3,000-year-old tablet with oldest readable text found in Greece

The tablet, an apparent financial record from a long-lost Mycenaean town, is about a century older than previous discoveries, said Michael Cosmopoulos, an archaeology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

“On one side it has a list of names and numbers, on the other a verb relating to manufacture,” Cosmopoulos told AFP by email.

“It is the oldest tablet from a stratified deposit from the Greek mainland, and consequently from Europe,” he said.

The sun-dried tablet was found near the hilltop village of Iklaina in the western Peloponnese peninsula, surviving purely by accident when the refuse pit was set on fire and baked the clay.

The inscription it bears is in Linear B, a form of writing that predates ancient Greek and was used by the Mycenaeans, a Bronze Age culture that waged the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad and dominated much of Greece from 1600 B.C.

The excavation supervised by the Athens Archaeological Society and partly funded by the National Geographic Society began in 2006.

It has uncovered the destroyed remains of a large building complex with massive terrace walls, frescoes and an advanced drainage system, apparently an early Mycenaean palace and town dated to 1550-1400 B.C.

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