Vinca symbols

The Vinča symbols, sometimes called the Vinča signs, Vinča script, Vinča-Turdaș script, Old European script, etc., are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennia BC) artifacts from the Vinča culture of Central Europe and Southeastern Europe.

In 1875, archaeological excavations led by the Hungarian archeologist Zsófia Torma (1840–1899) at Tordos (today Turdaș, Romania) unearthed a cache of objects inscribed with previously unknown symbols. In 1908, a similar cache was found during excavations conducted by Miloje Vasić (1869–1956) in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade (Serbia), some 120 km from Turdaș. Later, more such fragments were found in Banjica, another part of Belgrade. Since 1875, over one hundred and fifty 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 Nicolae Vlassa in 1961 reignited 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 (while the tablets themselves cannot be dated by physical or chemical methods), thirteen hundred years earlier than the date he expected, and earlier even than the writing systems of the Sumerians and Minoans. However, the authenticity of these tablets is disputed. To date, more than a thousand fragments with similar inscriptions have been found on various archaeological sites throughout south-eastern Europe, notably in Greece (Dispilio Tablet), Bulgaria, Romania, eastern Hungary, Moldova, and southern Ukraine.

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