science - now that's poetry!

Quarry workers in Mexico seem to have discovered the New World's first known poetry in a pile of road-building rubble. The writing is on, not the wall, but a stone which is nearly 3,000 years old: a relic of the Olmec civilisation, the oldest known in the Americas, long before the Mayan. There's been lots of interest in the press - I've seen this cited in a few places - after the information was published in Science magazine last week, though the stone was found in 1999. Of course, all through the seven years since it was found the quarry has been in use, so as an archaeological site it's now about useless.

The slab of stone is 5 inches thick and weighs 26 pounds (the same as my middle baby when he was 8 months old; but he was off the scales), which is prompting archaeologists to refer to it as 'portable' - I say if this is portable then it's more like the first known TV.

Interestingly, though, and more to our purposes here in the beautified halls of - well - (one hesitates to say 'Hackney', though the fact that beauty can exist even here is surely the whole raison-d'être of beauty?) - the archaeologists have perceived patterns that looks like paired lines, with paired repetitions. In other words, they feel that the oldest known writing on the whole American continents could quite probably be something like rhymed couplets.

I don't know about you, but I'm pleased about that.

Also, if you look at the signs in the key above, you will see that it was a nice, happy poem, about going out for ice cream after eating corn on the cob... I think it may even have a pineapple in it.

A few years ago there was a fantastically interesting series about the Ancient Egyptians which the kids and I were all riveted by, in which the presenter showed these small - c4in - stone tablets used by builders as notepads. They were full of shopping lists and to-do lists, and little snippets of gossip, like, "I saw him yesterday with so-&-so's wife" (and if more than one wife: what a to-do!). That was just as gratifying as the poetry find. Human beings are just endlessly endearing creatures.

I couldn't find the article online, which is why I haven't linked to it. I was pleased, though, to see in another headline that "The Galápagos Islands Kiss Their Goat Problem Goodbye".