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November 5, 2007
The World’s Oldest Inscription?
I'm always skeptical of these kinds on claims. Iran Press TV is reporting the discovery of an inscribed brick at Jiroft, near the Halil Roud historical site. Besides the picture below and a few comments from Yousof Majid Zadeh, head of the team that found the brick, there is no information on date or specific archaeological context. Zadeh thinks the language on the brick is Elamite.
The article does attribute this curious bit to Zadeh, "The only ancient inscriptions known to experts before the Jiroft discovery were cuneiform and hieroglyph." Hmmmmm! Proto Sumerian texts are not what I would call cuneiform. Here's an example.
I'm not claiming that the inscribed brick and the proto-Sumerian tablet are in the same language or are even closely related in any meaningful way. I'm also not claiming that they are the same age. For one thing, I have no idea how old the inscribed brick is. All I'm claiming is that they are both written in linear scripts. Neither of them is in a cuneiform script. It is nearly certain that cuneiform did evolve from this proto-Sumerian linear script.
Posted by Duane Smith at November 5, 2007 8:14 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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