Nokta Parchment
Tantalizing and mysterious, the Nokta Script has once again materialized before all. The latest revelation is awash in controversy, but it is not the first time that this scrap of ancient paper has sent ripples across the waters of the collective conscience. I’m referring to the scandal that occurred nineteen years ago, in which I played the role of instigator.
Publishing my decipherment of the Nokta text was a spectacular career suicide. Accused of being a fraud, scourged by my fellow academics—my role as a scholar at the University came to a dramatic end. But not before my paper stirred up a great deal of lay fascination for linguistics and archeology. Even if I am to remain a charlatan, I can at least lay claim to generating a sense of mystery and wonder for the ancient world, language, and mankind’s origins.
But I am not a fraud. I stand by my work, although I confess that I never revealed all the details of the journey that led me to crack those letters. Well, given the latest discovery about the mysterious Nokta characters, the time to tell the entire story is clearly at hand!
If we are going to travel two decades back, it is precisely October 4th that I want to relive. A single day hasn’t gone by since then during which I haven’t dwelled on the strange event that changed everything.
In that afternoon, I had found myself standing frozen with fear—the tips of my shoes sticking past the edge of a brittle cliff. A deep, dark precipice fell away below me. I couldn’t see the bottom of that terrifying void.
Technically, I was sitting in my office on the third floor of a creaky university building. Cluttered with chaotic stacks of books and papers, the small room had belonged to me during my two-year post so far as a professor of linguistics. But anyone who has ever undertaken a massive research project knows exactly which cliff I’m referring to. I had been stuck for weeks—questioning my premise, struggling to organize my thoughts, unable to squeeze more than a few pathetic lines of ink out of my fountain pen. The clock was ticking. An abyss of inevitable failure loomed beneath me. My mind and face tightened with panic; my body wilted under the threat of defeat squeezing at my entire being.
In my defense, the weight of the psychological burden grinding down upon me was not entirely self-imposed. I confess that I have the misfortune of being a member of a family made up of several prominent intellectual titans.
We can start with my grandfather, Byron, sometimes referred to as Canada’s JRR Tolkien. He was a true philologist, when this romantic pursuit was still alive, before being eclipsed by its dryer and more materialistic 20th Century offspring: linguistics. I don’t think I need to remind anyone that it was Byron who made the world of language-studies fall in love again with the Athabaskan language family. His son and my father, Augustus, was renowned in linguistics for several innovative theories that shaped and revitalized the field, especially his peculiar and bold Eastern Drift Hypothesis. And then of course my mother, Grauben, the astrophysicist in the family and a favorite of PBS or anyone else filming a documentary on space. If you want to interview a charming celestian expert who can speak ad infinitum about solar winds and planetary orbits, my mother is the ocean of wisdom you’re looking for (we have dozens of such interviews recorded on tapes and if you should happen to attend one of our family functions, you will be made to watch them all).
I acutely felt the mass of such a family legacy bearing heavily on my shoulders. How could I let my gifted forebears down? How could I not continue their traditionally-scientific labors?
For my crysis ran deeper than a simple writer’s block: I had begun to question the dogma that intellectual pursuit is the greatest means of attaining knowledge. It is true that the western mind hails science and intellectualism as nonpareil instruments for extracting the essence out of mankind, culture, history, language, the universe, etc. But since the Enlightenment, and even before that great paradigm shift took place, there have always been those who see the mind as a useful tool indeed, with its ability to catalog sensorial data and process it dualistically, but far too limited when it comes to the superlative questions. The true comprehension of mankind’s nature and the fundamental laws governing the extraordinary universe that we inhabit can only be accomplished with authentic transcendence: through mystical, aesthetical, right-brained, or liminal experiences. It was only when the world’s great religious and spiritual traditions lost their souls, wilting into the desiccated husks of mental concepts (i.e. idols), that our civilization required something like the enlightenment to correct its course. But humanity is stuck once more when it should be continuing its great shift of consciousness.
As I languished in my university office reflecting on all this, I feared that my ideas were too heretical, both in scholarship and among my kin. This crysis hindered any attempt to continue the research that was required of me as a professor. I didn’t know what to do.
