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.
Names inscribed on an ancient tablet in cuneiform characters appear to be from an unknown language.
Dating back to 700 BC, the tablet was retrieved from the site of the Ziyaret Tepe palace in the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan. Examinations of the tablet revealed that several of the names inscribed are written in a language that has never been seen before. "One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian," said John MacGinnis, "but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language."
Source New Scientist
