Ancient Inscription Finally Deciphered at Monument

Roughly 2,600 years after somebody carved an inscription on a monument in what is now Turkey, an American researcher appears to have cracked the code. The engraving on the Arslan Kaya monument spells out the name of the goddess Materan, reports Live Science. Those who looked upon the engraving at the time it was made would have known her "simply as Mother," says historian Mark Munn of Penn State, whose paper in the journal Kadmos details his unraveling of the inscription. The monument was rediscovered in 1884, and archaeologists had been puzzling over the indecipherable script—worsened by millenia of erosion—ever since, per the Greek Reporter.

The discovery sheds more light on the monument itself, with the style of the script suggesting it dates back to the first half of the sixth century BC. It's located in the hills of Phyrgia, but the tribute to Materan—who was revered in nearby Lydia—suggests the monument went up when the Lydian Empire dominated Phyrgia, per LBV. Because the lettering is so difficult to make out, Munn pored over photographs taken when the morning light was just right. "Munn's discovery is significant not only because it recovers a fragment of Phrygian religious history, but also because it confirms the relationship between Phrygia and Lydia in terms of beliefs and cultural practices," per LBV. (More discoveries stories.)