So I grabbed my coat and leather binder and left that suffocating room. There was a place that I desperately wanted to be then—I prayed that it would help me.
My destination lay at the far end of our wind-swept campus. It was a decent walk but I enjoyed feeling the cold breath of autumn on my face. A liberal mass of red and yellow leaves shifted and swirled all around me.
I was greeted at the end of my journey by a monumental set of doors. Towering from the top of a long and straight flight of stairs, their thick oak flexed under broad bands of studded iron. Suspended from powerful hinges, the heavy portal had been laboriously thrust open in the early, dim hours while our campus still slept to avoid the bitter chill. I passed through it with a subtle bow of my head—a self-conscious expression of the admiration that I felt in that moment.
The sight that overcame me then was the reason I had come. I was inside a massive church, about a hundred yards long and twenty wide, once dedicated to deity, and now to erudition.
The eyes immediately go to the roof when one first enters the library. Beginning at a line running down the middle, at the highest point sixty feet above, dark wood vaults down both sides in long, beautiful curves. Thick stone arches break up the ceiling every ten feet, diligently supporting the entire length of the roof. As they reach the walls, the arcs sacrifice elegance for brawn, projecting straight down in the form of thick columns. Between these pillars, tall windows shower down abstract patterns of faded green, red, and yellow stained shards. The cascade continues obscured behind stout bookshelves that line the perimeter of the entire space.
The brilliantly vast and empty expanse under the ceiling floats in shadowy oak and stone. It is a dim contrast to the myriad of burning, bronze chandeliers that hang on long iron chains, closer to the floor than the roof. Their warm outpouring of illumination is mainly for the broad wooden tables evenly spaced across the resonating marble. Students sit at them in bowed postures, unconsciously praying for the grace and illumination that their rigorous studies demand.
That was my motivation too, and I walked across that spacious library, picking a nearly-empty table by the far wall. I climbed up into the thick, straight-backed chair and emptied my binder of all research materials and notebooks. Scattering the wealth of information in front of me, I hoped that the impressive sight would give me confidence.
But sorting through printouts of eloquent and clever papers, published by other philologists, only managed to force me into the familiar, bleak tunnel. My vision narrowed—disaster.
The paper was to be on patterns of lexical erosion in ancient languages of the Dravidian family. The branch of linguistics that I belonged to was Morphology—the study of words, how they are formed, their relationships, etc. The grand ideas that I had concocted about breaking trail within my field were revealing themselves to be the empty shells of torpid dreams. My thesis languished in banality. My imagination failed to achieve anything but a useless exercise in arranging words into a sad semblance of rhetoric.
I had brought with me to the library a faded copy of the Nokta Parchment. I was certainly not using it as any kind of source, since not a single character of those strange markings had been deciphered. But it was a scrap of ancient writing and it fascinated me. Radiocarbon had dated it to roughly 2500 B.C., which made it some of the oldest writing known to modern man. Cuneiform, the oldest, preceded it by about a thousand years. And before cuneiform… the written word had not existed, as far as we knew.
What did the Nokta Script say?
It was highly unlikely that people would ever come to understand its meaning. If the mysterious characters truly belonged to an ancient language, the tongue would have been lost to mankind eons ago. There was a slim hope that one day someone in a faded baseball cap and dirty khakis might dig up a stele or parchment covered with text in the language of the Nokta. Of course, in this pipe dream, the diligent archeologist would also need to uncover a second script: an exact translation of the first document in a language that we already know how to read, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was all too improbable.
And yet, the smallest prospect that humanity might one day decipher the Nokta Parchment, and suddenly fall backwards through time, was enough to enliven my philological flame.
In the quiet library, I held the photocopy close to my face, carefully poring over its eleven lines of primordial characters. I compared it to cuneiform, with its straight etchings pressed into clay tablets, which had been cracked by philologists during the 18th and 19th Centuries. The Nokta letters had also been imprinted into soft clay, but their lines are unusually winding and elegant. They flow with a delicate beauty that time has not managed to smudge away.
What on earth could they mean? Were they a royal decree? Was it a prayer to a deity that is unknown to us? Or was it a mundane, administrative document, like the one inscribed on the Rosetta Stone?
Back to reality. Back to my original research.
