The world is home to approximately 7,111 known languages. New ones get discovered on occasion. Nevertheless, researchers in Georgia have been unable to attribute the script on a recently surfaced rock tablet to any of them. Even after intense analysis, the ancient language on the so-called Bashplemi tablet still evades researchers.
Fishermen in Dmanisi, Georgia discovered the tablet in Lake Bashplemi in 2021. Its eight-by-nine-inch face features 60 characters, 39 of them unique, across seven lines. A bit of the tablet has broken off, leading researchers to believe they’re missing a few words, according to their paper in the Romanian Institute’s Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology.
Before studying the letters, the team had to ensure the tablet wasn’t a fake. Using optical and electronic microscopy, they confirmed that it is made of vesicular basalt, which abounds in the area.
They also determined how the inscriptions were made, since basalt is so hard to carve. The tablet’s creator outlined its characters with a conic drill, then connected them using a smooth, rounded tool. While the Bashplemi tablet’s age remains uncertain, experts believe it dates from the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, based on archaeological artifacts uncovered here since excavations began in 1936. Such techniques would have been sophisticated but not impossible for that period.
Bashplemi Lake. Photo: R. Shengelia et al., Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology.
Although the team noted that they hope someday to use “modern computer methods” to analyze the Bashplemi tablet, their latest efforts to make sense of its text relied solely on comparative analysis. While they found that “the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us,” a number of its symbols resemble characters found in scripts of the Middle East, India, Egypt, West Iberia, and, most of all, the Proto-Kartvelian language of the fourth century B.C.E., which predated modern languages including Svan, Mingrelian and Laz.
Little is known, in fact, about the Georgian language’s origins, even though Georgia is one of just three Caucasian nations that developed a language of its own. Evidence of Georgian, Armenian, and Albanian scripts started appearing on the historical ledger only after the proliferation of Christianity.
“There is a reasonable doubt that inscriptions and manuscripts written in the pre-Christian versions of these scripts were destroyed as a result of Christian domination,” the researchers write. But, decades ago, experts found a fragment written in Georgian near Nekresi Church, in eastern Georgia, dating to the third century C.E.—a century before Christian dominance.
The authors of this study appear hopeful that the Bashplemi tablet is related to the fabled “Golden Script,” perfected, per Greek myth, by the Colchians, who previously inhabited western Georgia. But there is no evidence of this script to compare the tablet with—partially because the Colchians purportedly wrote only on organic surfaces like leather, which have since decayed, but also due to insufficient archaeological research thus far into this part of the world.
They also don’t know what direction to read the script, or whether the tablet’s original shape was rectangular, elliptical, or naturally irregular—or, of course, what the tablet says.
For now, they offered ideas. Given the basalt’s sturdiness, and the many repeated symbols (which suggests that they may be numbers) it could be a record of military spoils, a construction project, or a religious offering.