 | Old European Script: Encyclopedia II - Old European Script - The discovery of the script
Old European Script - The discovery of the script
In 1875, archaeological excavations led by the archeologist Zsófia Torma (1840–1899) at Turdaş (Tordos), near Orăştie in Transylvania (now Romania) unearthed a cache of objects inscribed with previously unknown symbols. A similar cache was found during excavations conducted in 1908 in Vinča, a suburb of the Serbian city of Belgrade, some 120km from Tordos. Later, more such fragments were found in Banjica, another part of Belgrade. Thus the culture represented is called the Vinca-Tordos culture, and the script often called the Vinca-Tordos script. To date, more than a thousand fragments with similar inscriptions have been found on various archaeological sites throughout south-eastern Europe, notably in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, eastern Hungary, Moldova, southern Ukraine and other locations in the former Yugoslavia.
Most of the inscriptions are on pottery, with the remainder appearing on whorls (flat cylindrical annuli), figurines, and a small collection of other objects. Over 85% of the inscriptions consist of a single symbol. The symbols themselves consist of a variety of abstract and representative pictograms, including zoomorphic (animal-like) representations, combs or brush patterns and abstract symbols such as swastikas, crosses and chevrons. Other objects include groups of symbols, of which some are arranged in no particularly obvious pattern, with the result that neither the order nor the direction of the signs in these groups is readily determinable. The usage of symbols varies significantly between objects: symbols that appear by themselves tend almost exclusively to appear on pots, while symbols that are grouped with other symbols tend to appear on whorls.
The importance of these findings lies in the fact that the oldest of them are dated around 4000 BC, around a thousand years before the proto-Sumerian pictographic script from Uruk (modern Iraq), which is usually considered as the oldest known script. Analyses of the symbols showed that they had little similarity with Near Eastern writing, leading to the view that they probably arose independently of the Sumerian civilization. There are some similarities between the symbols and other Neolithic symbologies found elsewhere, as far afield as Egypt, Crete and even China. However, Chinese scholars have suggested that such signs were produced by a convergent development of what might be called a precursor to writing which evolved independently in a number of societies.
Although a large number of symbols are known, most artefacts contain so few symbols that they are very unlikely to represent a complete text. Possibly the only exception is a stone found near Sitovo in Bulgaria, the dating of which is disputed; regardless, the stone has only around 50 symbols. It is unknown which language used the symbols, or indeed whether they stand for a language in the first place.
Other related archives1875, 1908, 1921, 1994, 20th century, 4000 BC, Artemis, Belgrade, Bronze Age, Bulgaria, China, Crete, Easter Island, Egypt, Etruscan alphabet, Greece, Homer, Hungary, Indo-European, Iraq, Kurgan culture, Linear A, Linear B, List of undeciphered writing systems, Marija Gimbutas, Minoans, Moldova, Mother Goddess, Old European cultures, Orăştie, Phoenician, Pseudoarchaeology, Romania, Rongorongo, Serbian, Sumerian, Sumerians, Transylvania, Ukraine, Uruk, Vinca-Tordos culture, Vinča culture, West Greek Alphabet, Yugoslavia, Zsófia Torma, alphabet, archaeological, bird goddess, continuity theory, cuneiform, dated, figurines, iconography, ideograms, inscriptions, language, neolithic, patterns, pictograms, pictographic, pottery, pre-Indo-European, south-eastern Europe, suburb, syllabary, votive offerings, whorls, writing system, zoomorphic
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