Olmec Writing Tablet Found!

Around 3000 years ago, the Olmec people of ancient Mexico were thriving in their homeland along the Gulf lowlands. Here they built some of the earliest New World cultural centers with pyramids, massive stone altars and colossal heads, and here they established the foundations of Mesoamerican civilization. Now there’s one more accomplishment of the Olmecs that can be added to their list of innovations—writing. That’s the conclusion of scholars after the discovery of a spectacular engraved stone tablet found in a rock quarry.

Although the tablet, dated around 1000 bce to 900 bce, is relatively young compared to the Old World civilizations like the Sumerians and Egyptians, it nevertheless puts these New World people among the ranks of cultures that established a “full-blown written language,” said archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire. The 26-pound tablet is the size of a legal pad, and is covered with 62 symbols arranged horizontally. There are 29 distinct glyphs, some repeated up to four times, that create what appears to be a kind of text.

It’s not surprising to scholars that there’s evidence of the Olmecs having a writing system. After all, they were skilled observers of the sky, had a calendar, and understood the idea of zero. And for people who figured out how to make paper around 1500 bce, it would make sense that writing might be a reason for it. For more information, visit The Los Angeles Times.com