Evidence · Glozel: the inscribed tablets of the Fradin field
Crawford's 1977 computer analysis of 34 tablets found none of the statistical characteristics of a natural-language…
Crawford's 1977 computer analysis of 34 tablets found none of the statistical characteristics of a natural-language text when compared with Basque, Berber, Chinese, Finnish and Iberian corpora.
What it means
Key questionDo the Glozel signs form a writing system that records a language?
4 answers, none ahead yet
Openunchanged
Answer this evidence bears onSigns copied from alphabet tables without linguistic order
Supports2 for, none against
Still possibleunchanged
Next steps 3
1
Transcribe the 44 legible tablets of Morlet's Corpus (pp. 69-90, MOM scan) into a sign-occurrence table keyed to Morlet's 111 sign numbers, with line and position, and publish it as a dataset.
~16 h
—not judged
2
Transcribe Morlet's Corpus tablets into a sign-occurrence table and rerun Crawford's test against natural-language and random-alphabet null models.
~24 h
—not judged
3
Repeat Crawford's 1977 test on the full transcription: sign-frequency rank curve, conditional entropy and repeated n-gram counts, compared with natural-language controls and a null model of random draws from Phoenician and Iberian sign tables.
~8 h
—not judged
Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes
Sources 1
Les tablettes inscrites de Glozel
SRCCrawford 1977
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Crawford's 1977 computer analysis of 34 tablets found none of the statistical characteristics of a natural-language… [Evidence EVD0DEDY9F72CWK]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDY9F72CWK
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedy9f72cwk,
title = {Crawford's 1977 computer analysis of 34 tablets found none of the statistical characteristics of a natural-language…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDY9F72CWK},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDY9F72CWK}
}