I tapped my pen excitedly on a blank page in my notebook. This had no effect. The large, immobile block continued to lay across my path. Its rough surface cut me every time I threw my weight against it.
It was easier to find some refuge in the library’s silent walls. The earthy, stained glass reminded me of Picasso’s Cubism, although the patterns in the windows were purely abstract. Decades ago, the building had been a church, and presumably this art had been more religious in nature then. I wondered if the energy of the place still possessed any of its former transcendental ambiance. Or had the weight of dry academia snuffed out the very last atom of veneration? Certainly, the space still managed to leave an impression on me.
Smoothly, I traced one of the columns up with aesthetic eyes, feeling myself lift up from my hard chair. The chains attaching my wrists to the laborious table snapped as I glided among delectable arcs under a lofty roof. I longed to give up the notion that I was an academic, that my place on the faculty mattered, or that I had to drive myself mercilessly to work and prove anything to my fellows and dean.
And this is precisely where my story departs from the realm of the mundane and conceivable. As I sat in admiration of the massive work of art around me, I began to grow drowsy. Usually, when we fall asleep, long before we enter the oneiric realm, we plunge fully into unconsciousness. But that was not my experience at that moment. Even though I was drifting off and growing distant from the physical space around me, I remained acutely aware of this. As my eyes closed and the world went dark, somehow, I maintained a lucid consciousness of my body slouching in the large chair. I can still remember the intense tingling that I felt all over from the numbness of sleep paralysis.
That sensation was strange enough, but then, out of the void: a hail of random, unfamiliar visions. In front of me, stood a grove of thin, young cedars, gently swaying in a breeze. Then, I was looking at a window made of small, diamond-shaped glass panes separated by strips of shining copper. In the next instant, it was replaced by a cold lake surrounded by bare and rugged peaks. The hypnagogic pictures continued to change rapidly but indicated no sense of coherent orchestration.
Abruptly, something appeared in the very middle of them, remaining solid and consistent within the chaotic slideshow.
Slowly and steadily, it grew.
I fixated intensely on the strange spot of color—there was something inside…
I saw it then: the widening circle was a kind of tunnel. It grew clearer as it inflated like a balloon. There was a green space within—a field of verdurous grass, rolling like a lazy ocean swell to the infinite horizon… I studied with fascination this endless plain on the other side. My vision was almost entirely inundated with the expanding portal—
An overwhelming electric roar filled my ears. The sound was like a transformer blowing and violently showering sparks everywhere. In all honesty, I was terrified—I thought something seriously harmful was happening to me.
Somehow, I’m not exactly sure how, I broke loose from my body, and fell forward through the opening.
This is a suitable moment to pause and argue in defense of my own sanity. Days after this preternatural event, I fervently conducted research into various phenomena of human consciousness. I found some relief in learning that my own altered state was qualitatively similar to out of body, or near-death, experiences (which have been scientifically examined, albeit inconclusively).
In any case, the next moment was all confusion—I remember darkness and nothing else.
And then I was standing among the knee-high blades of grass, feeling them swaying gently in a shy breeze. A pleasant, deep blue sky imbued the entire space with a cheerful light. This place felt as solid and real and the physical realm. I remember pushing my foot into the earth to test it. The ground was dependably solid and covered with a firm cushion of sod—as corporeal as anything.
The shoes that I was wearing were my own, as were my clothes. The fibers had a familiar roughness under my fingertips and my body sensed the weight of the fabric against it.
I looked along the expanding plane and felt chilly air blow past my ears, gently tugging on the hairs on my head.
A circle of flattened vegetation moved quickly in my direction across the green expanse. It struck me with a gust of refreshing, icy wind. I held a forearm up in front of my eyes, looking at the little hairs that moved with the breeze. The dream had remarkable detail!
That’s when the already-strange experience pitched up to a new and bizarre octave.
In a split second, the entire world around me heated up in a flash of blinding silver. The grass, which had been vibrantly green, became like white ash. My arm came up immediately as I squeezed my eyelids tight with supreme effort. The sound was terrifying: the blasting roar of a massive furnace, or rocket engine, whose fuel lines tapped into the pure hydrogen stores of a star. The urge to run was not there, superseded by an instinct to instantly vanish from existence in order to escape the overwhelming phenomenon.
