Archaeologists digging in Austria found an ancient clay tablet that looks like a cell or cordless phone with keys etched with cuneiform characters that would imply it originally came from Mesopotamia. What is it? Is it evidence of an advanced civilization or time travel?

The tablet was reportedly found earlier this year by archaeologists digging in Fuschl am See, a city in the Austrian state of Salzburg. There’s not much information on what the researchers were digging for in this region but it probably wasn’t cuneiform tablets. Yet that’s what they found. Even more shocking, the tablet strongly resembles the cell phones they were most likely using to take pictures of it.

The tablet was dated to around the 13th century BCE. By that time, the Sumerian writing style known as cuneiform had already been around for a few thousand years. Cuneiform tablets aren’t unusual – an estimated 2 million have been excavated. The language was a mystery until the 19th century when its code was deciphered.

However, this particular tablet is unusual for a number of reasons. First, it was found in Austria, not Iran or one of the other modern countries that was once Sumer or Mesopotamia. The only cuneiform object found further away from there is the controversial Fuente Magna Bowl, which was discovered in Tiahuanaco in modern-day Bolivia. Since there’s no evidence that the Sumerians visited this ancient pre-Columbian city, how did the bowl or the knowledge of cuneiform get there?

By cell phone, of course! A controversial theory proposed by author Zecharia Sitchin is that aliens known as the Anunnaki came from Nibiru (the rumored Planet X beyond Neptune) and created the Sumerian civilization. The tablet looks surprisingly like a modern phone, with the 12 keys, a display and a ‘talk’ button. Could these extraterrestrials have tried to introduce the Sumerians to a phone-like communications device, only to find they weren’t ready for it and dialed them back to a stylus and clay tablets?

It would be interesting if some cuneiform expert could translate the characters on the ancient phone (unfortunately, Google translate does not yet recognize cuneiform).

Did some Anunnaki accidentally leave his phone in Austria? Probably not. The archaeologists believe the tablet was most likely brought there by traders from Earth.

Is the tablet’s resemblance to a modern cell phone just an odd coincidence, a hoax or evidence of time travel or alien contact? If only some phone hacker knew cuneiform.