Mysterious Language Etched Onto Newly Discovered Ancient Tablet

A few years ago, fishermen in the Dmanisi municipality of Georgia discovered a stone tablet inscribed with a mysterious language—a script that has the potential to upend the history of ancient Caucasian writing.

Researchers in Georgia and France have analyzed a carved tablet with an undeciphered script unearthed by Georgian locals near Bashplemi Lake in 2021. A study published in November in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology suggests that the inscription could be an ancient local Georgian script. If this interpretation, and the artifact’s tentative dating to the Early Iron Age or earlier, are confirmed, it could rewrite our understanding of the origins of Georgian writing.

“The signs on the tablet undoubtedly represent a script,” the researchers wrote in the study, adding that it could even “have been an alphabet.” The inscription, dubbed “Bashplemi inscription” after the nearby lake, is composed of 39 unique characters—likely including numbers and punctuation marks—with some repeating for a total of 60 signs divided into seven horizontal lines. Though the text remains undeciphered, certain characters appear similar to other scripts.

“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us; 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,” they explained, also listing Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek. Additionally, they noted a likeness to Bronze and Early Iron Age seals unearthed in Georgia. Many of the similarities, however, were with Caucasian scripts (a region including parts of Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), including Georgian Mrgvlovani, Albanian, and proto-Georgian.

However, the directionality of the Bashplemi inscription remains a mystery. The symbols could be read left-to-right, right-to-left, or could even follow a boustrophedon pattern (a text that changes directionality with every line), though the researchers claim this last option is the least likely. Because parts of the tablet seem to have chipped off, the inscription could also be incomplete.

The team, including a researcher from Tbilisi State University, conducted a mineralogical analysis to determine that the tablet was carved from local basalt, an exceptionally difficult material to cut or carve. In fact, they deduced from a visual examination that the responsible scribe or scribes initially marked the shape of the symbols with notches using a conic drill, then connected these marks using “some smooth and round-headed tool” (reminiscent to connect-the-dots).

The researchers propose that the tablet’s “hard-to-work material” and possible inclusion of numbers indicate that the inscription might outline military spoils, a divine offering, or a significant construction project. Two other factors—the origin of the stone, and the similarity with nearby Caucasian scripts—could indicate that both the artifact as well as the script may be local to the Georgian region where it was discovered.

The researchers couldn’t determine the tablet’s exact age but suggested that, based on the inscription’s graphical shapes and artifacts uncovered during preliminary studies of the site, it likely dates back to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age.

If this interpretation is correct, it would revolutionize our understanding of the history of ancient Georgian writing. While historical sources suggest the existence of an ancient written language in Colchis (now western Georgia), the oldest direct evidence of Georgian scripts—as well as all Caucasian scripts—date to after the spread of Christianity in the area, which was adopted in the early fourth century, according to the study. The Early Iron Age dates back to around 1000 BCE, meaning that the Bashplemi inscription potentially predates these early examples by over a millennium.

“Deciphering the inscription discovered in historical Dbaniskhevi can become a remarkably interesting and significant event,” the researchers concluded (historical Dbaniskhevi being the Dmanisi municipality), “and this can possibly change the stereotypes about certain historical phenomena, as well as key aspects of the origination and development of the scripts in Caucasus,” they concluded.

Interestingly, they also emphasized that the tablet is unlikely to be a forgery, one of the reasons being that the locals who found the artifact scrubbed the tablet’s surface to see the inscription better with an iron object that left shallow scratches.

“No falsifier would ever do anything like this and render the authenticity of an artifact questionable,” they pointed out. While I hope forgers don’t take this as a helpful suggestion, it remains to be seen whether further archaeological work can indeed confirm the tablet to be as significant as the researchers speculate it to be.