Cascajal stone
The Cascajal stone is a stone block from the Mexican state of Veracruz , which is attributed to the archaeological Olmec culture and dates back to the first millennium BC . Signs are carved into a concave side that could belong to a previously unknown script . It would be the earliest of pre-Columbian America.
Find situation
The stone with the presumed inscriptions became known in 1999. It comes from a small previously unexplored archaeological zone in Tacamichapa ( Municipio Jáltipan de Morelos ) and was not in its original storage , but in the rubble of an artificial hill from the Classical era, which had been mined for road construction material for a long time. The dating is carried out using ceramic fragments that were found by the road workers together with the stone block, and which mostly belong to the San Lorenzo phase of the neighboring site of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan .
description
The twelve kilogram stone block made of serpentine (36 cm × 21 cm × 13 cm) bears 62 characters on one side, the surface shows clear traces of weathering . 28 different characters can be distinguished. They are in horizontal lines that are not precisely adhered to and are often interrupted. The small number of characters could indicate an alphabet font for structural reasons , but it is not possible to determine how many characters the presumed font had that were not used on the stone. Individual characters seem to be derived from the representation of objects.
Missing decipherment
The significance of the presumed script for the development of script in Mesoamerica is still difficult to determine. The inventory of signs bears no resemblance to the better-known Isthmian script that existed in the larger region around the time of Christ's birth, and could therefore be an isolated development. It cannot be determined which language the presumed script could belong to, so the chance of a reading is very slim.
According to the findings of the archaeologists around Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia , it is an unknown Olmec writing system that dates back to around 900 BC. And has all the characteristics of a real writing system. The scientists even want to have recognized bound language in it. The fact that the processed surface of the stone is concave indicates the unique technique that writing was chipped off several times and the stone was rewritten.
criticism
Critics have pointed out the unclear circumstances of the find and the therefore unsecured date and left open the possibility of a modern forgery .
literature
- Maria del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez among others: Oldest writing in the New World . In: Science. vol. 313, no. 5783, September 2006, pp. 1610-1614. doi : 10.1126 / science.315.5817.1365b
Individual evidence
- ^ Maria del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez (Centro del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Veracruz) among others in: Science . Washington DC 313.2006, p. 1610. ISSN 0036-8075
- ↑ When Americans learned to write.
- ^ Katja Seefeldt: Enigmatic characters.
- ^ KO Bruhns, NL Kelker ;, Ma. d. CR Martinez, PO Ceballos, MD Coe: Did the Olmec Know How to Write? In: Science . tape 315 , no. 5817 , March 9, 2007, ISSN 0036-8075 , p. 1365b – 1366b , doi : 10.1126 / science.315.5817.1365b ( sciencemag.org [accessed March 23, 2020]).