In the Mexican state of Veracruz in 1999, a slab was discovered, on the machined concave side of which were inscribed previously unknown letters of pre-Columbian America. The approximate age of the slab is the very beginning of the first millennium BC
The artifact belongs to the archaeological culture of the Olmecs. The unique find was made by accident, but the mysterious hieroglyphs defy reading. The Cascajal slab - bloque de Cascajal - was discovered among the building debris of an artificially erected hill and was later intended for the construction of a road. The dating was done based on a piece of pottery found by road workers along with a slab.
It is possible that the age of the slab is actually a little more than three thousand years, since it has already got into the quarry from somewhere. The rather complicated story with the discovery of this artifact and the difficulties with its dating do not exclude the possibility of forgery, as critics tirelessly remind. See also: The Mayan calendar was invented before them The dimensions of the plate with clear signs of weathering are 36 by 21 by 13 centimeters, it weighs about 12 kilograms. One of the machined concave sides contains 62 symbols.
Hieroglyphs are drawn in horizontal rows, some of them are repeated. Three of the 28 characters are written four times, the other six are repeated four times, and 12 characters are duplicated. Some symbols look like insects, others like a stylized ear of corn. "Olmec" in Aztec means "inhabitant of the country of rubber" and comes from the word "Olman" - "country of rubber", or "the place where rubber is mined." The history of the appearance of the Olmecs in modern science is as follows.
“In 1902, an Indian peasant accidentally discovered in his cornfield a graceful jade figurine of a priest wearing a mask shaped like a duck's beak. The surface of the object was mottled with some incomprehensible symbols and signs. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that this is nothing more than the date of the Mayan calendar, corresponding to 162 AD. The shape of the signs and the whole style of the image in general resembled Mayan letters and sculptures, although they were more archaic,”writes archaeologist V. I. Gulyaev.
The famous American archaeologist George Vayan became interested in this mysterious people, who inhabited Veracruz and Tabasco in remote times, and who invented the Mayan writing and calendar much earlier than the Mayans themselves. Knowing well the culture of many ancient peoples, such as the Aztecs, Toltecs, Totonacs, Zapotecs, Maya, the scientist recalled the ancient Aztec legend of the Olmecs. The area of distribution of jade figurines of the jaguar man entirely coincided with the alleged habitat of the Olmecs - the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
So, in 1932, traces of another disappeared people were found in history. From 1938 to 1942, a joint expedition of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society of the United States, led by Matthew Stirling, visited at least three major centers of Olmec culture: Tres Zapotes, La Venta and Cerro de Las Mesas. The most interesting was the find of a fragment of a stone slab from Tres-Zapotes, which later became widely known as the stele "Ts".
“On the face of the monument, a mask of a popular Olmec deity is carved in low relief - a kind of combination of a jaguar and a man,” V. Gulyaev described the artifact. - The other side, facing the ground, is decorated with incomprehensible signs and a column of dashes and dots. Experts easily established that before them the date of the Mayan calendar, corresponding to 31 BC. The priority of the Olmecs in the invention of writing received, thus, a new serious confirmation."
Speaking about the problems of the Epiolmec writing (Isthmian Script), the researcher A. V. Tabarev writes: “The recent discovery of a clay cylinder-seal in San Andres (five kilometers from La Venta) with an image of a bird“pronouncing”a certain phrase written in hieroglyphic signs, allows us to date the existence of the present Olmec writing to 650 BC era. In the light of this find, the signs noted by experts on the Celts (ritual axes), masks, figurines, steles and other works of art can be viewed in a completely different way. However, the corpus of inscriptions is still extremely small in order to be able to talk about the possibilities of reading these signs or entire texts."
For more than a decade, linguists Terrence Kaufman and John Justason have been deciphering the Epiolmec letter. In their opinion, the Epiolmec script is partly logographic (semantic), partly phonetic and belongs to the Mixe-Zoquean language family, or rather, to the proto-Zoquean language. Read also: The language of the Queen of Sheba has been deciphered
For quite objective reasons, such as the lack of texts, the absence of bilingual texts, iconography that complements the texts and a number of others, reliable deciphering is not yet possible. Until it is established which of the languages the writing on the Kaskahal plate may refer to, the chance of reading them is also very small. However, not everything is so hopeless. I would like to believe that the joint efforts of scientists from different countries and new findings will make it possible to understand the mysterious language.