbelow Station, so… well, so if you start there and don’t like it, maybe don’t give up on her.
i did not do this, myself, but i think with the Foreigner books it makes sense to start at the beginning, even though my memory is of being a bit disappointed with the first book when i came back to it. the more classically first contact narrative is in the second trilogy.
i appreciated Cyteen, though it’s been so long that i don’t remember it as clearly as i’d like.
the Merovingen Nights books are my other favorite of hers – it’s mostly a shared-world anthology series, each book having a cherryh novella strung through it, in a sf-framed steampunk-for-lack-of-a-better-word setting within the Alliance/Union universe.
Thanks!
Start with the first book she wrote, Gate of Ivrel. It’s short, not excessively stylized, engagingly confusing in places, and arguably superior to everything she has produced since. It does have space* ronin though, which some readers may find objectionable.
* Actually, more like planetary romance ronin.
Jerry Friedman: Downbelow Station is a really weird place to get acquainted with the Alliance-Union part of the universe, much less the particular subplot. You should not start there — I did and I imagine many other Bulgarian readers did also. It’s very much in media res. It was the first book of Cherryh to be translated into Bulgarian, and it was not even the whole book, it was split in two for the Bulgarian translation, and the second half did not come trough for quite a while. Censorship had just been lifted and translators were struggling to go though the backlog.
To my untrained eye the table looks kinda fakey but maybe its because I’m not used to seeing such thickly-etched characters.
And naturally Brian Pellar has Big Ideas about how it’s connected to the Vinca symbols because of course he does. I except he’ll find a way to tie it into the Chinese zodiac somehow as proof of… something.
Discussion of this item continues at Language Log, starting with
“Enigmatic writing from the Republic of Georgia
December 12, 2024 @ 12:04 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Decipherment, Writing”
Here.