Writing on Olmec Slab Is Hemisphere's Oldest

The 26-pound tablet, about the size of a legal pad, bears 62 symbols arrayed in a manner suggesting an organized text.

"We have long thought that the Olmec would have writing," said archeologist William A. Saturno of the University of New Hampshire, who was not involved in the discovery. "This block is finally the evidence everyone has been waiting for."

Scientists may never be able to translate the text unless they find many more examples of Olmec writing, said archeologist Stephen D. Houston of Brown University in Rhode Island, a co-author of the report published today in the journal Science.

But "if we can decode it, it gives us a chance of hearing their voices and finding out what they considered important and worth recording," he said.

The Olmec flourished in south-central Mexico for more than 1,000 years before they mysteriously disappeared, a few centuries before the rise of the classic Maya culture about AD 300. The Olmec were the first civilization in Mesoamerica, and at their height they constructed large pyramids and created massive stone sculptures. They built the first cities in the region and established a wide-ranging trading system that stretched across Central America.

The tablet dates from about 1000 BC to 900 BC and is at least 300 years older than any purported writing that archeologists have discovered in the region. The oldest previous example of what can be considered a "full-blown written language" in this hemisphere, Saturno said, was the so-called Tuxtla Script, discovered in the same region and dating from about AD 100 to AD 200.

Both are comparatively young compared with the oldest known written language, developed in the Middle East by the Sumerians about 5,000 years ago.

Virtually all examples of purported Mesoamerican writing that have been found previously and that date to the first millennium BC are isolated sets consisting of just one or a few glyphs, or symbols. Critics have charged that such discoveries represent merely pictures or identifiers rather than true writing.

With the new find, Houston said, "suddenly we are aware of the possibility that those far shorter sequences may be part of the same writing system."