Talk:Dispilio Tablet

Comments
This is not what the discoverer is saying: "The Dispilio Tablet refutes a major facet of the Indo-European Theory that states that the Phoenicians were the inventors of the alphabet and that the ancient Hellenes adopted it from them. The writings on the tablet possess letters from Linear A.". --Wetman 22:55, 18 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Linear A doesn't consist of letters in the first place, but of syllables.


 * Indo-European theory says nothing at all about the Phoenician alphabet (a writing system). What's more, Linear A is undeciphered, and does not does appear to be Indo-European as far as anyone can tell.
 * It's not entirely accurate to say Linear A hasn't been deciphered. The language hasn't been identified, but we can read the symbols themselves (assuming that the values didn't change significantly when they were used in Linear B). Based purely on the number of symbols, though, Linear A is almost certainly a syllabary.
 * Has anyone here actually read Hourmouziades' publications? Strangely, they are pretty much invisible in Google Scholar and Google Books. --Macrakis (talk) 02:09, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Looks vaguely like Ogham. And the site sounds something like a Crannóg... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.198.55.108 (talk) 20:40, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

The signs are similar to Vinca. Probably they influenced Linear A and B, but the new alphabet that Greece use after dark age (XII-VIII) until today is indubitely Phoenician. About the theory of indo-european migrations it has lot of archeological falure. Indeed, for example, the Copper Age sites in Northern Italy are undoubtedly older than those in Asia, and have cultural continuity until Roman age. Etruscans excluded. It is not that Indo-eruropeans were arrived from Anatolia or born directly in Europe, after glacial era directly from African Sapiens? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.222.73.39 (talk) 00:24, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Dubious image
I have serious doubts about the factual correctness of the purported "text" of the tablet in the file File:Dispilio_tablet_text.png. The contents of the file are sourced to an unreliable webpage in Russian. I don't know what the image on that page is supposed to mean, maybe just a tabular list describing a reconstruction of the glyph repertoire collected from the tablet, but it certainly does not appear to be the actual arrangement of symbols on the tablet itself. This, in contrast, purports to be an actual photograph of the tablet. As can be easily seen, it has nothing like the neat arrangement of straight columns of symbols as shown in our image. Our image suggests the existence of an actual writing-like arrangement of a "text", while the photo suggests nothing of the sort. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:40, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks, well done. Dougweller (talk) 11:00, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm confused by this discussion. This image seems to show exactly the same symbols as those on the ministry of culture's page http://pegasos.fhw.gr/chronos/01/en/gallery/nl/dispilio/disp5.html, in fact it is apparently simply the same image that has been edited to make it less difficult to see the symbols. If we use similar wording to the ministry's "linear writing symbols, found incised on a wooden tablet", that should be OK, shouldn't it? --Espoo (talk) 12:39, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
 * We don't know to what extent that website is anything like a reliable source. It's not actually a Ministry of Culture website, but the site of some privately-run cultural foundation, of unknown academic standing. The page cites an (unpublished) paper by Hourmouziadis; we don't know whether Hourmouziadis actually features that image, or what if anything he says about it there. (The image is credited not to Hourmouziadis but to the Ministry, but without any indication how and by whom and in what context it was compiled there.) Apparently Hourmouziadis never actually offered a formal academic publication about the symbols (as opposed to other archaeological aspects of the site), so there isn't really much to go by. Even if the chart purports to show a repertoire of glyphs found on the tablet, it is by no means clear whether all the symbols shown in the picture are meant to be that – if you compare the chart with the photograph of the actual tablet, it appears that the tablet contains substantially fewer signs than shown in the chart. In fact, one contributor on the Greek Wikipedia seemed to have found out that only one column in the chart was meant to show the actual Dispilio signs, whereas the others were meant to show signs from other writing systems for comparison ; unfortunately, that edit, while plausible, didn't come with proper references either. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:26, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Update: I finally found a proper and more recent reference: https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/17456/pdf (posthumously credited to Hourmouziadis as a co-author). This archaeological report features a copy of the same chart (p.517, p.7 of the PDF), clarifying that only the first column is meant to show "Samples of carved “signs” on the wooden tablet and other clay finds from Dispilio", while the second column are signs from Linear A script and the remaining ones are from other "Paleoeuropean clay tablets" from other sites. There is also a photograph of the actual tablet, although, confusingly, it appears to be a different object from the one I linked to earlier (which had appeared to be a decent enough source, but apparently it wasn't). On the photograph shown here, it appears the tablet is covered in a dense jumble of carved strokes, making it quite difficult to sort them into individual "signs". Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:08, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, i found that file before you. It was very easy to find by putting <> into Google. --Espoo (talk) 17:00, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Plagiarism
This text: "The tablet was partially damaged when it was exposed to the oxygen-rich environment outside of the mud and water in which it was immersed for a long period of time, and it is now under conservation. The full academic publication of the tablet apparently awaits the completion of the work of conservation" is taken verbatim from an uncited source: Archaeology News Network

I added a "Disputed" tag due to the concerns raised above about accuracy, the plagiarized text, and lack of independent sources.. Cleeder (talk) 14:32, 8 May 2014 (UTC)


 * That text has been in the WP article since 2005, and the Archaeology News Network article is dated 7/2012, itself copied from a Greek Reporter article also from 7/2012. In fact, I wrote that text in 12/2005, and it was a rewrite of existing WP text, so the plagiarism is in the other direction (a phenomenon I see more an more often, even in published books).


