Olmec hieroglyphs

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Olmec hieroglyphs (or Olmec script) refers to the putative writing system associated with the Olmec archaeological culture which flourished in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico, ca. 1250–400 BCE. The evidence for Olmec writing is based mainly on a single inscription on a stone tablet, which was recovered from an Olmec archaeological site in the late 1990s. Details of the find (dubbed the "Cascajal block") were published by researchers in the 15 September 2006 issue of the journal Science.^[1]

1 Discovery
2 Dating
3 Text
4 Assessment by archaeologists and other specialists
5 Footnotes
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Discovery

The text is found on a writing tablet-sized slab which dates to the early first millennium BCE and has been called the Cascajal Block. Archaeologist Stephen D. Houston of Brown University said that this discovery helps to "link the Olmec civilization to literacy, document an unsuspected writing system, and reveal a new complexity to this civilization." The Cascajal Block was discovered by road builders in the late 1990s in a pile of debris in the village of Lomas de Tacamichapa in the Veracruz lowlands. It weighs about 11.5 kg and measures 36 cm × 21 cm × 13 cm. There are 62 characters in the text, some of which are repeated up to four times. The block is made of serpentine.

[edit] Dating

The Cascajal Block was found amidst ceramic shards and clay figurines; from these the block is dated to the San Lorenzo phase which ended c. 900 BCE. This means that the writing on the block is some 400 years older than any other writing known in the Western hemisphere.

[edit] Text

The 62 glyphs of the Cascajal Block

The block holds a total of 62 symbols, some of which resemble plants such as corn, or animals, such as insects and fish. Many of the symbols are more abstract boxes or blobs. The symbols on the Cascajal block are unlike those of any other writing system in Mesoamerica, such as in Mayan languages or Isthmian, another extinct Mesoamerican script. The Cascajal block is also unusual because the symbols run in horizontal rows; other known Mesoamerican scripts typically use vertical rows. Most of the symbols on the block are identical or very similar to those found in Olmec iconography.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Assessment by archaeologists and other specialists

Stephen D. Houston, who also worked on the study, said the text if decoded will decipher "earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilization."^[2] "Some of the pictographic signs were frequently repeated, particularly ones that looked like an insect or a lizard." Houston suspected that "these might be signs alerting the reader to the use of words that sound alike but have different meanings—as in the difference between "I" and "eye" in English." He concluded, "the linear sequencing, the regularity of signs, the clear patterns of ordering, they tell me this is writing. But we don't know what it says."^[3]

William Saturno not involved in the study agreed with Houston that the horizontally arranged inscription shows patterns that are the hallmarks of true writing, including syntax and language-specific word order. "That's full-blown, legitimate text—written symbols taking the place of spoken words,"^[4] said Saturno, a University of New Hampshire anthropologist and expert in Mesoamerican writing.

Mary Pohl at Florida State University is an expert on the Olmec. She said "One sign looks actually like a corn cob with silk coming out the top. Other signs are unique, and never before seen, like one of an insect…These objects—and thus probably the writing—had a special value in rituals…We see that the writing is very closely connected with ritual and the early religious beliefs, because they are taking the ritual carvings and putting them into glyphs and making writing out of them. And all of this is occurring in the context of the emergence of early kings and the development of a centralized power and stratified society."^[5]
David Stuart, a University of Texas at Austin expert in Mesoamerican writing, was not connected with the discovery, but reviewed the study for Science. He said "To me, this find really does bring us back to this idea that at least writing and a lot of the things we associate with Mesoamerican culture really did have their origin in this region."^[6]
"This is extremely important because we never recognized this writing system, until this discovery," said anthropologist Karl Taube of the University of California Riverside. "We've known they have very elaborate art, and iconography, but this is the first strong indication that they had visually recorded speech."^[7]
For Richard Diehl of the University of Alabama, the discovery announced in the journal Science amounted to rock-solid proof that the Olmecs had a form of writing. Diehl has believed "all along" that the Olmecs possessed the ability to write and discovery of the stone "corroborates my gut feelings."^[8]
Lisa LeCount, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama, theorized that, if it is a crown, it might have been carved into the stone to establish leadership. "The stone could have been used as a tool by an emerging king to validate his exalted position and to legitimize his right to the throne. Only the elite in that society would have known how to read and write."^[9] LeCount said there should be no question that the Olmecs represented the "mother culture" and predated the Mayans, whose writings and buildings remain to this day.

Some archaeologists are sceptical about the importance of the tablet:

For David Grove, an archaeologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved in the research, the tablet "looked like a fake to me because the symbols are laid out in horizontal rows,"^[10] unlike the region's other writing systems, he said.
Archaeologist Christopher Pool of the University of Kentucky in Lexington has known about the tablet for a couple years. "I've always been a little skeptical of it,"^[11] Pool said. "For one, it's unique," he continued. Another critical issue, Pool adds, is that when Rodriguez and Ortiz got the tablet, it was already removed from the ground, taking it out of its original archaeological context.
Max Schvoerer, highly professor at the Bordeaux-III University, founder of the Institute of physics applied to the archeomaterials, said "the authors of the discovery thought the age of the block indirectly, by studying ceramics shards found at its sides. And this, in the absence of a level of occupation well identified and dated." ^[12]