Our ancient world never ceases to amaze us, and every time a discovery appears, we realize that we really do not know much about societies of the past as well as we thought or as we would like. This time, a group of researchers managed to decipher a lost Canaanite language, thought to be related to other West Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic, found on a pair of clay tablets dating from around 4000-years-ago.
Canaanite Tablets Found in Iraq
The discovery in itself is not new, since the tablets in which the language is carved were found in the 80s, in Iraq. They ended up in two opposite locations: one, in a private collection in England, and the other, in the Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen Cuneiform Collection, in the United States. It is not known exactly how these pieces ended up in the West; however, according to Heritage Daily, it is thought that they were found between 1980 and 1988.
[Photo: Rudolph Mayr/Courtesy Rosen Collection]
What Was Found on the Tablets?
The two pieces presented a series of graphs that apparently form phrases from an unknown language that could have belonged to the Amorite people, a culture located in the Northwest of the Levant, with some occupation in Southern ancient Mesopotamia, and whose language was Semitic.
These phrases, apparently written in Old Babylonian cuneiform cursive, also included translations into the Old Babylonian dialect of the Akkadian language, which was deciphered in the mid-19th century, a fact very useful to scholars of ancient languages in their work of encryption. These tablets are said to be essentially correlated with the Rosetta Stone, which is a stele with three types of inscriptions from a decree that was supposedly issued in Memphis, Egypt, during the Ptolemaic dynasty.
And this is so since, like the tablets, writings were found on the stone that is related to the written language of Ancient Egypt, based on hieroglyphics, and other Ancient Greek graphs, supposedly to facilitate their understanding among the various societies from the past.
In 2016, the researchers Manfred Krebernik and Andrew R. George began the investigations into the encryption of the “new” tablets, but their results had not come to light until now, published in the most recent issue of the French magazine Revue d ‘assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale (Journal of Assyriology and Oriental Archaeology).
“The singularity of the two tablets’ content may indicate that they come from the same scriptorium. They are sufficiently similar in handwriting to suggest that they may even be the work of the same individual scribe,” said the specialists.
In one of its texts, it seems, the names of some constellations, stars, food, clothing, and deities were described, while in the other, a kind of translation was made of some bilingual phrases that were extracted from the common speech of the society of those days.
It is unknown if these tablets are part of the cradle of a hitherto unknown civilization, or if they were simply worked by a scribe from the social groups previously found in the investigations of ancient Mesopotamia, although the existence of a never-before-seen language can not generate anything else than unknowns about our ancestors, their social divisions, and how they affected the present that we know today.
