Stele filled with ancient characters challenges scientists

So far, no scientist has been able to decipher the inscriptions on the Iron Age stone tablet excavated in Spain.

At 1.5 meters high and 85cm wide, Montoro stone stele covered with inscriptions dating from the Iron Age . The icons are similar to characters from extinct languages ​​but no one can decipher their meaning, according to International Business Times.

Archaeologist Leonardo García Sanjuán at the University of Seville, Spain, began studying the stone tablet after reading a brief note about the discovery in the leaflet of the Montoro Archaeological Museum. He noticed the special feature of the stone monument and decided to learn about the artifact with his colleague Marta Díaz-Guardamino at the University of Southampton, England.

The stele was first unearthed by a peasant farmer cultivating a field in the city of Montoro in southern Spain in 2002. The farmer threw a stone tablet on a pile of rock next to the field. Two years later, two park rangers from the provincial environmental department discovered a stone tablet and noticed a series of strange carvings covering one side of it.

Stone monument Montoro.(Photo: Antiquity 2017).

The rangers brought the stone to the local museum, where it was kept for eight years before García Sanjuán and Díaz-Guardamino came to visit in 2012. They were confused when they found the letters or letters seem meaningless."It is rare to see anything similar to this stele, the inscriptions on the beer cannot be read. There is no meaningful word," García Sanjuán said.

Most characters are easily identifiable, because they come from a variety of languages. At the top of the stele, some characters are arranged in a circle or spiral pattern while others are engraved without any order.

To find out the meaning of strange texts, one of the most important issues is dating . Since then, archaeologists can gather suggestions about the cultural context when stone beer was born.

The research team encountered many difficulties in dating. The owner of the field where the stone was found did not want archaeologists to dig up the land to search for other contemporary artifacts that could help estimate the age of stone steles."He only allowed us to dig a small hole. We were not very lucky and could not find any materials. So we had to rely on indirect evidence," García Sanjuán said.

The inscription on the beer includes elements from the original Hispanic set in the northeast, Graeco-Iberian letters, inscriptions Proto-Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, South Arabia and Phoenic . The researchers estimated that inscriptions were created from the 9th century to the end of the 3rd century BC.

García Sanjuán's group offers two hypotheses about the stone tablet. The first hypothesis is the stone inscription carved in early Stone Age, between the 9th century and the 5th century BC."Maybe the illiterate local people simulate the signs they used to see or hear on stone steles," explains García Sanjuán.

The other hypothesis is the inscription formed at the end of the Iron Age from the 5th century to the 3rd century BC. The stone tablet may be the mark of the multi-ethnicity of soldiers in the same army.

However, these two hypotheses are speculative. Before finding more artifacts, the team still had no way to determine the true origin of the stone tablet and the meaning of the inscription on it.