Alphabet of an ancient Paleo-Hispanic civilization discovered on slate tablet
While looking at a slate tablet found in Spain, a researcher noticed engravings of warriors in battle, but also the mysterious alphabet of an ancient language.
The 20-centimeter tablet was recently unearthed during an archaeological dig near the Spanish town of Guareña. The site, known as Casas del Turuñuelo, belongs to the late Tartessian civilization, which developed in the southwestern Iberian Peninsula about 2,500 years ago. When Spain's National Research Council announced the discovery on June 6, they simply noted that it depicted fighting individuals identified as warriors.
The news caught the attention of Joan Ferrer i Jané, a computer scientist and expert on Paleo-Hispanic languages at the University of Barcelona. He quickly realized that the artifact was even more significant than the initial reports suggested. “Beyond the figures, when I looked at the plaque, I saw what appeared to be a Paleo-Hispanic sign; a sign that cannot be confused with any other,” he said in a statement.
He contacted the Institute of Archaeology of Mérida to obtain better images of the slab and discovered that it contained a beautiful (and very rare) example of Southern Paleo-Hispanic writing. “After studying the images, everything indicates that it is an alphabet of the southern script with the initial sequence ABeKaTuIKeLBaNS?ŚTaUE, which is almost the same as documented in the Spanish alphabet, except for the eleventh sign, which has a unique shape,” Ferrer explained.
Paleo-Hispanic scripts, the writing systems used in the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of the Latin alphabet, are divided into at least two families: the Northeastern family and the Southern family. All these writings are believed to derive from the Phoenician writing system, developed by the Phoenician civilization around 3,000 years ago along the eastern Mediterranean coast in what is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.
The new discovery is particularly notable as there are only two other known pieces of evidence showing alphabets of Southern Paleo-Hispanic scripts. Consequently, our knowledge of this writing system is very limited. There may also be letters or symbols yet to be discovered; the lower part of the tablet is broken, but Ferrer suggests that it may once have depicted up to 32 symbols.
“This alphabet has 27 signs and is the only complete one we know of to date. Another was found in the excavation of Villasviejas del Tamuja (Cáceres), but it is very fragmented and contains only a few central signs. Therefore, [the new alphabet] would be the third example and would provide a wealth of information,” Ferrer explained.
