Experts are still puzzling over a basalt stone tablet, more than three years after discovering it near Lake Bashplemi in Georgia. According to their recent study published in the Journal of Ancient History and ArchaeologyThe book-sized artifact excavated in 2021 contains 60 etched symbols, 39 of which differ from each other. And while some characters resemble those in other old scripts, the team is still unsure what the author is actually saying.
If Arkeo news As explained on December 5, Lake Bashplemi is fed by tributaries leading to the Mashavera River, and lies on a volcanic plateau bordered by hills. The area has yielded many archaeological finds in the past, including those dating back 1.8 million years humanoid skull fragments discovered in 1999 and 2000. Although archaeologists have yet to date the tablet precisely, related items, including pottery shards and a stone mortar also found nearby, indicate that it probably originated around the 1st millennium BC, in the Late Bronze Age or early Iron Age.
The tablet, also called the Bashplemi inscription, contains seven horizontal lines containing the 60 characters, some of which may be numbers or punctuation marks due to the frequency of use. The details also reveal a level of sophistication remarkable for the region and time. Basalt, the researchers explained, is a particularly hard rock that is difficult to engrave and cut. The archaeologists believe that the writer probably first drew the outlines of each character using a conical drill, and then connected them with lines using “a tool with a smooth and rounded head.”
The mysterious language of the Bashplemi inscription also appears to share similarities with possibly more than twenty writing systems to date, although the message cannot be directly linked to any one culture. Researchers noted a possible overlap with pre-Christian Georgian seals dating to the fourth millennium BC, while other forms resemble both early Caucasian, Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic languages. Because no direct link has been established, experts believe the inscription may contain a much more regionally specific, previously undocumented script.
[Related: 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian artifacts linked to the dawn of writing.]
Whether archaeologists and linguists will ever decipher the Bashplemi Tablet remains to be seen, but until then, the context may provide a clue to its translated contents.
“Given that the inscription is made on difficult-to-work material, and that some oft-repeated symbols may be numbers, [the text] may represent military loot, an important construction project, or an offering to a deity,” researchers theorized in their paper.
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