Experts puzzled by never-before-seen language on unearthed tablet

An undeciphered language has been discovered etched into a stone tablet which could be over 3,500 years old.

A book-sized tablet of volcanic basalt rock was found near Bashplemi Lake, Georgia, in 2021, covered in etchings which have yet to be deciphered.

A paper published in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology found that the mysterious writing is similar to other ancient languages from the Mediterranean region at that time, but experts are still baffled.

Researchers believe the stone tablet itself could date back to the Late Bronze Age, roughly 3,500 years ago.

A research team in Georgia found the writing was done right to left, rather than left to right.

Nearly three years after its discovery, no match has been made of the script to a known language.

The study read: ‘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.’

Other languages spoken during the Bronze Age include Akkadian, Mycenaean, Egyptian, and others.

Researchers theorised that because the inscription was done on basalt – a notoriously hard rock – it could represent something important.

‘Given that the inscription is made on hard-to-work material, and that some frequently repeated symbols may be numbers, it may represent military spoils, an important construction project, or an offering to a deity,’ researchers said.

There are seven lines of horizontal characters – 60 in total – and researchers found some of them might be punctuation marks, but it has yet to be confirmed.

In 2023, the first ever sentence in Canaanite from 3,700 years ago, a plea to remove hair lice, was discovered etched on an ivory comb.

Researchers described it as a ‘landmark in the history of the human ability to write’. Written in the Bronze Age, the comb dated to around 1700 BC and says: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’

At 17 letters and seven words, it is the most complete and earliest known example of an archaic alphabet invented only a hundred years earlier.

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