ancient writing – Lee Duigon

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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.

Here it is–the world’s oldest writing… that we know about, so far. See if you can decode the secret message.

I hope you don’t mind taking a little break from watching our secular pin-head civilization destroy itself.

When was writing invented? Back when they used to teach such things in school, we were told that the ancient Sumerians invented writing, possibly as long ago as 4,000 B.C. Egyptian hieroglyphics came along shortly afterward.

In 1993, archaeologists in northern Greece dredged up a piece of wood from the bottom of a lake. The wood was carved all over with writing. Preserved in the oxygen-free environment under a layer of mud, the artifact was carbon-dated to circa 5,200 B.C. ( http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-writings-ancient-places-europe/dispilio-tablet-oldest-known-written-text-00913 )

Did you know that? I didn’t, and I try to keep close track of such things. This piece of wood, now called the Dispilio Tablet, is far and away the oldest known sample of writing. But of course we have no idea what it says. An unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered, as the saying goes. But we might have a slim chance of someday cracking the code, if the unknown language of the Dispilio Tablet is related to ancient Greek. For the time being, though, we have no way of reading it.

Funny things are going on in prehistory, these days. There’s the Potbelly Hill site in Turkey, where a vast, sophisticated temple complex, complete with nicely-executed sculpture in the round, was apparently in operation around 10,000 B.C (see http://leeduigon.com/2013/01/10/an-archeological-enigma-potbelly-hill/ ). And now the advent of writing has been pushed back over a thousand years.

If this keeps up, we’re going to run out of room in history for primitive, know-nothing cavemen.

Although we can always find their like in some of our more expensive public schools.