Step 4 of 5

It’s all Greek to me!

Related Images

  • Fig. 6 - Last signs of side B in the hand copy of Frans de Liagre Böhl
  • Fig. 7 - Hand copy of side ‘A’ made by Johannes Friedrich of the Munich tablet that shows similar signs as our tablet LB 0892 - Friedrich, J. ‘Ein wohl Kleinasiatisches Tontäfelchen mit unbekannter Schrift’, Kadmos 3 (1964): 160.
  • Fig. 8 - The curse of Artemisa. Document written on papyrus in the Greek alphabet found in Egypt, dating to the late 4th century BC. The fragment is currently located at the Austrian National Library - [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667677)

​​Though the script is unidentified, some of the signs may look familiar to you, especially if you know the letters of the Greek alphabet. The last sign on side B, for example, looks like the capital ‘A’, and the sign next to it like a capital ‘P’ (or ‘R’ in Greek). The sign to the left of ‘R’ resembles the Greek letter γ ‘gamma’, and there are more of such similarities. These signs are the reason why we think we have to hold the tablet like it is depicted now, and not the other way around. Other signs, however, look very different from any known alphabetic letters. In total, the tablet holds circa 200 characters, but they are not all unique; many of the signs occur more than once. Some signs may not represent a character, but rather function as some kind of interpunction; the little vertical stroke to the left of the ‘gamma’ sign, for instance, might be a word divider, but this is uncertain.

At the moment, we only know of two other clay tablets with similar looking signs. One of them is LB 891, which was purchased together with our tablet from the same antiquity dealer in Istanbul. The third tablet turned up in an antiquities store in Munich; its origin is regrettably completely unknown. The signs on the three little tablets show significant overlap, but there is no 100% match; they each contain signs that are not present on the other tablets.

Altogether, there seems to be quite a large body of distinctive signs. It is difficult to say how many exactly, because it is in some cases unclear whether we are dealing with two different signs that closely resemble each other, or if they represent variants of one and the same sign. As a general rule, the more signs a writing system has, the less chance there is that it is an alphabetic script. In alphabetic or segmental scripts, in which each character represents a vowel or a consonant (for example ‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘d’), the total number of characters is usually rather limited. This in contrast to syllabic writing systems, in which each character represents a syllable (e.g. ‘ba’, ‘bo’, ‘bu’, ‘bi’ etc.) and which tend to have a much more elaborate repertoire of signs. Our mystery script may be a syllabic script, or perhaps a hybrid mixture of an alphabetic and syllabic system, a so-called alphasyllabary or abugida.