Tărtăria tablets

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The Tărtăria tablets

PRESENTATION by Marco Merlini

Ioana Crişan's research (Reghin-Mureş, Romania) contributes to establish the continuity of Tartaria signs and Danube Script in the collective memory. The Danube Script appeared some 7,000 years ago in the Danube valley: in Serbia, Kosovo-Metohija, Southern Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and northern Greece. It flourished for one and a half millennia. Around 5,500 years ago, a social upheaval eclipsed this and other elements of the advanced culture of the Danube Civilization. Some researchers argue that there were devastating invasions of new populations from the steppes while others have hypothesised the imposition of new dominant elites. Over the last seven thousand years, and continuing today, traditional pieces of folkloric art (from carpets to clothes) are being produced that continue these ancient signs. The lozenge, the X, the E, the b, the D, the M, the circle, the angle, the tree, the spiral, the angle, the cross, the rosette, short parallel lines are highly productive and persistent motives attesting to the Neolithic Script. Whilst Tartaria signs have not lost their popularity over the millennia as decorative motives, it remains the case that in rural tradition they are not purely ornamental elements but allusive expressions of religious ideas, codes associated with magic powers and basic symbols relating to the divinity and its epiphanies. Powerful geometric motives continue to be transmitted from mother to daughter, as Ioana Crişan witnesses herself as she inherited the beautiful collection by the mother who inherited from her own the mother. She continues working to complete the collection. That Neolithic-Chalcolithic Script also inherits this marked preference for abstraction and schematisation in the decorative design of folkloric art. Close to Tartaria, a small rural Transylvanian village of 5,000 inhabitants some kilometres from the well-known site of Turdaş, Nicolae Vlassa (an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum) in 1961, unearthed three clay tablets, covered with strange signs, together with a small cache of offerings, accompanying the charred bones of a mature human, estimated to be 35-40 years old. The accompanying artefacts, suggest this person was a Great Priest or a Shaman and that he was cremated during a sacrificial ritual. The archaeologist, who made the discovery, suggested the (unproven) hypothesis that a cannibalistic ceremony took place in Tartaria. These three small, inscribed tablets started a debate that is challenging the conventional wisdom of European prehistory, because they have been dated from around 6.500 years ago.¹ Some scholars argue they date even earlier at 7,300 years old.² More prudent researchers, date the stones to 6,000-5,800 years ago. In any case, the astonishing question is did the South-eastern Neolithic Europe develop its own script before Sumeria and Egypt? Given the context of the finding, the tablets from Tartaria are probably amulets or votive tablets. The clay is grey-reddish and crystallised, to the point of looking like tuff. Careful observation and analysis is needed to ascribe to them their potential value as a written document as they contain much more than ascertained from a cursory examination. Technical analysis of the Transylvanian tablets that the inscriptions are not simple signs or randomly distributed insignia, rather the inscriptions are characters from some type of writing system. There are three reasons for this conclusion. Firstly, it is easy to find similar signs also on other artefacts of the Danube civilisation, pointing to the fact that the characters of the Danube Script follow precise standard shapes and that scribes made use of an inventory. Secondly, the characters of this proto-European script, when compared to other archaic writings, are marked by a high degree of stylisation and a rectilinear shape. Thirdly, we may reasonably assume that the information communicated by each character was a specific one with a univocal meaning. Finally, whilst the inscriptions have varied patterns (in horizontal, vertical or circular rows), this variety has a clear structure, evidenced by the specific sequencing of the signs. In the majority of the cases, the Danube Script had a linear organisation, a feature shared with other pre-classic writings (Minoan Linear A, Cypriot-Minoan and Cypriot Syllabic).³ Today, village life and its visual art and folk memory, has the capacity to reveal the heritage from Neolithic times through the importance of Tartaria signs, created thousands of years ago but of continued authenticity. As Crişan's article documents, in some Balkan-Carpathian rural areas, the Danube Script characters occasionally revived to enjoy a popularity they originally possessed in the early period of Danube civilisation.

The folkloric art is an attribute to the national nobility and an expression of spirituality. It is a bound with Danube land from the beginning of history. As many cultural treasures ware created in the village world, so are the three tablets of Tartaria, on the river Mures, in the county of Alba (Romania). They bring into light the writing of the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Danube Civilization. The Tartaria tablets are not only a proof of the oldest utility of writing in South Eastern Europe, but of the first writing of the entire continent. The splendid material and spiritual creations transmitted to us by the people of Neolithic time have a great significance in revealing its peaceful character passed on to generations across the millennia until our time. The signs of Tartaria were preserved and exist in a wide range of objects in the folkloric art. In the Romanian region of Reghin-Mures they can be seen in tapestries, kindling items, embroidery, fabrics, sculpture, paintings and ceramics. The beautiful collection of my mother gathers approximately 300 of such objects. The majority are created by her and I must mention that I have myself a small contribution to their completion. Through the importance of the message and its intrinsic value, the Romanian folkloric art supports and represents us in the idea of Zalmoxian immortality, which is now more actual than ever. The symbols of the first beliefs and religions remain evermore eternal, due to the spiritual charge which is carried across the centuries. After 7.000 years these symbols come at the surface proving the existence and the continuity of these religious expressions.

The spiral, as a solar symbol, figurative of the Cosmic Serpent is maintained in the autochthonic cultural conscience from prehistoric times to present.

As a archetype symbol, as it was unchangeable from the sacred compositions, taking diverse looks: the circumscribed lozenge, the column of lozenges or marking the face of the man from the oldest times. The head of an animal is a pictographic sign of the Danube Script. It is possible to find it in many Neolithic and Chalcolithic inscriptions. The quadrant "a" contains angle, triangle, the "X" and the "E" formed by short parallel lines.

