Archaeologists working on the Gulf coast of Mexico have uncovered a 3,000-year-old stone tablet that bears the oldest writing in the Western Hemisphere and the first text unambiguously linked to the Olmec empire – the enigmatic civilization believed to be the progenitor of the Aztecs and Maya.
The 26-pound tablet, about the size of a legal pad, bears 61 symbols arrayed in a manner suggesting that it is recording everyday speech.
“We have long thought that the Olmec would have writing,” said archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, who was not involved in the discovery. “This block is finally the evidence everyone has been waiting for.”
Scientists may never be able to translate the text unless they find many more examples of Olmec writing, said archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University, a co-author of the report published today in the journal Science.
But “if we can decode it, it gives us a chance of hearing their voices and finding out what they considered important and worth recording,” he said.
The Olmec flourished in south-central Mexico for more than 1,000 years before they mysteriously disappeared, just before the rise of the Maya. They were the first civilization in Mesoamerica, and at their height, built large pyramids and massive stone sculptures. They built the first cities in the region and established a wide-ranging trading system that stretched across Central America.
The tablet dates from about 1000 B.C. to 900 B.C. and is at least 300 years older than any purported writing that archaeologists have found in the region. The oldest previous example of what can be considered a “full-blown written language,” Saturno added, is the so-called Tuxtlas script from the eastern coast of Mexico, dating from about A.D. 100 to A.D. 200.
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