 * What exactly is the "accuracy" you are questioning? The article does not claim that the markings on the wood are writing (though Chourmouziadis suggested that). --Macrakis (talk) 16:37, 8 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Given the above, I have removed the tag.Eniagrom (talk) 14:15, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Conservation
'Currently under conservation' - dates? Jackiespeel 09:13, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The earliest known alphabet?
A long comment on Quora by Colleen Anne Coyle, Ph.D Archaeology, University of Chicago July 19, 2019 ("The Dispilio Tablet- Revising the Origins and Development of Writing") discusses the discoverer's belief that the marks on the tablet represent writing, pre-dating Sumerian writing by a long time.Kdammers (talk) 08:10, 25 July 2019 (UTC)


 * The pdf linked in a comment above seems to contain no details on whether the Centre for Isotope Research of the University of Groningen conducted any date corrections because the artifacts and surrounding sediments come from a lacustrine location. It is therefore uncertain whether the ages calculated here are in fact too high. Underwater sources require different aspects of the carbon cycle to be considered. &#9798; CUSH &#9798;  14:28, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

To add to article
Basic information to add to this article: has the inscription been deciphered? If not, why not include that information in the article? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 06:24, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Proto-writing?
I find it unsatisfactory that there is no image, and no mention of suspected or alleged writing or proto-writing, or even symbols in the article (it merely says "inscribed markings"). Without that, I simply don't think the "tablet" (what does that word signify, anyway?) is sufficiently noteworthy to have its own article. -- But, obviously, we'd need proper sources. Nø (talk) 12:11, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Age of wood vs. age of writing
It would be helpful to know how they distinguished between the age of the wood and the age of the writing. Since of course the wood could be a lot older than the writing. Greg Lovern (talk) 09:13, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Notability?
As an ancient piece of wood with some man-made marks on it, this object is hardly notable enough to have its own wikipedia article. The notability relies on a reliably sourced academic claim that the markings are writing, or at the very least suspected protowriting, and also, I think, on havning a reliably sourced photo and/or diagram showing the object and the markings. (There may be other reasons for notability, but I can't see any in the article.) In the absence of such sources and images, I'd suggest we delete this article (or move it to a sandbox space).

Obviously, I could create an AfD, but perhaps someone here can change my mind before I do so?

It should be noted that a number of articles link here: However, the I think the reasons for linking are not really borne out by the present contents of the article. Nø (talk) 10:12, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Proper links:
 * Tartaria tablets
 * Proto-writing
 * History of writing
 * George Hourmouziadis
 * List of languages by first written account
 * Undeciphered writing systems
 * Dispilio
 * Lake Orestiada
 * Dispilio Lakeside Neolithic Settlement Archaeological Collection
 * See also links:
 * Linear A
 * Phaistos Disc
 * Vinca symbols
 * Sesklo
 * Kastoria (regional unit)
 * Arkalochori Axe,
 * Non-article-space links: Several.


 * I wouldn't mind seeing it deleted. During all these years, we've never even found proper sourcing even for what this object actually looks like. There seems to be a single academic publication and from what we got cited here it barely contains a proper description of this item, beyond the statement that it bears some engraved markings that might be writing-like. We have one image, ultimately taken from this publication, that has been repeatedly inserted in the article with the claim of showing "the text on the tablet", but it clearly doesn't – it's the authors' tabulation of supposed "signs" compared with signs from other ancient scripts. We have another image, at File:Dupyak Tablet Model.jpg, that has been mirrored on countless external websites as allegedly showing the Dispilio tablet – but it clearly doesn't either. That's a "reproduction" fashioned (very loosely) in the style of the actual Dispilio tablet, apparently on display in the modern lakeside museum. There are some photos out on the web of a different object, seen e.g. here (I haven't seen it sourced to a reliable source). That may well be the actual ancient object; in any case it's clearly not the same physical object as the one in our photo. Also, if that's the tablet, you can see that what it contains is a very dense, chaotic jumble of individual scraped strokes covering its entire surface, nothing like a clear arrangement from which distinct letter-like groups of strokes could be isolated as individual "signs" in any obvious way, so if Hourmouziadis and his associates disassembled that into the list of "signs" they tabulated, that must be an act of very bold interpretation on their part. It doesn't seem as if anybody has yet published an actual in-depth study of the structure of the markings that would justify such an analysis. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:57, 24 June 2024 (UTC)