"Lentila" - graphic image identified in the third millennium in the culture Prund, as a primordial symbol was at the base of all cult (religious) concepts.

The parallel lines are along the seven basic mystic symbols (spiral, lozenge, angle, circle, intersection, volutes, letter "M") of the Carpathian area.

Quadrant d has the arch and the arrow and the cross with two parallel arms (the cross was presented in quadrant "b" and the angle symbols ware presented in quadrant "a").

I sewed the tree in black little crosses following the model from the tablet. Here there is the embroidery with the tree on the margin and the cross in the middle. The goat was a very important animal in the religion of the Danube Civilization. On the tablet and connected with the tree it is suggesting a sacrifice in celebration of the return of new life.

(The article translation from Romanian is by Doina Mureşan)

¹ Merlini, in preparation ² Masson 1984, Haarmann, 2002 ³ Haarmann, 1997

Discovery

The tablets were re-found in 1961 at about 30 km (19 mi) from the well-known site of Alba Iulia. Nicolae Vlassa, an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum, 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 male. 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. Vlassa seared the originally unseared clay tablets, he falsified them. Since his act, the exact dating is no more possible.

All three have symbols inscribed only on one face. Similar motifs have been found on pots excavated at Vinča in Serbia and a number of other locations in the southern Balkans. The unpierced rectangular tablet depicts a horned animal, another figure, and a branch or tree. The others have a variety of mainly abstract symbols. The purpose of the burial is unclear, but it has been suggested that the body was that of a shaman or spirit-medium.

Dating

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. 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 archeological world as it predated the first Minoan writing, the oldest known writing in Europe.

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. Still, this is disputed in the light of apparently contradictory stratigraphic evidence.

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. This claim remains controversial.

Interpretation

The amulet (retouched)

The meaning (if any) of the symbols is unknown, and their nature has been the subject of much debate. Scholars who conclude that the inscribed symbols are writing base their assessment on a few conclusions, which are not universally endorsed. First, the existence of similar signs on other artifacts of the Danube civilization suggest that there was an inventory of standard shapes of which scribes made use. Second, the symbols make a high degree of standardization and a rectilinear shape comparable to archaic writing systems manifest. Third, that the information communicated by each character was a specific one with an unequivocal meaning. Finally, that the inscriptions are sequenced in rows, whether horizontal, vertical or circular. If they do comprise a script, it is not known what kind of writing system they represent. Some archaeologists who support the idea that they do represent writing, notably Marija Gimbutas, have proposed that they are fragments of a system dubbed the Old European Script.

Others consider the pictograms to be accompanied by random scribbles. Some have suggested that the symbols may have been used as marks of ownership or as the focus of religious rituals. An alternative suggestion is that they may have been merely uncomprehending imitations of more advanced cultures, although this explanation is made rather unlikely by the great antiquity of the tablets—there were no literate cultures at the time from which the symbols could have been adopted. Colin Renfrew argues that the apparent similarities with Sumerian symbols are deceptive: "To me, the comparison made between the signs on the Tărtăria tablets and those of proto-literate Sumeria carry very little weight. They are all simple pictographs, and a sign for a goat in one culture is bound to look much like the sign for a goat in another. To call these Balkan signs 'writing' is perhaps to imply that they had an independent significance of their own communicable to another person without oral contact. This I doubt."

Another problem is that there are no independent indications of literacy existing in the Balkans at this period. Sarunas Milisauskas comments that "it is extremely difficult to demonstrate archaeologically whether a corpus of symbols constitutes a writing system" and notes that the first known writing systems were all developed by early states to facilitate record-keeping in complex organised societies in the Middle East and Mediterranean. There is no evidence of organised states in the European Neolithic, so it is likely that they would not have needed the administrative systems facilitated by writing. David Anthony notes that Chinese characters were first used for ritual and commemorative purposes associated with the sacred power of kings; it is possible that a similar usage accounts for the Tărtăria symbols.

Vinca Culture Writing - Tartaria Tablets in Romania What explanation can be given to the fact that three clay tablets containing sumerian pictographs made with local clay , but 1000 years older than the oldest tablets found in Mesopotamia , are found in a region where the surrounding cities have sumerian names , URASTIE , SIMERIA ; KUGIR ? Is it possible that sumerian groups have migrated as far north as the western Rumania ? I am familiar with the Vinca culture 'writing', discussed by Marija Gimbutas in her books and the subject of a 1973 UCLA doctoral dissertation by Milton McChesney Winn. There were about 200 symbols used by the Southeast Europe Chalcolithic civilization. But just like the Indus culture script, they mainly occur on pottery. Yes , the Tartaria tablets are included in the "Vinca" culture , and I am familiar with Maria Gimbutas remarkable work , but I have to disagree with your conclusion that those three clay tablets "are not sumerian writing" . I cannot explain the similarities, but the facts are that they contain pictograms absolutely identical with those found in Djemet-Nasr, they are carbon dated 1000 years before, and are made of local clay . http://www.sumerian.org/sumerfaq.htm#s50

Bibliography

• Haarmann, H. 1990 Writing from Old Europe. The Journal of Indo-European Studies 17
• Makkay, J. 1969 The Late Neolithic Tordos Group of Signs. Alba Regia 10, 9-50
• Makkay, J. 1984 Early Stamp Seals in South-East Europe. Budapest
• Winn, Sham M. M. 1973 The Sings of the Vinca Culture
• Winn, Sham M. M. 1981 Pre-writing in Southeast Europe: The Sign System of the Vinca culture. BAR

External links

• "Signs on Tărtăria Tablets found in the Romanian folkloric art", by Ioana Crişan.
• "Milady Tărtăria and the discovery of the Tărtăria Tablets", by Marco Merlini