Quickly, as if aware of my discomfort, the glow subsided, the roar diminishing.
I tentatively lowered my arm and looked at the world again. The explosion of light had reduced itself to a single beam, standing about ten feet in front of me and emitting a soft hum. I couldn’t look directly into its white heat, but turning away slightly allowed me to view it in the periphery. There was no clear source of the ethereal column. It seemed to extend up indefinitely and disappear into the endless sky.
The ground around the beam began to shift in a curious way. I tried to look closer but the luminance was too much. Still, I was aware enough to notice that the earth was moving, growing, tilling… Soil and rock emerged, coalescing into a low mound.
Something about its outline…
It registered: short grass grew over large eyelids, dark soil pushed-up and curved into a nose and cheek-bones, and large lips made of wet rock rested shut. I recognized the shape, even though I couldn’t look directly at the face of the buried, slumbering giant who faced skyward from the cool ground. The towering ray of light pierced a patch of sod exactly between his two colossal eyes.
A low rumble beneath my feet—a soft quake—as the earth continued to displace. The lumbering mouth heaved open to deep, sonorous grinding and cracking. Hard lips parted slowly and deliberately with crumbling effort, showering pebbles and sand loudly in all directions.
When they had hoisted fully apart, a large, dark maw gaped up at the sky. The stones rumbled to a halt like the final notes of a dramatic rock slide. All was quiet.
As quickly as it had appeared, the stark beam extinguished. Now, I could comfortably look directly at the face within the earth.
But something else caught my eye.
A tree now stood in front of me. I hadn’t seen it grow or emerge out of the ground—my vision had played the dream card and surreptitiously materialized the timber. It was a strong oak, looming over me with wide, reaching branches that were generously clothed in vibrant leaves. The tree grew among a haphazard outcropping of rocks that had seconds ago resembled large lips rolling open laboriously—the trunk had suddenly sprouted forth from the titan’s mouth. When I squinted at the mound of soil and stone, I made out the outline of the colossal face, but now the formation looked rough and scattered; no longer anthropomorphic.
Quietly, I walked toward the oak, admiring the thick, old-growth trunk. A generous number of knots bulged from its rough surface, which sprouted thick boughs that fanned out in all directions. Thrusting out from a crater of rock and dark soil, the tree was heavy with countless branches and leaves, and human language.
In the mysterious way of dreams, this strange idea was so obvious and apparent to me that I didn’t doubt it for one second—I just knew it to be true. Throughout the explosion of teeming green leaves were hundreds of languages. It wasn’t that they were represented physically (if I can use that word when describing a dream) by fruit or spheres, but they were up there. I could look at each one and immediately know its name.
I saw modern tongues such as German, Dutch, Russian, Polish, and English. Armenian was by itself at the tip of a lone, slender branch. Moving down the tree, I spotted a bough with Scots Gaelic, Breton, Welsh, and other Celtic tongues. I saw the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Catalan, and even Sardinian… Another nearby branch bore Persian, Ossetian, Dilami… Farther down I found even older tongues: Sanskrit, Pali, Bengali, and Greek. Excitedly, I recognized what all of these, and a hundred others among the leaves, had in common. My eyes darted around in search of the mysterious and dead Anatolian languages, which had existed farther back in history than the others, but their elusive bough was not in view.
I would have circled around the oak to look for it, but at that moment, I needed to examine the trunk, and I approached it.
All the disparate and exotic modalities impregnating the vast canopy above my head, both modern and ancient, living and dead, had unbelievably originated from just one source. Proto-Indo-European is the name given by historians to the root of the many languages that emerged out of Europe, Asia, the Near East, Iran, and India. It is estimated to have been spoken by a singular group of people, in the Near East or Southern Russia, as early as 4,500 B.C. They were believed to be illiterate—the main reason that their way of speaking disappeared long ago.
The trunk of the unusual tree in front of me was so massive that five people with arms extended and fingertips touching might just barely encircle it. This was the original source then, the wellspring out of which surged hundreds of disparate tongues. They flowed through mankind, resonating around the world in the form of speech and written word. All that communication and culture… Language is the medium of our discoveries, innovation, religion, art, science, philosophy, industry, technology… I reached out my hand and placed my palm against the rough, dry, old skin.
Instantly, I felt the most unique and unusual sensation pass into my arm and intensely hum through my entire body. I will never be able to forget that feeling nor do it justice with a description. It was something like nostalgia, but not for ten or thirty years—for millennia—for ancient, weathered, faded, buried, long-forgotten ages. It was as if a breeze had tumbled and struck into me, carrying the spiced and musty scent of a place and a time utterly foreign to me. I had walked back to a distant past and staggered into a far-flung reality. Happily, as though that realm had been waiting for a visitor, it divulged to me its ways, flavors, pictures, values, and words. I saw and heard people dressed in colorful fabrics, children playing in forests, celebrations, priests, rituals, fields of sheaves, stone cities, hunts, battles, nomadic camps, raids, fearful eyes, migrations… I couldn’t clasp onto any of the flighty sights—they were too many and too swift to mull over. As if in desperation, as though it needed me to see and hear, the oak radiated that strange current into me, carrying with it the deluge of extraordinary data.
A curious shadow down by the ground caught my eye. Somehow, the subtle distraction was enough to shake the tree’s spell, and I managed to jerk my hand away from the trunk. This motion all at once severed the frenetic download. The stillness that followed was so abrupt that it seethed intensely within the silence of the grassy plain.
Squatting down quietly, I reached into a small opening between two large roots that protruded away from the trunk and plunged into dark earth. My hand came back out clutching a small bundle. I unraveled it and stared at a wrinkled surface covered in characters that I knew so well. The Nokta letters stared back at me.
With a shout of surprise, I projected out of my dream and back into the realm of the awake.
The disturbing sensation of my body tumbling forward greeted me on the other side, and I jolted back to keep from falling over. I gasped at the sudden violence of my awakening, but managed to grow still and to calm my agitated breath. My bulging, paranoid eyes darted around at the other people. The way I had yelled out and careened in my chair, dangerously close to causing a scene—surely these actions of a madman had been observed.
But the students continued as I had left them—buried in their work and oblivious to the professor who slumbered among them and engaged in astral travel in order to escape his research. I must have shouted only in my sleep, and the disturbance of my physical body had probably felt more dramatic than it had looked.
The spells cast on us by dreams are impossible to resist. We are entirely at their whim until waking life rushes to our aid. But it couldn’t shake the awe that I had brought back with me. Although I was awake, my imagination was still delighted and alive with the final, poignant image that had concluded my vision: the Nokta Parchment, pulled out from under an oak, a tree filled and flowing with the human word. And in its trunk: the venerable, sophisticated, inflected, beautiful, and mysterious source of hundreds of varied and exotic languages, both living and dead.
I thought about Proto-Indo-European spreading, changing, and growing into over four hundred languages, as distinct as Hindi and Luxembourgish. People like to think about proper and correct grammar, but such a phenomenon has never truly existed. Language constantly develops and alters, even after mere decades. Consonants erode, vowels change, meanings shift, grammar transforms, and words die while new ones are formed or adopted.
In our age of universal literacy and record-keeping, we are able to stem this relentless current, but never dam it. Language will continue to evolve.
In the 1400s, Britain was peppered by incredibly diverse dialects of Germanic Old English. A printer wrote of his journey from London to the nearby region of Kent—half a day by horseback. When he spoke to a woman there, they had so much trouble understanding each other that she thought he was speaking French.
We humans cannot help but alter our languages. It is in our nature—perhaps even in our DNA. Thousands of years ago, as the dialects of Proto-Indo-European turned into foreign tongues, as its descendants borrowed terms from neighboring cultures, and as many of the subsequent modalities suffered extinction, the original, mysterious language faded and vanished into millennial dust.
The Nokta had been under the trunk of the tree in my vision… I felt the full weight of the dream and its significance bear down on me.
What if this arcane text, these words on the sheet of paper in front of me, were an actual remnant of a language thought to belong to an illiterate people? None of the proto languages had been written down, as far as we knew. For scholars, they existed only as hypothetical reconstructions based on a comparison of their descendants. But what if humanity was in possession of the written record of a proto language without even realizing it? If proven true, it would be a remarkable discovery—a key to a door leading to a wealth of knowledge and comprehension concerning our past, present, and future.
Could a simple dream have revealed such insights? In the world of mainstream research and scholarship, this notion is a dubious one. But, by no means would my own case be a precedent. In the Sixteenth Century, a cosmologist named Giordano Bruno proposed that the stars in the heavens were distant suns surrounded by planets. For such a heresy, he was imprisoned and executed by the Catholic Church. Giordano’s grandiose and prescient notion of the cosmos came to him in a dream.
With some effort, I bent my academic mind away from the trained paradigm of rigid skepticism. Perhaps my dream had been a shout from the subconscious—genuine knowledge surfacing from the depth of a mind honed by years of concentration on ancient writing. Could it have been a message from the realm of DNA—data recorded thousands of years ago in the bones of my ancestors, still resonating to this day within my genes?
While continuing to reel from my vision, I even entertained divine intervention as an explanation…
As I sat inside the beautiful, reverential library and dwelled on the experience that had so thoroughly dazed me, I felt a completely novel idea enter into me. I became possessed by a deep, inner certainty: that I could translate the Nokta script.
But how can I explain such a personal and esoteric thing?
While the letters had certainly impressed me before, they now affected me in a radically new way. I felt something inside of them: each symbol was like a unique string in a musical instrument of antiquity. By scanning across the characters, I felt a kind of melody resonating through me. It seemed more than obvious to me that if I dedicated myself to studying the Nokta words, my work would surely yield interesting results.
Call it what you will—some sudden, inner madness had pursued me out of the oneiric world, refusing to let me return as the conforming intellectual I had been before my dream.
The alarmed faces of my learned ancestors rose up in my imagination. What would they say if I told them about my experience in the library? Would they think that I had shrugged off the erudite legacy they had built? Would they accuse me of trespassing beyond the reasonable boundaries of the liberal arts? Such criticisms seemed highly likely, but it was too late for me—I was too far gone—beyond saving.
Eagerly and with great joy, I abandoned my original, impotent project and the stale odor of perfunctory scholarship, in favor of pursuing a fresh, exhilarating, and living scent. Guided by the clue of what the Nokta Parchment might be, and drawing upon all my acumen in ancient languages, morphology, etc., I enthusiastically began my attempt to decipher those cryptic words.
Most of the details of this work, which took nearly a year to see through, are in the paper that I published—the very paper that brought me to academic ruin; but more on that soon… Truthfully, I don’t believe I can claim to possess complete cognizance of how the deciphering was managed. While I did continue to feel a mysterious instinct or intuition—at my disposal but not my own—helping me, I still needed to do the work… To bring the letters into focus, so to speak.
I labored diligently and passionately, totally absorbed in the new, exhilarating project. Progress was slow and difficult, but almost immediately there were clues that I was on the right track, which only caused me to increase my effort and focus. A coherent model began to emerge out of the arcane characters.
At times, the whole thing suddenly looked quite muddled to me. I went through a severe crisis of self-doubt. Certainly, I felt the full weight of my situation. Was I really deciphering a dead language from a dead script? Did I think myself capable of such a thing because of a dream about a tree? Who would believe that I could accomplish it with only eleven short lines of text as the source? It was unheard of in historical linguistics…
But I couldn’t deny what I was seeing.
I forced myself to keep going. Even if I was wrong—why not see it through?
And finally, it happened: I deciphered the entire passage.
The skepticism that my statement is certain to invite is totally justified. I felt it myself! How could anyone pick a lock as old and esoteric as the Nokta? And on their own?
But it was true! I had not imagined the translation that lay before me into existence. It had emerged out of months of real work. And once finished, I found myself reading words from an era thought to predate writing.
Eleven tantalizing lines of a dead language had just time-travelled into our modern age. I was not about to keep them all to myself. And so, with no hesitation, I published.
Those who have read my paper know the lengths to which I went in order to infuse it with credibility. Linguists have done a fine job comparing thousands of languages and guessing what their prototypal sources must have been like. I drew upon all the extant Proto-Indo-European reconstructions, showing the similarities to my version of the language and making sound arguments for where it differed. I painstakingly verified and demonstrated that my recasted Proto-Indo-European did not break down when following its transformation into its descendants. I illustrated the parallels between my deciphering and the work done on other very old languages, such as Hittite (a descendant of Proto-Indo-European.)
