The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) made the 8-inch slate public last week — discovered at Casas del Turuñuelo, an anthropological dig site believed to have been a sanctuary or temple for the lost Paleo-Hispanic society called Tartessos.
The CSIC said that the tablet also depicts ‘a framework on which figures of warriors were found’ members of an advanced civilization that disappeared mysteriously.
But as one CSIC researcher, Esther Rodríguez González, a leader of the excavation noted, ‘the volume of information it contained was even greater,’ and may yet prove to be evidence of an independent, brand new, Paleo-Hispanic southern alphabet.
The tablet’s carvings, which date back to about 600 and 400 B.C., appear to show repeated and overlaid illustrations of faces, geometric shapes and three warriors in a combat scene, as officials revealed in their preliminary photos.
Archaeologists who have reviewed the tablet now theorize that it was like a scratch pad, or sketch book, used by artisans to practice these images and symbols before engraving a finished product on more valued materials like gold, ivory or wood.
The Tartessian culture — sometimes compared to the mythical city of gold, ‘El Dorado,’ and occasionally discussed alongside accounts of mythical Atlantis — is believed to have thrived from the 9th to 6th centuries B.C.
‘Their sophistication was remarkable,’ as archaeologist Richard Freund of Christopher Newport University told travel site Atlas Obscura in 2021.
While it is known that the wealthy Tartessians were a mixture of indigenous people and Greek and Phoenician colonizers, it’s still unknown if they were a large city-state, a full nation or something in between.
Experts have speculated that an earthquake or a tsunami may have led to their disappearance.
Excavations at Casas del Turuñuelo have been underway for at least six years, according to CSIC officials.
Paleo-Hispanic written languages are currently divided into two styles or families, one common to the northeast of Spain and one common to the south, which archeologists have only seen in fragments before, speculating more might exist.
University of Barcelona researcher Joan Ferrer i Jané, who examined the tablet, said that it resembles ‘other strokes compatible with signs of a known sequence’ from two prior southern dialect tablets from this period.
The Turuñuelo or Guareña alphabet on this new tablet depicts the first 10 signs of the alphabet also seen at an archeological site, Espanca, in Castro Verde, Portugal.
‘This alphabet [from Espanca] has 27 signs and is the only complete one we knew of to date. Another was found at the excavation of Villasviejas del Tamuja but it is very fragmented, it only has some central signs,’ Ferrer i Jané said in a CSIC statement.
‘Guareña would be the third and would provide a lot of information,’ he added....<<<Read More>>>...