Dredged up in a fisherman’s nets near Seven Stones Reef off the coast of Cornwall in 1798 CE the ‘Lyonesse Book’ was a set of four bronze sheets embossed with the longest known text in the written language of the Pisk – an enigmatic, metaphysically-aware culture that was present on the western fringes of Europe for around 1,000 years from approximately 3,500 BCE onwards. The ‘book’ is considered lost – last being recorded in the collection of a frustratingly anonymous Irish Antiquary in 1852 CE – but a number of written descriptions and illustrations (such as the one reproduced above) have survived, allowing it to be determined that the text was stamped into the bronze by a series of dies and that the text should almost certainly be read left to right, top to bottom.
The Pisk corpus is extremely small and to date no Pisk text has been convincingly translated. Thirty-four distinct characters are known (five of which are unique to the ‘book’) suggesting a syllababric system, although a complex alphabet cannot be entirely ruled out. The small semantic space covered by the characters has lead to suggestions that the Pisk were either not widely literate – with the script limited to ritual or other restricted purposes – or had a neural structure resistant to dyslexia.
Failing the discovery of a Pisk ‘Rosetta Stone’ – or at least a much larger collection of texts – it is considered unlikely that Pisk will ever be translated, although it is suspected that a common character sequence (i1, c5, f5) represents the Pisk’s own name for themselves and their culture.
