Ancient
language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle
Eastern palace
Archaeologists
have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in
the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace.
The
discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural
origins of some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ – mountain tribes which had, in
previous millennia, preyed on the world’s first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is
now Iraq.
Evidence of
the long-lost language - probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the
Zagros Mountains of western Iran – was found by a Cambridge University
archaeologist as he deciphered an ancient clay writing tablet unearthed by an
international archaeological team excavating an Assyrian imperial governors’
palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey.