Vin?a Symbols .... The History of Writing

Vinca culture was part of the bigger Balkan culture system, The Danube Valley civilization, one of the oldest civilizations known in Europe ....

Vinca letter, was named after the small town,Vinca, near Belgrade,Serbia ....

This is the oldest written system in the world, found on pottery in Vinca archaelogical site, which represents remnants of small Fortified Town, many years before Mesopotamia ....

The Origin

These symbols have been found on many of the artefacts excavated from sites in south-east Europe, in particular from Vin?a near Belgrade.

The artefacts date from between the 7th and 4th millennia BC and those decorated with these symbols are between 8,000 and 6,500 years old.

Some scholars believe that the Vin?a symbols represent the earliest form of writing ever found, predating ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing by thousands of years. Since the inscriptions are all short and appear on objects found in burial sites, and the language represented is not known, it is highly unlikely they will ever be deciphered.

In 1908, the largest prehistoric Neolithic settlement in Europe was discovered in the village of Vinca, just a few miles from the Serbian capital Belgrade, on the shores of the Danube. Vinca was excavated between 1918 and 1934 and was revealed as a civilisation in its own right. Indeed, as early as the 6th millennium BC, three millennia before Dynastic Egypt, the Vinca culture was already a fully fledged civilisation. A typical town consisted of houses with complex architectural layouts and several rooms, built of wood that was covered in mud. The houses sat along streets, thus making Vinca the first urban settlement in Europe, but being far older than the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And the town of Vinca itself was just one of several metropolises, with others at Divostin, Potporanj, Selevac, Plocnik and Predionica.

Archaeologists concluded that “in the 5th and early 4th millennia BC, just before its demise in east-central Europe, 'Old Europeans' had towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists, weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, a writing system, advanced architecture, including two storey houses, and the construction of furniture, such as chairs and tables and other artisans producing a range of sophisticated goods all of which occurred while most of Europe was in the middle of the Stone Age. A flourishing network of trade routes existed that circulated items such as obsidian, shells, marble, copper, and salt over hundreds of kilometres.”

The Origin Of Writing

While it is still generally considered that writing emerged 'independently in at least three different places - Egypt, Mesopotamia and Harappa between 3,500 BC and 3,100 BC' (2), we have until recently had little understanding of how and why this happened. The discovery of the Vinca script and (mother) culture c. 5,500 - 3,500 BC, has offered a possible clue as to this question, but more importantly, symbols in the Vinca script can be seen to have roots that trace back as early as Palaeolithic times, as revealed by the exhaustive examination of 'geometric' symbols in 150 prehistoric caves in France by Petzinger, 2009. While there is still much work to be done in order to confirm the hypothesis, it is now suspected that these Palaeolithic geometric symbols represent a "proto-script" from which all other scripts can trace ancestry.

New Scientist reports on research published in PNAS about what may be the earliest writing yet discovered, on eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. "Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa. They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team. Another researcher is quoted: "Judging from what we know about the evolution of art all over the world, there may have been many, written language, traditions that were born, lasted for some time, and then vanished. This may be one of them, most probably not the first and certainly not the last."

The Vinca culture flourished from 5,500 (2) to 3,500 BC (4) on the territories of what is now Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia . The concept of writing in essence, is the transference of thought or language into a re-readable form. The earliest forms of this art have long been considered to be represented by pictograms, simple images which enabled the transfer of information through pictures, but writing itself has not generally been considered until recently to have any great antiquity before the flourish of writing witnessed in the Middle east and Asia c. 3,500 - 3,100 BC. However, modern research is now questioning this hypothesis with results from different academic sources confirming the presence of a group of recurring symbols in Palaeolithic art, suggestive of sharing a common meaning, and therefore being considered a proto-language. Harald Haarmann, a German linguistic and cultural scientist, currently vice-president of the Institute of Archaeomythology, and leading specialist in ancient scripts and ancient languages, firmly supports the view that the Danube script is the oldest writing in the world. The tablets that were found are dated to 5,500 BC, and the glyphs on the tablets, according to Haarmann, are a form of language yet to be deciphered. It conflicts with the accepted view of which nation holds claim to the "first civilization" ....

At the very least, Haarmann’s proposal deserves further research and serious analysis in order to confirm that this is indeed the oldest known written language in the world. The implications are huge. It could mean that the Danube Valley Civilization predates all other known civilizations today. Evidence also comes from thousands of artifacts that have been found.

Vin?a settlements were considerably larger than any other contemporary European culture, in some instances surpassing the cities of the Aegean and early Near Eastern Bronze Age a millennium later. The largest sites, some more than 300,000 square metres may have been home to up to 2,500 people. We are told that they lived in spacious housing and separated their dead in nearby necropolis. They had workshops, which means skilled labour. They developed skills such as spinning, weaving, leather processing, clothes manufacturing, and manipulated wood, clay and stone and they invented the wheel. They had an economic, religious and social structure. They worked with several styles of pottery and had their own particular artistic fingerprint which is seen in both early Cretan and Sumerian cultures, which rose following the demise of the 'Old Europe' heartland ....