Dispilio Tablet

{{short description|Wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, discovered in Dispilio, Greece}}

The Dispilio tablet is a wooden artefact bearing linear marks, unearthed in 1993 during George Hourmouziadis's excavations of the Neolithic site of Dispilio in Greece. A single radiocarbon date from the artefact has yielded a radiocarbon age of 6270±38 radiocarbon years, which when calibrated corresponds to the calendar age range of 5324–5079 cal BC (at 95.4% probability).{{cite journal |last1=Facorellis |first1=Yorgos |last2=Sofronidou |first2=Marina |last3=Hourmouziadis |first3=Giorgos |year=2014 |title=Radiocarbon dating of the Neolithic lakeside settlement of Dispilio, Kastoria, Northern Greece |journal=Radiocarbon |doi=10.2458/56.17456 |volume=56 |number=2 |pages=511–528 |bibcode=2014Radcb..56..511F |s2cid=128879693 |url=https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/17456/pdf}} The lakeshore settlement occupied an artificial islandWhitley, James. "Archaeology in Greece 2003–2004". Archaeological Reports, No. 50 (2003, pp. 1–92), p. 43. near the modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Western Macedonia, Greece.

File:Dispilio signs.jpg

Discovery

The tablet is one of numerous items found during the excavations of the Neolithic layers at Dispilio. Most abundant objects were pottery fragments and wooden structural elements, followed by many seeds, bones, figurines, personal ornaments, and flutes.

The tablet's discovery was announced at a symposium in February 1994 at the University of Thessaloniki.OWENS, GARETH A.. "BALKAN NEOLITHIC SCRIPTS" , Kadmos vol. 3lake dwellings8, no. 1-2, 1999, pp. 114-120 The site's paleoenvironment, botany, fishing techniques, tools and ceramics were described informally in a magazine article in 2000Eptakyklos: literary and archaeological magazine, June 2000 and by Hourmouziadis in 2002G. H. Hourmouziadis, ed. (2002) Dispilio, 7500 Years After. Thessaloniki. and 2006.G. H. Hourmouziadis (2006), Ανασκαφής Εγκόλπιον. Athens.

The archaeological context of the tablet is not known, as it was found floating on the water that was filling the excavation trench. The tablet itself was partially damaged when it was exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water in which it was immersed for a long period of time, and so it was placed under conservation. {{Asof|2024}}, a full academic publication assessing the tablet apparently awaits the completion of conservation work.{{fact|date=April 2025}}

Despite the lack of proper context, and the fact that no dedicated scientific paper has ever explained the tablet in detail, various archaeological and unofficial interpretations have surfaced, including the interpretation of the markings as some form of early writing.{{fact|date=April 2025}} The markings on the tablet, and on a few other ceramic objects from the site, have been compared to those on other Neolithic clay finds from other sites in the southern Balkans, such as the Vinča symbols and the Tărtăria tablets, as well as the (much later) Linear A script. One of the main difficulties in such comparisons lies in the very wide range of possible dates for the different artefacts from different regions. The terms used for archaeological periods, such as "Late Neolithic", may mean different phenomena in different countries and schools of thought, and these periods often have assigned durations of several centuries or even a millennium.{{fact|date=April 2025}}

Incorrect image of the tablet

A large number of sources in popular and social media, and even some scholarly articles, show a wrong image of the tablet, specifically, the modern artistic recreation. This photograph portrays an object which is a modern recreation of how the tablet may have looked like originally. It is an object hanging from the wall in one of the reconstructed house in the open-air museum nearby the archaeological site. The lines on the modern recreation bear little resemblance to the markings on the original artefact.Michael Bott, Rupert Soskin (2024): "[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eUfOBMB8w8 Deconstructing the myth of the Dispilio Tablet and Early Writing]". The Prehistory Guys YouTube video podcast series, 2024-11-30. The only publicly available photograph of the original artefact is contained in the article by Yorgos Facorellis et al. from 2014.