Indus Valley: Trade and Communication
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. The Indus Valley left no decipherable archive of its own commerce. What it left, instead, is a material vocabulary so consistent that scholars have been able to reconstruct the routes, the freight, the partners, and even something […]
The Glozel Tablets: A French Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Are the Glozel Tablets? The Glozel tablets are a body of inscribed clay objects, part of a larger assemblage of roughly three thousand artifacts, recovered between 1924 and 1930 from a single field outside the hamlet of Glozel, in the Auvergne […]
The Sitovo Inscription: A Bulgarian Enigma
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Is the Sitovo Inscription? The Sitovo Inscription is a sequence of roughly thirty-eight characters cut into a limestone wall inside a rock shelter near the village of Sitovo, in the Rhodope foothills south of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. It was identified in 1928 […]
The Dispilio Tablet: Neolithic Writing in Greece
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Is the Dispilio Tablet? The Dispilio Tablet is a small wooden plaque inscribed with engraved symbols, recovered in 1993 from a waterlogged Neolithic pile-dwelling site on the southern shore of Lake Kastoria in northwestern Greece. Radiocarbon […]
The Southwest Script: Pre-Columbian Mysteries
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What People Mean by a “Southwest Script” The phrase “Southwest script” gathers together a set of very different claims about pre-Columbian writing in North America, and the first task of any honest treatment is to separate the […]
The Zapotec Script: Understanding Mesoamerica’s Inscriptions
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. On a limestone slab set into the floor of a temple corridor at San José Mogote, a small village in the Etla arm of the Valley of Oaxaca, a sprawled human figure was carved sometime around 600 […]
The Proto-Elamite Script: Deciphering Iran’s Ancient Writing
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. What Is the Proto-Elamite Script? Proto-Elamite is the world’s oldest still-undeciphered writing system with a substantial corpus, used in southwestern Iran roughly between 3100 and 2900 BCE on small clay tablets that record the daily accounting of […]
The Cascajal Block: Oldest Writing in the New World?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. What Is the Cascajal Block? The Cascajal Block is a small slab of greenish serpentinite, roughly the size of a hardcover book, incised on one face with sixty-two carved signs. It is dated to the late San […]
The Isthmian Script of Ancient Mesoamerica
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. In 1902, a farmer named Pedro Mimendi was breaking ground in a tobacco field in the Tuxtla foothills of Veracruz when his plow turned up a hand-sized lump of jadeite shaped like a shaman with a duck’s […]
The Tartaria Tablets: Europe’s Oldest Writing?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 2026. What Are the Tartaria Tablets? The Tartaria tablets are three small clay objects pulled from a Neolithic ritual pit in western Romania in 1961. Two are pierced rectangles, one is a perforated disc, and all three carry […]