A few years ago, fishermen in the Dmanisi township in Georgia discovered a stone tombstone with a mysterious language engraved on it.—a script that has the potential to change the history of ancient Caucasian writing.
Researchers from Georgia and France have analyzed a tablet carved with undeciphered writing unearthed by Georgian locals near Lake Bashplemi in 2021. study published in November in the Magazine of Ancient History and Archeology suggests that the inscription could be an ancient local Georgian script. If this interpretation and the tentative dating of the artefact to the Early Iron Age or earlier is confirmed, it could rewrite our understanding of the origins of Georgian writing.
“The signs on the tablet certainly represent writing,” the researchers wrote in the study, adding that it could even “have been an alphabet.” The inscription, called the “Bashplemi inscription” after the nearby lake, is made up of 39 unique characters, probably including numbers and punctuation marks, with some repeating for a total of 60 signs divided into seven horizontal lines. Although the text remains undeciphered, certain characters appear similar to other scripts.
“In general, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any scripture that we know; However, most of the symbols used there resemble those found in the writings of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and Western Iberia,” they explained, also listing Phoenician, Aramaic and the Greek. Additionally, they noted a resemblance to Bronze and Early Iron Age seals unearthed in Georgia. Many of the similarities, however, were with Caucasian scripts (a region that includes parts of Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), including the Georgian Mrgvlovani, Albanian, and Proto-Georgian scripts.
However, the directionality of the Bashplemi inscription remains a mystery. The symbols could be read from left to right, right to left, or could even follow a boustrophedon pattern (text that changes direction with each line), although the researchers say the latter option is the least likely. Because some parts of the tablet appear to have broken 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 conical drill, then connected these marks using “some smooth, round-headed tool” (reminiscent of connect-the- points).
The researchers propose that the tablet’s “difficult-to-work material” and possible inclusion of numbers indicate that the inscription could describe military booty, a divine offering, or an important construction project. Two other factors (the origin of the stone and the similarity to nearby Caucasian writings) could indicate that both the artifact and the writing may be local to the region of Georgia where they were discovered.
The researchers were unable to determine the exact age of the tablet, but suggested that, based on the graphic forms of the inscription and artifacts discovered during preliminary studies of the site, it probably dates back to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Age.
If this interpretation is correct, it would revolutionize our understanding of the history of early 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, dates from after the spread of Christianity in the area. , which was adopted at the beginning of the 4th century, according to the study. The Early Iron Age dates back to approximately 1000 BC c.meaning that the Bashplemi inscription potentially predates these early examples by more than a millennium.
“Deciphering the inscription discovered in the historical Dbaniskhevi can become a remarkably interesting and significant event,” the researchers concluded (the historical Dbaniskhevi is the municipality of Dmanisi), “and this can possibly change stereotypes about certain historical phenomena, as well as aspects key to the origin and development of scripts in the Caucasus,” they concluded.
Interestingly, they also emphasized that the tablet is unlikely to be a fake, one of the reasons being that the locals who found the artifact rubbed the surface of the tablet to better see the inscription with an iron object which left superficial scratches.
“No forger would do something like that and question the authenticity of an artifact,” they noted. While I hope that forgers do not take this as a useful suggestion, it remains to be seen whether future archaeological work can confirm that the tablet is as significant as researchers speculate.