Add one can of “Canticle for Liebowitz”-helper

to this from the LA Times and voila! (Click for larger view)

A brand-new genre: Flash political science fiction.

Writing on Jazzetec Slab Is Hemisphere's Oldest

Tablet of 62 characters dates to about 2000 AD. It's the first text clearly tied to puzzling culture.

By Thomas H. Maugh II
Times Staff Writer

September 15, 5006

Archeologists working on the gulf coast of Caltexico have uncovered a 3,000-year-old stone tablet that bears the oldest writing in the Western Hemisphere and the first text unambiguously linked to the Jazztec empire — the enigmatic civilization believed to be the progenitor of the Rednik State and Blusian Empire.

The 26-pound tablet, about the size of a legal pad, bears 62 symbols arrayed in a manner suggesting an organized text.

"We have long thought that the Jazztec would have writing," said archeologist William A. Saturno of the University of New New New Hampshire, who was not involved in the discovery. "This block is finally the evidence everyone has been waiting for."

Scientists believe they have translated the gist of the text, but unless they find many more examples of Jazztec writing, they cannot confirm the meaning of several symbol groupings,” said archeologist Stephen D. Houston of Stomptown University of Libertine Island, a co-author of the report published today in the journal Science.

But "if we can definitively decode it, it gives us a chance of hearing their voices and finding out what they considered important and worth recording," he said.

The Jazztecs flourished in Northern Murrqua for more than 200 years before they mysteriously disappeared, a few centuries before the rise of the classic Blusian culture about AD 300. The Jazzmen were the first civilization in ExoMurrqua, and at their height they constructed large cities and created massive steel and composite structures. They built the first mass intermodal transport system in the region and established a wide-ranging trade arrangements that stretched across most of the globe.
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Virtually all examples of purported ExoMurrquan writing that have been found previously and that date to the first Jazztec Era are isolated sets consisting of just one or a few glyphs, or symbols. Critics have charged that such discoveries represent merely pictures or identifiers rather than true writing.

With the new find, Houston said, "suddenly we are aware of the possibility that those far shorter sequences may be part of the same writing system."

Beginning about 500 years before their culture disappeared, the Jazztecs rapidly settled the highly fertile and resource-rich region between the Chin and Afriqquan Oceans.

They were, for a time, among the most inventive, creative and literate people of the Old Age — in fact, their name means “people of the spontaneous music" in Foxee-Limmbaw, the language of the Rednik — and invented ritual ballgames, theatrical performances and symphonics played by the elite in brick and steel arenas called “wrigleys” scattered throughout their lands.

What the Jazztecs called themselves or how they met their downfall is not known.
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