Unknown language found stamped in ancient clay tablet

(Image: John MacGinnis, University of Cambridge)

Your homeland has been taken over by a foreign power. You are forced to move to a frontier town far from your home and work in the palace of the governor. Your name, perhaps the only link to your mother tongue, is recorded in the household accounts in the local script.

This could be the story of some of the women who were attached to the Ziyaret Tepe palace in the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan over 2500 years ago. Their names were inscribed in cuneiform characters on the clay tablet shown above, which was baked in an accidental fire at the governor's palace around 700 BC.

In deciphering the tablet seen above, John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge found that many of the names on the list are not from any currently known ancient language. "One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian," he says, "but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language."

MacGinnis thinks that the names are from a language that originated in modern-day western Iran and was transported to Tušhan, now in south-east Turkey, with the people who were deported there to work in agriculture or construction.

Deportation has been a historically common tool to control invaded peoples and is know to have been practised by the Assyrian empire.