The Cascajal Block, a recently discovered artifact that shows what may be the oldest writing in the New World. Click for another, enhanced image that shows the character more clearly. This image is copyright Stephen Houston, a professor at Brown University.

The Cascajal Block, a recently discovered artifact that shows what may be the oldest writing in the New World

Writing was the last of the inventions that make up the core of human civilization, and it’s one whose origins have proven a bit tricky to study. It’s almost certain that Sumerian hieroglyphics developed from scratch, simply because there’s no writing of any type from before them—though the recently discovered Dispilio Tablet is threatening to crack open the debate about Vinča signs again. If you want to study how people came up with the idea of writing, you have to deal with a major issue: we really don’t know that the Old World’s other independent writing systems (Indus script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Oracle Bone Script) are totally original. Granted, they’re all very different in appearance but there’s always the possibility that the people who invented them had heard of Sumerian writing and only developed their own after being exposed to the concept of using marks to represent sounds and words. This is quite different from inventing writing from nothing.

You might have noticed that I didn’t include the alphabet you’re reading right now when I listed the Old World’s writing systems. The Latin script is derived from the Greek alphabet, which in turn is derived from the one the Phoenicians used, which in turn comes from proto-Canaanite, which eventually works its way back to Egyptian hieroglyphics (yes, ABCD…et al. are bastard versions of the inscribed ibises and hands and snakes and whatnot on Egyptian tomb walls). Next, consider that the oldest Egyptian writing known is on the Narmer Palette, which was made barely a century after the Sumerians came up with the concept. The timing of it is awfully suspicious. Borrowing of the idea of writing has even happened in the modern era, with Sequoyah and his Cherokee syllabary, so why couldn’t it have happened in the past? It’s a very difficult supposition to prove or disprove.

The only other writing we can be very sure is independent is Mesoamerican writing; the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on either side of Mexico make it extremely unlikely that the idea of it percolated across from Mesopotamia. As a result, the development of scripts in Central America has been of considerable interest. Right now the oldest piece of evidence that might be writing is a discovery that was announced just a few years ago, the Cascajal Block.

The first Mesoamerican civilization was the Olmec, and it’s far from clear that they knew how to write. On the other hand, the Zapotec flourished not long after the heyday of the Olmec, and they had a fairly developed script. This has troubled archaeologists for a while, for the reason that one would expect writing to start out crudely and develop over time. As it happens, this theory had been challenged by better understanding of Sumerian writing, which went from quite crude to quite complex in just a few hundred years. Even so, archaeologists specializing in Central America have kept a close eye out for Olmec artifacts that suggest that the Zapotec learned the trick from their predecessors.

The centre of Olmec civilization was Veracruz state, particularly San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán—unfortunately named because it’s not the Tenochtitlan, AKA pre-Columbian Mexico City (its Olmec name is unknown, so it’s named after two nearby towns, one of which was in turn named after the chief Aztec city by modern-day Mexicans). The centre is there because of the Coatzacoalcos River, which isn’t very long but was to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán what the Thames is to London or the Tiber was to Rome. About 25 kilometers downstream from San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán is the tiny village of Lomas de Tacamichapa, which contains a road-building quarry named El Cascajal. In 1999 two archaeologists, the husband-and-wife team María del Carmen Rodríguez Martínez and Ponciano Ortíz Ceballos, realized that the quarry was actually an Olmec site. In a pile of rubble left by a bulldozer they turned up many Olmec artifacts, the gem of which was an eleven kilogram block of serpentine stone. The block was incised with various symbols—62 in all, with 28 different ones—and, based on analysis of the other archaeological bits and pieces in the pile, it was anywhere from 2800 to 3000 years old: centuries older than any other writing found to date in the New World.

The news of the discovery, along with an in-depth study of it, was only formally announced in September of 2006; Rodríguez Martínez and Ortíz Ceballos spent six years trying to find any other similar artifacts and, when they found nothing else, they brought in several other notable experts on Mesoamerica. Altogether they came to the conclusion that the sigils weren’t just decoration, which seems a bit surprising given that no-one knows how to read it. Several techniques developed during the decipherment of other unknown texts were used instead and, while not definitive, produced clues that the signs have an underlying meaning.

For example, some of the sign pairings repeat: signs 1 and 2 are the same as signs 23 and 24, while signs 7 and 8 are the same as 40 and 41. Both sets of pairs tend to appear at the beginning of lines (or, if read right-to-left, the end), which is typical of a lot of languages—to use English as an example, consider how common words like pronouns often start a sentence and are followed by verbs. For that matter, the frequencies of signs vary, some appearing four times, others three or two, and several only once. This suggests words, especially as there’s no obvious sequence for their repetition as one would expect from a decorative pattern.

Others are unconvinced. Most criticism of the writing theory focuses on two points. First, the characters don’t bear much of a resemblance to the next writing systems to appear in the Americas, Zapotec and Isthmian (also still-undeciphered as there are only a couple of known texts, one of which is inscribed on a statue of a man dressed as a duck). Second, the characters run the wrong way. While quite scattered they appear to read horizontally, and other Mesoamerican writing reads vertically (for example, Mayan places two characters left-to-right, then another two underneath them, then another two underneath that until a whole column is filled).

There’s a third criticism as well: as the block was found in a pile of rubble outside of its archaeological context, there also exists the possibility of a hoax. The team that announced the discovery are confident that the incisions in the Cascajal Block show signs of age like pitting and weathering, but that sort of proof is tricky to do. More artifacts with the same signs on them, found in place by professional archaeologists, are needed.

On top of that, without more text in this script and a break or two more there’s no chance of reading what the block says. Every notable decipherment of unknown writing up to now has depended on either a bilingual text (for example, the hieroglyphic-and-Greek of the Rosetta stone) or an idea of what language was being written (like Linear A or Mayan writing). With the Cascajal Block we’ve got neither, and only 62 signs to help us out.