Mr Babel

[Ebiris]

"They'd have to have ranged far and wide, yes, " Alice nods, "Which makes the fact that this is the first evidence of their existence all the more puzzling."

Coming over to the last crate you opened, she leans in to remove the packing foam, brushing against you slightly. "This one is interesting," she notes, pulling out a shiny black... bowl? Disc? It only has a very shallow curve, and the centre is empty. All told, it's nearly two feet across. "You see these patterns?" she asks, holding it up so it catches the light and tiny pinpricks through the obsidian become visible. They seem to be arrayed around the whole thing in more or less random clusters.

[Edward]

Steady on, Richard, she didn't mean to brush against you. Suddenly the room seems a bit smaller and he feels rather warm.

"What?  Oh yes, nicely rounded, I mean, I'd like to examine it more closely."  Richard pauses and takes a deep breath, then looks at the bowl.

"I've not seen anything like this."  He examines the obsidian bowl closely, trying to determine what if any pattern occur in the pinpricks.  Do they bear similarity to the sample of writing he's seen?  Does it perhaps look like a star chart?  Or are there any other patterns he can discern?

"Do let me know if your arms are getting tired, Alice, that can't be the lightest of objects.  It must have taken a lot of time and effort to bore all these holes directly through the obsidian, which is rather a hard stone, if I recall correctly."

"So what are your theories about this extraordinary find?"

[Ebiris]

Looking carefully at the patterns, it takes less than a moment for you to come up with the most obvious hypothesis. Several of them bear more than a passing resemblance to constellations you recognise, albeit curiously warped.

Alice, for her part, blinks a little bit at your initial phrasing, although seems to dismiss it easily enough as you move on. "Yes, drilling such small holes right through without any chipping would be difficult enough even with a modern drill," she notes.

"As for theories, well," she flips it the other way round and sets the artifact down on her desk. "Notice these grooves?" she indicates three sets of narrow grooves, one right at the hole in the middle, the other two one third and two thirds up towards the outer edge. "I think this was meant to be set into a specific apparatus, possibly for ceremonial purposes. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything that actually fit at the site, so I can't be sure..."

[Edward]

Richard you bloody idiot, you almost put your bloody foot in it.  That was definitely an accident on her part.

"And, of course there weren't any inscriptions depicting said apparatus," Richard replies.  "Perhaps there will be something helpful at the new site.  Regardless, this is an incredible find."

He takes another close look at the disk.  "The constellations are a bit off from  the way they look today.  I'm no expert in astronomy, but I know the stars move.  If we can plot things backwards, we should be able to determine just when the disk was made."

[Ebiris]

"Constellations?" Alice blinks, flipping the disc over to look closer. "Hmm... I'm really not familiar with how they actually look, but it definitely bears further thought..."

[Edward]

Richard points at some of the more recognizable bits on the disk.  "You see, this is very close to the way the constellation is today.  My theory is that the disc was made when the stars were in these positions.  A bit of astronomy research should tell us how long ago the stars were in these positions, thus telling us when the disc was made."

[Ebiris]

"Interesting," Alice muses, nodding after a moment. "Shouldn't be too hard to find an astronomer around here who can confirm it."

Putting that aside for the moment, she leans over another crate. "These aren't as intellectually puzzling. But still excellent finds..." she pulls out a black blade in each hand, about a foot long each. "Careful, they still hold an edge," she cautions, delicately reversing her grip to hand them to you by the... handle? Even for daggers, the handle seems very short. Barely the breadth of your palm. And there's no handguard to speak of.

[Edward]

Richard takes the blade gingerly and examines it.  "Rather odd, did they have  particularly small hands?  Or perhaps there was some sort of larger handle of a less durable material."

[Ebiris]

"They're spearheads," Alice tells you as you examine them. Hmm, looks like there's writing down the middle. Three characters on each, with both blades sharing the first two characters, but the third one being different on each.

[Edward]

"Ah, that would explain it, then."  Richard looks closely at the blades.  "Rather odd place to put writing, though."

[Ebiris]

"Yes, although I could think of several meanings," Alice notes. "Perhaps the weapons are named, or it's the insignia of the maker. Or it might even refer to the owners - possible members of the same family, given the similarity in the characters. At any rate, I'd feel safe in assuming they have more significance than merely being weapons."

[Edward]

"It seems a reasonable theory," Richard replies.  "Have you found these characters anywhere else besides the spearheads?"

[Ebiris]

"All except the first shared character appear here and there on the other writings," Alice nods, indicating where they crop up on the etchings. "They don't follow the same sequence anywhere else, though."

[Edward]

"Nowhere else at all?" Richard replies.  "That is rather odd.  Though thinking about it, it's perhaps odder that the second shared character doesn't appear with either of the third characters in this order."

It's an exception to the pattern, but I can't think of why.  I'll probably feel quite foolish about not getting it when I do puzzle this out.

"Is there anything else interesting you would like to show me?" Richard adds.

[Ebiris]

"Well, we don't know for sure what they're saying... we've documented a hundred and..." she scrunches her brow a moment in thought before concluding, "A hundred and thirteen seperate characters. We don't know if that's their whole alphabet, after all. Compared to say Chinese kanji, it's a small amount, so there might be a ton more we haven't seen."

"Anway," she brightens, moving to a flat crate, "Still more to see. This one's really nice, too." Fumbling for a moment through the packing material, she produces a thin oblong shape held within a glass container. As she holds it up, you can see what appears to be a landscape painting of a sandy valley beneath a clear blue sky. The colours are strikingly vivid, although art is mostly subjective, so you can't really say it's 'better' than anything else that could have been painted at that time. It's competent enough at conveying the scene, at any rate.

"Compared to the others, it's not really terribly surprising - the dyes are of a kind common enough to the region in that period. But it's a nice scene - actually the view to the north of the site, as far as I can tell. And I do know for a fact it's the earliest recorded example of landscape painting."