Europe's oldest readable text found

Wed Apr 6, 2011

Researchers say they have found Europe's oldest readable text in an ancient refuse pit near the hilltop village of Iklaina in southern Greece.

The sun-dried tablet was found by the Athens Archaeological Society in the western Peloponnese peninsula and is said to be more than 3,000 years old.

Partly funded by the National Geographic Society, the project began in 2006 and led to the discovery of the tablet which experts say has survived purely by accident when the refuse pit was set on fire and baked the clay.

According to US-based researcher Michael Cosmopoulos, the tablet is a financial record from a long-lost Mycenaean town and is about a century older than the ones discovered before.

"On one side it has a list of names and numbers, on the other a verb relating to manufacture,” the University of Missouri-St Louis archaeology professor told AFP.

"It is the oldest tablet from a stratified deposit from the Greek mainland, and consequently from Europe," Cosmopoulos added.

The inscription is in Linear B, a form of writing that dates back to Mycenaeans, a Bronze Age culture that waged the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad and dominated much of Greece from 1600 BCE.

"The existence of the tablet at Iklaina suggests that bureaucracy and literacy were more widespread and more ancient than we had previously thought," Cosmopoulos went on to say.

"Until now, tablets had been known only from a handful of major palaces -- Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes."

The tablet will be presented at the University of Austin, Texas, by Mycenaean script expert Cynthia Shelmerdine, who first deciphered it, Cosmopoulos announced.

The excavation project has also yielded the ruins of a large building complex with massive terrace walls, frescoes and an advanced drainage system, which archeologists say might have been an early Mycenaean palace and town from 1550-1400 BCE.

According to Cosmopoulos, the site was apparently destroyed around 1,400 BCE and conquered by the neighboring kingdom of Pylos.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/173351.html.