Is the 7,200 Year-Old Greek Dispilio 'Tablet' the Earliest Recorded Piece of Writing?

By Dig Labs Contributors

Source: Dig Labs Project

Skeptics debate whether the Dispilio 'Tablet' incisions are a true proto-writing system or merely "marking" symbols for property, ritual, or tallying.

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We hope you find this article useful—it’s an ongoing Observatory research project that will be updated.
If you have expertise or insight on the topic that you think could be useful, please send us a note.

Join Our Collaborative Research

“Is the 7,200 Year-Old Greek Dispilio 'Tablet' the Earliest Recorded Piece of Writing?” by Dig Labs Contributors is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.Last edited: July 9, 2026

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Introduction

The Neolithic lakeside settlement of Dispilio, Greece, dating between 6,000 and 12,000 BCE, has yielded a controversial find: a "wooden tablet bearing engraved symbols." Archaeologists involved in the excavation suggest these carvings"represent the earliest known example of writing, predating Sumerian cuneiform by thousands of years.

Critics and skeptics debate whether these incisions are a true proto-writing system or merely "marking" symbols for property, ritual, or tallying. We will work to get to the bottom of it.