Tartaria Tablets – The first writing in the world
5300 BC
In the city Tărtăria, Alba County,Romania, in 1961 was discovered an important religious complex; the material showed a continuity of habitation for several thousand years.
Members of a team led by Nicolae Vlassa, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Transylvanian History, Cluj-Napoca in charge of the site excavations, unearthed three inscribed but unbaked clay tablets, together with 26 clay and stone figurines and a shell bracelet, accompanied by the burnt, broken, and disarticulated bones of an adult.
The three sensational clay tablets were made at least 6,500 years ago, according to the isotope carbon 14 dating.
Two of the tablets are rectangular and the third is round. They are all small, the round one being only 6 cm (2½ in) across, and two — one round and one rectangular — have holes drilled through them.
All three have symbols inscribed only on one face. The unpierced rectangular tablet depicts a horned animal, an unclear figure, and a vegetal motif, a branch or tree. The others have a variety of mainly abstract symbols, pictographic writing, over a millennium older than the famous Sumerian clay tablets. The purpose of the burial is unclear, but it has been suggested that the body was, if not that of a shaman or spirit-medium, that of a local most respected wise person
At first, the scientists thought the tablets are fakes. But the isotope Carbon 14 dating has proven that these objects are at least 6,500 years old.
Similar motifs have been found on pots excavated at Gradeshnitsa in Bulgaria, Vinča in Serbia and a number of other locations in the southern Balkans.
In Bulgaria has also been found a 5,500 year old clay pot, which is covered with the same type of writing/depictions.
The tablets are generally believed to have belonged to the Vinča-Turdaș culture, which at the time was believed by Serbian and Romanian archaeologists to have originated around 2700 BC.
Vinca figurine
Vlassa interpreted the Tărtăria tablets as a hunting scene and the other two with signs as a kind of primitive writing similar to the early pictograms of the Sumerians. The discovery caused great interest in the archaeological world as it predated the first Minoan writing, the oldest known writing in Europe.
Vincan symbols
Credit: Wikipedia
The Vinča culture is a Neolithic archaeological culture in Southeastern Europe, dated to the period 5500–4500 BCE. Named for its type site, Vinča-Belo Brdo, a large tell settlement discovered by Serbian archaeologist Miloje Vasić in 1908, it represents the material remains of a prehistoric society mainly distinguished by its settlement pattern and ritual behavior Farming technology first introduced to the region during the First Temperate Neolithic was developed further by the Vinča culture, fueling a population boom and producing some of the largest settlements in prehistoric Europe.
These settlements maintained a high degree of cultural uniformity through the long-distance exchange of ritual items, but were probably not politically unified. Various styles of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figurines are hallmarks of the culture, as are the Vinča symbols, which some conjecture to be an early form of proto-writing. Though not conventionally considered part of the Chalcolithic or “Copper Age”, the Vinča culture provides the earliest known example of copper metallurgy.
However, subsequent radiocarbon dating on the Tărtăria finds pushed the date of the tablets (and therefore of the whole Vinča culture) much further back, to as long ago as 5500 BC, the time of the early Eridu phase of the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia
If the symbols are indeed a form of writing, then writing in the Danubian culture would far predate the earliest Sumerian cuneiform script or Egyptian hieroglyphs. They would thus be the world’s earliest known form of writing.
One thing is sure: the writing found on the “Tărtăria tablets” is the first writing in the world, which we know of. Unfortunately, the signs have remained indecipherable until this day.
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