An undeciphered piece of text, written over 5000 years ago on tablets of clay, could be a utilities bill claim academics at Oxford University.
Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College said the Iron Age scrawl, carved into tablets of soft clay and fired at extremely high temperature, displayed an uncanny resemblance to a bill he had recently received from his gas and electricity supplier.
The complex writing system, which has so far defied all attempts to decode it, was thought to be for energy supplied to his home address between April - June 2012
Advanced imaging systems hooked up to a central computer data base in the Louvre think the coded text could be message warning Dr Dahl that if he doesn’t pay his bill within 21 days his energy supplies will be cut off and that late payment could damage his credit ratings.
Academics say the 5000 year old text is riddled with inaccuracies and mistakes and is almost identical to the one received by Dr.Dahl for his energy use.
‘The text appears to be made up of arbitary dots and dashes, random squiggles and meaningless lines which we think is probably a meter reading’ said Dr.Dahl ‘although to be fair to whoever wrote this, they have gone to great lengths in order to make the last bit clear.
The complex alphabet system may be completely alien to any advanced society but their understanding of numerical algorithms is spot on.
Look here....£850.57....clear as day.
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World’s oldest undeciphered message ‘probably a utilities bill’ say academics
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Uncle Bertie
offlineMemberPosted 7 months ago #
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