‘World’s Oldest Writing–and We Can’t Read It’ (2015)

Anybody got a decoder ring?

For most of my lifetime, the Sumerians got the credit for inventing writing. With some modifications, their “cuneiform” system was used throughout the Ancient Near East for several thousand years.

But a find from northern Greece is older than that.

World’s Oldest Writing–and We Can’t Read It

What does it say? What did somebody take the trouble to write down by carving it into a block of wood, maybe seven thousand years ago? Was it a grocery list? A things-to-do list? There’s just no way to tell. Maybe if we had dozens of samples, and a guess that the language was some form of ancient Greek turned out to be right, we might someday apply enough computer analysis to read this.

Who knows? It might be something important.