The mysterious origin of the Glozel artifacts

Have you ever wondered how humans first developed the writing system? The ability to create pictographs and text languages has been always a uniquely human creativity. But unless you believe that modern humans have been given supernatural assistance, it must have taken our ancestors many generations to develop and gain such achievement.

There are various texts and writing systems discovered around the world that controversially pre-date recorded history, and their origins and meaning remain a source of mystery. The Glozel hillside in rural France could be home to such intriguing archaeological enigmas.

In 1924, a farmer named Emile Fradin discovered an underground chamber full of mystery objects in one of his fields in the vicinity of French hamlet of Glozel. Human bones with strange marks, hermaphrodite idols, masks, and tablets with an unfamiliar text were among the artifacts. Fradin openly invited archaeologists and enthusiasts to come and dig, and they did so for years, uncovering thousands of artifacts.

The controversy surrounding the findings was so intense that the New York Times dubbed it the “Glozellian war.” The newspaper stated in 1927 that the entirety of France was “divided into two violently opposed opinions” over the question of whether or not the objects were authentic. Some archaeologists believe that the artifacts date back to the Neolithic period and existed before the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet was the ancestor of the Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets. If this theory was accurate, then France, not the Middle East, would have been the place where Western civilization began to take shape.

As a direct consequence of the conflict, lawsuits were initiated. After discovering some freshly carved tablets, the police conducted a search warrant at the farmhouse and subsequently arrested the farmer on charges of fraud; however, believers asserted that the fake tablets were actually plants. Everyone took an even stronger stance in response to a report that was compiled by specialists from around the world. Fradin was never found guilty of anything in any situation.

The bones are thought by scientists to have been buried somewhere between 300 BCE and 1600 CE. The glass found at the site is said to date from Medieval France. It is believed that the tablets are older than 2,000 years old due to the fact that they all appear to date from the same age. Because the clay used to construct them is chemically comparable to that which can be found locally, it is likely that they were manufactured in the same location. Old Celtic text is thought to be the most likely translation.

However, the circumstances behind how such a large number of peculiar and unique artifacts came to be located in such a featureless field remain a mystery. There is no other historical site in Europe that is comparable to this one. Fradin himself remained steadfast to his account for the entire eight decades, carrying any mysteries to his grave when he passed away in the year 2010.