Unknown Script Found in Georgia

Writing of a heretofore unknown style has been found in the Caucasus:

GRAKLIANI, Georgia—Sophia Paatashvili, a third-year graduate student in archaeology at Ivane Javakashvili Tbilisi State University, was excavating an ancient temple at an Iron Age site called Grakliani last month when she noticed something strange: a series of marks carved into a stone slab just below the temple’s collapsed altar.

Unlike inscriptions found in other temples at Grakliani, these didn’t show animals or people, nor were they random decorative elements.

Instead, says Vakhtang Licheli, who heads the university’s archaeology institute and has led excavations at Grakliani during the past eight years, they may be the oldest example of a native alphabet in the Caucasus—fully a thousand years older than any indigenous writing previously found in the region.

When I was a kid I was fascinated with the stories of how the great writing systems of antiquity—Egyption hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform leading the pack. I read everything I could get my hands on on the subject. I was amazed when within my own lifetime the writing system of the Maya was decoded.

There are still undeciphered scripts waiting to reveal their secrets, the most notable being the writing system of the Indus Valley Civilization. I still have hopes that it will be deciphered.

There are still other writing systems that have eluded understanding. Linear A (the other Cretan writing system). Rongorongo (the writing system found on Rapa Nui). Proto-Elamite (another Middle Eastern writing system, different from cuneiform). In the case of many of the undeciphered inscriptions that have been found they don’t even know what language they’re written in.