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 ?

Dubious image

dubious "text", not the actual tablet

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 [1]. 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 [2], 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)

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)