America's earliest writing a mystery thriller
The Cascajal block, left, and a drawing of its patterned images.
Photo: AP
Mike Toner, Atlanta
September 16, 2006
A SMALL stone slab unearthed in a pile of debris in Mexico bears what appears to be the oldest example of writing in the Americas.
The 2900-year-old inscriptions, attributed to Mexico's ancient Olmec civilisation, push the advent of writing in the New World back at least 400 years.
Without a New World Rosetta stone — the key that helped interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs — the symbols on what researchers are calling "the Cascajal block" have not yet been deciphered. But a team of Mexican and American researchers say the repetition of some symbols suggests it might be an early form of poetry.
"This is a tantalising discovery that shows a whole new dimension of Olmec society," says a Brown University archaeologist, Stephen Houston. "More records probably exist and remain to be found.
"If we can decode the content, these earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilisation will speak to us today." The world's first writing is thought to have emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt about 5000 years ago.
Until now, however, the earliest known example of writing in the Americas were Olmec symbols carved on a ceramic cylinder, and engraved plaques — dating to between 350BC and 650BC — and found in the late 1990s on Mexico's Gulf Coast.
A University of Alabama anthropologist, Richard Diehl, an expert on Olmec culture, says the latest discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, pushes the emergence of writing back to about 900BC. The stone tablet, a slab of greenish serpentine 12 centimetres thick, 23 centimetres wide and 40 centimetres long, contains 62 distinct symbols that Professor Diehl and other members of the team say "conforms to all expectation of writing".
The slab was discovered in 1990 by road builders quarrying for construction near the village of Lomas de Tacamichapa, in an area that was once the heartland of the Olmec civilisation.
Later American cultures, such as the Mayan, had well-developed systems of writing, record keeping and calendars, but less is known about the Olmecs, who built cities and pyramids along the Gulf of Mexico nearly 2000 years before the Mayans.
The Olmecs are best known for the colossal carved stone heads they left behind. But anthropologists believe they were also the first Central American civilisation to practise intensive agriculture, and the first to develop a distinct political hierarchy.
Professor Houston and other researchers say the Olmec writing system may have grown out of a need for reliable accounting and record keeping.
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