‘Unusual’ writing on 4,000-year-old tablets decoded as lost language, study says

With a wedge-shaped pen, a scribe sat down with a clay tablet and began writing.

Dividing the tablet in half, the mysterious author wrote the same message in two different languages. It was an “impromptu academic exercise” that — 4,000 years later — would allow researchers to decipher a lost language.

Archaeologists in Iraq found two clay tablets with cuneiform writing about 30 years ago, Live Science reported. One tablet found its way into a private collection in New York. The other landed in a private collection in London.

While in New York, the tablet and its “unusual” writing came to the attention of George Andrew, a professor of Babylonian history, according to a study published Jan. 11 in the French Journal of Assyriology and Oriental Archaeology.

Intrigued by the tablet, Andrew and study co-author Manfred Krebernik decided to examine it further, soon locating the second similar tablet in London.

The two tablets have very similar handwriting — so similar that the same scribe might have authored both, the researchers said. Their content also seems to fit together.

The tablets, dated to 2,000 B.C., were covered with two columns of Old Babylonian cursive, the study said. Researchers recognized the right-hand column as a dialect of the Akkadian language and the left-hand column as Amorite.

Akkadian was a language spoken in Mesopotamia from around 2000 to 1 B.C. and written using a cuneiform script from Sumeria, according to Britannica. Linguists first deciphered Akkadian in the 19th century and, through decades of research, have an extensive understanding of the language’s vocabulary and structure.

The Amorite language, spoken around the same time as Akkadian in what is now modern-day Syria, remains largely lost and unknown, according to Britannica.

Like the Rosetta Stone’s bilingual writing that allowed researchers to use ancient Greek to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, these clay tablets have allowed scholars to recover the first significant portion of the once-lost Amorite language, including names, words and phrases.

“Our knowledge of Amorite was so pitiful that some experts doubted whether there was such a language at all,” the researchers told Live Science. “The tablets settle that question by showing the language to be coherently and predictably articulated, and fully distinct from Akkadian.”

Using preexisting knowledge of Akkadian, the researchers set about translating the text written in Amorite. Line by line, a sort of “tourist’s phrasebook” emerged, the study said.

Inscribed on one tablet was a bilingual list of deities, stars or constellations, foods, clothing, and social phrases. A lament and “love charm” may also have been written there, but the clay was too damaged for researchers to be certain. The second tablet contained bilingual snippets of social conversations.

The 4,000-year-old messages still seem relatable today. “Beer,” “wine,” “bread,” and “shoe” appeared in the clay as did phrases such as “pour us wine” and “my friends, I am going off to my woman.”

But who wrote these tablets? And why were they writing in both Akkadian — the period’s dominant language — and Amorite, a language belonging to a stigmatized nomadic people?

The tablets were likely written by a scribe “motivated by intellectual curiosity,” the researchers write. The inscription has likely gained more attention today than when it was written.

“These two tablets increase our understanding of Amorite, a Semitic language that was previously hardly known,” Andrew told McClatchy News on Thursday, Feb. 16. “Now we have a selection of sentences that provide detailed knowledge of its vocabulary, grammar and syntax.”

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