The Vinča symbols, sometimes known as the Danube script, Vinča signs, Vinča script, Vinča–Turdaș script, Old European script, etc., are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era artifacts from the Vinča culture of Central Europe and Southeastern Europe. The vast majority of historians agree that those symbols are not a writing system, but private symbols or ornaments of some kind. A minority of historians claim that this is the earliest known writing system that has influenced other early writing systems.
Discovery
In 1875, archaeological excavations directed by the Hungarian archaeologist Zsófia Torma at Tordos unearthed a cache of objects inscribed with previously unknown symbols. In 1908, a similar cache was found during excavations directed by Serbian archaeologist Miloje Vasić in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, some 245 km from Turdaș. Later, more such fragments were found in Banjica, another part of Belgrade. Since 1875, over 150 Vinča sites have been identified in Serbia alone, but many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated. Thus, the culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture, and the symbols are often called the Vinča–Turdaș script. The discovery of the Tărtăria tablets in Romania by a team directed by Nicolae Vlassa in 1961 revived the debate. Vlassa believed the inscriptions to be pictograms and other items found at the same place were subsequently carbon-dated to before 4000 BC, thirteen hundred years earlier than the date he expected, and earlier even than the writing systems of the Sumerians and Minoans. The authenticity of these tablets is disputed.
Analysis
Most of the inscriptions are on pottery, with the remainder appearing on ceramic spindle whorls, figurines, and a small collection of other objects. The symbols themselves consist of a variety of abstract and representative pictograms, including zoomorphic representations, combs or brush patterns and abstract symbols such as swastikas, crosses and chevrons. Over 85% of the inscriptions consist of a single symbol. 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.
Dating and importance
The importance of these findings is due to the fact that the bulk of the Vinča symbols were created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets possibly dating back to around 5300 BC. This means that the Vinča finds predate the proto-Sumerian pictographic script from Uruk, which is usually considered to be the oldest known writing system, by more than a thousand years. Analyses of the symbols showed that they have little similarity with Near Eastern writing, resulting in the opinion that these symbols and the Sumerian script probably arose independently. Although a large number of symbols are known, most artifacts contain so few symbols that they are very unlikely to represent a complete text. Possibly the only exception is the Sitovo inscription in Bulgaria, the dating of which is disputed; regardless, even that inscription has only around 50 symbols.
Inventory
A database of Vinca inscriptions, DatDas, has been developed by Marco Merlini:
DatDas organizes a catalogue of 5,421 actual signs. These are recorded from a corpus of 1,178 inscriptions composed of two or more signs and 971 inscribed artifacts.
Meaning of the symbols
The nature and purpose of the symbols is a mystery. Although attempts have been made to interpret the symbols, there is no agreement as to what they might mean. At first it was thought that the symbols were simple property marks, meaning "this belongs to X". A prominent holder of this opinion is archaeologist Peter Biehl. This theory is now mostly abandoned, as the same symbols have been repeatedly found throughout the territory of the Vinča culture, in locations hundreds of kilometers and years away from each other. The prevailing theory is that the symbols were used for religious purposes in a traditional agricultural society. If so, the fact that the same symbols were used for centuries with little change suggests that the ritual meaning and culture represented by the symbols likewise remained constant for a very long time, with no need for further development. The use of the symbols seems to have been abandoned at the start of the Bronze Age, suggesting that the new technology brought with it significant changes in social organization and beliefs. One argument in favour of the ritual explanation is that the objects on which the symbols appear do not seem to have had much long-term significance to their owners – they are commonly found in pits and other refuse areas. Certain objects, principally figurines, are most usually found buried under houses. This is consistent with the supposition that they were prepared for household religious ceremonies in which the signs incised on the objects represent expressions: a desire, request, vow, etc. After the ceremony was completed, the object would either have no further significance or would be buried ritually. Some of the "comb" or "brush" symbols, which collectively compose as much as a sixth of all the symbols so far discovered, may represent numbers. Some scholars have pointed out that more than a quarter of the inscriptions are located on the bottom of a pot, an ostensibly unlikely place for a religious inscription. The Vinča culture appears to have traded its wares quite widely with other cultures, so it is possible that the "numerical" symbols conveyed information about the value of the pots or their contents. Other cultures, such as the Minoans and Sumerians, used their scripts primarily as accounting tools; the Vinča symbols may have served a similar purpose. Other symbols are wholly unique. Such signs may denote the contents, provenance/destination or manufacturer/owner of the pot.
The primary advocate of the idea that the markings represent writing, and the person who invented the name "Old European Script", was Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist and advocate of the hypothesis that the "Kurgan culture" of the Pontic steppe was the archaeological expression of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. She reconstructed a hypothetical pre-Indo-European "Old European civilization", which she defines as having occupied the area between the Dniester valley and the Sicily-Crete line. Gimbutas observed that neolithic European iconography was predominantly female—a trend also visible in the inscribed figurines of the Vinča culture—and concluded the existence of a "matristic" culture that worshipped various gods and goddesses. She also incorporated the Vinča markings into her model of Old Europe, suggesting that they might either be the writing system for an Old European language, or, more probably, a kind of "pre-writing" symbolic system. However, Vinča logographics themselves have not been found on an area wider than southeastern Hungary, western Romania, and western Bulgaria, as described by Winn.
