The strange artifacts found in Glozel
Glozel is a small hamlet, located about 20 km south of Vichy, France.
It was the first of March 1924, when Emile Fradin, a young sixteen-year-old, was preparing to plow a small field with his grandfather Claudio.
While plowing the field, the tool jammed against a stone and the legs of one of his two oxen sank into the ground. The two men, intrigued by the fact, dug into the ground andfound some bricks, engraved tablets, two small axes, two pebbles with inscriptions and two small knives. Although unaware of the extent of the discovery, they involved the local "authorities": around thirty people, including Mr. Agostino Bert, tutor in Ferrieres and the Reverend Naud, curate dean of the parish.
Everyone declared the findings authentic.
Among the many things discovered were baked clay tablets with inscriptions. All the finds were attributed to the Magdalenian period (16,000-8,000 years ago), thus implicitly considering the existence of an unknown civilization never discovered before. Civilization also relatively advanced given the inscriptions that presented alphabetic writing before it was invented by the Phoenicians in the 13th century BC.
Given the importance of the discovery, two sides soon formed: supporters and skeptics.
Dr. Morlet was in charge of the work in this regard and on 23 September 1925 he published a report to which he gave the title "New Neolithic Station", without however having consulted with the official representatives of Prehistory of the time, namely Dr. Capitan of the Fine Arts, Abbot Breuil, and Peyroni, curator of the Eyzies museum. The former was particularly furious with Morlet, whom he summoned to the French capital for a somewhat disconcerting and very questionable proposal.
Capitan asked Morlet to have the discovery credited to himself, with the motivation that, with his signature alone (Morlet's) a book dealing with this would not have sold as many copies as it would have sold with his own. After Morlet rejects this proposal, Glozel's vicissitudes began.
He began by denying the authenticity of the findings. The young farmer Emile Fradin was then reported for fraud, as he had set up a small museum in his home with the objects he had found, which could be accessed for a fee. After some time, however, the boy was acquitted with a final sentence. Due to all these disputes, however, the authenticity of the discovery was never reconfirmed.
Among all the finds some very strange vases were found depicting species of human heads enclosed in space helmets, so much so that one of these was called "the interplanetary" and also, in the inscriptions, letters common to our current alphabet , that is: C, H, I, J, K, L, O, T, V, W, X.
Only after 1970 scientific works attempted to establish their exact age. Two different methods were used: Carbon 14 and thermoluminescence. The first was performed on all objects that contained organic substances, for example bones; the second instead on everything that undergoes a firing process, for example ceramics and vases.
In 1973 these examinations were conducted with the thermoluminescence method by Vagn Mejdhal, director of atomic research in Riso (Denmark).
These results attributed a date between 900 BC and 300 BC to a tablet. This dating was subsequently confirmed by Hugh Mokerrel of the Edinburgh museum who had completed tests on other objects. With Carbon 14, however, things became more complicated, as the results were somewhat different. The dating that emerged, in fact, was between 19000 BC and a few years before. Probably those examined were finds that had very different ages from each other.
Beyond this, there was still to explain the strange alphabet, similar to ours, reported on the tablets. First of all, it was possible to understand that they were inscribed only after the firing of the clay and that the latter dated back to 400 BC and no longer ancient, it can therefore be deduced that they were written after this date. However, it is not impossible to establish an interrelationship between the traced letters: these letters would therefore correspond to signs drawn probably at random, perhaps by someone who had seen them, unaware of their meaning.
Results were also confirmed by the examinations carried out in the 1970s by an English linguistic computer science group directed by Prof. Isserlin who set to work with the aim of understanding the structures of the "Glozelian language", with the aim of finding possible connections and analogies with other languages.
However the attempt was made in vain. It was not possible to find a connection between the 11 letters present in the fired clay tablets. It was not even possible to understand whether these signs formed a syllabic or alphabetic script or a series of ideograms; even their sequence did not respect logical rules: even a computer was unable to detect anything.
All this could make us think of a scam or a fake. Could it have been sixteen-year-old Emile Fradin? Unlikely, given his knowledge. At the time of the discovery, he had, in fact, only a primary school diploma and he was certainly unaware of any, even rudimentary, knowledge of archaeology. Furthermore, more than 3,000 artefacts were found. Where were they built? Where did the manufacturing waste remain?