I was shocked and relieved when I learned that both my parents, in spite of being establishment intellectuals, were entirely behind me. They were proud, I think, of their son taking such a radical and courageous position. And I imagine that Byron, my deceased grandfather, would have appreciated it too, being of that more romantic generation of scholars.
Although unprecedented, my translation of the etched Nokta lines was logical, sound, and well-supported. But at the end of the day, my claim was highly irregular and far too bold for the field. One lone scholar cannot complete such a massive venture singlehandedly. It always takes many, many years and the collective efforts of multiple experts and scholars. The Rosetta stone required decades to decipher and the labor of several philologists. But more importantly, they had a helpful key to work with: Greek. The message carved upon the stele was repeated in three different languages, one of which was an ancient form of Greek, easily readable by any philologist worth their salt. By comparison, the Nokta text offered no assistance to those trying to decipher it; and yet I had boasted of solving it.
There was an additional imposing hurdle: the dogma that all proto languages predate the written word. It didn’t matter that I cited relevant research in the fields of archeology and anthropology. To wit, as we learn more about the ancients, we realize that they were more sophisticated, scientifically and culturally, than we had previously imagined. As we continue to lower the light of science down the mineshaft of history, we discover more people with complex languages, societies, achievements, architecture, etc. I referenced all of this in my paper.
Quick and ruthless were the machinations of institutional scholarship. Where before I had been a willing cog inside this relentless mill, I now felt myself to be the grist. My findings were rejected and mocked with hot venom. I had prepared myself for such a response, but the vicious and personal attacks against my soundness of mind caught me off guard. Thus I was violently forced out of academia.
Until one ordinary day, nineteen years later.
I remember that I was having post-breakfast coffee that morning with my wife. Out of boredom, I compulsively reached for my phone to check on the news. It should have been the typical, subjective speculation on politics or inept economic forecast—nothing exciting enough to raise an eyebrow at.
The top story hit me with one, big, stunning blow. The known world around me—kitchen, table, coffee, sky outside, wife—collapsed into a black hole.
Radiocarbon Recalibration Puts Age of Nokta Parchment at 5000 B.C.
No doubt, by now, anyone reading my account will be quite familiar with the fallout from the Fridman Radiocarbon Data Shift (machine learning continues to shake things up within the sciences). As I absorbed the article, I felt an acute sense of confirmation. I can’t recall how many times I read and reread:
The fact that the Nokta Parchment is thousands of years older than we had previously realized is sending a powerful tremor through our understanding of history. It is the oldest written language discovered so far, and it is shaking and displacing the very foundation of what we thought we knew about humanity…
5000 B.C.—a primordial era when Proto-Indo-European was first stretching its wings, before it had begun to flourish and spread via its intrepid agents, before hieroglyphics burned on the walls of Egyptian temples and cuneiform accompanied depictions of mighty gods. It is worth remembering that Turkey is the location in which the Nokta artifact had been discovered. Some historians believe that this region of the Near East is precisely where Proto-Indo-European was born.
That article that I first spotted between gulps of coffee is not enough to convince the skeptics of the validity of my thesis and translation, but it is enough for me to banish any remaining self-doubt.
And so I believe that today is the ideal time for me to re-enter the stage and tell the complete story, and never flee again so long as truth is on my side. I hope that I have done so with this account, of which you are approaching the conclusion. I have written it because it concerns a topic of utmost importance to everyone.
For the beauty and richness of life in society, for all the scientific accomplishments of human civilization, and for the acquisition and purveyance of wisdom—language is cardinal.
In conclusion, I leave you with the deciphered lines of the Nokta. And I humbly beg that you, dear readers, imbibe these words with an open heart, even if you are reluctant to accept my story.
Mankind lives, breathes, and speaks with divine power
With the Word, they edify and exalt each other
They form tribes and build cities
Create art and make culture
They pray and bless
The Word is Divine, but many know it not
Giving it a hideous shape
And casting it carelessly to the four winds
But they who respect, honor, and gild their voices
Will work prodigies under the sun
The Word is God