LOS ANGELES -- Archaeologists have found a clay tablet bearing the earliest known writing in Europe, a 3,350-year-old specimen that is at least 150 years older than other known tablets from the region.
Found in one of the palaces linked to Greece's King Nestor of Trojan War fame, the tablet not only is older than expected, but also appears at a site, called Iklaina, where researchers did not expect to find writing, said its discoverer, Michael Cosmopoulos of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
The tablet, fortuitously preserved when someone discarded it in a trash pit and burned it, was part of the state's formal record-keeping process, and its discovery sheds light on early state formation, Cosmopoulos said.
Archaeologists "had grown more and more comfortable" with the idea that writing was limited to the major ruling centers of the time and was not to be found at secondary sites such as Iklaina, which was the equivalent of a district capital, said archaeologist Thomas Palaima of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the research.
"It was a great surprise and a welcome surprise" to find writing at such a secondary center, he said
Iklaina, which dates to the Mycenaean period of 1500 B.C. to 1100 B.C., sits at the southwestern corner of Greece. It was an independent until about 1400 B.C., when it was conquered by King Nestor, who incorporated it into his kingdom, which he ruled from the nearby city of Pylos. Overall, 16 states were brought under his rule.
Only one of them, Nichorea, has been previously studied, and no tablets were found there.
Cosmopoulos has been excavating at Iklaina for 11 years. Among other things, he has found evidence for a Mycenaean palace with elaborate architecture, colorful murals and a drainage system with clay pipes that was far ahead of its time. The architecture included what are known as Cyclopean walls, which are constructed of crude limestone boulders fitted roughly together, with smaller chunks placed between them
Cosmopoulos did not expect to find tablets because they were not meant to survive. "They were never meant to last for more than a year," he said. "Then they were recycled." The tablets were allowed to dry in the sun, which made them very brittle. But the tablet they found had been accidentally broken and thrown in a garbage pit, then burned, which fired the clay and preserved it.
The tablet measures 2 inches by 3 inches and has writing on both sides in the Linear B system, which is older than the alphabet.
