Did Europe Invent Writing Before Mesopotamia?

Over 7,000 years ago, in a settlement in South-East Europe, the partial remains of a woman were buried beneath the floor of a house, along with a collection of special objects, including broken statuettes, a delicate bracelet and three small clay tablets, decorated with strange, intriguing symbols. These are perhaps the most famous examples of what is known as the Vinča symbols, after the Chalcolithic Vinča culture. This was part of what's been called Old Europe, a group of ancient societies that built large settlements, developed rich ceramic traditions and left behind striking figurines and many symbolic designs. These symbols appear as incised or painted signs on pottery, figurines and small clay tablets. Some artefacts carry just one or two signs, others appear to have sequences of several symbols, almost like a text. Ever since their discovery over a century ago, scholars have debated their meanings. Some argue that these marks could represent an early system of proto-writing, a precursor to true writing systems, possibly used for ritual or administrative purposes. But if that's true, they would predate the world's earliest known writing, Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia by more than a thousand years. However, these extraordinary claims are challenged by others, who say they should instead be seen as potter's marks or signs representing gods or clans, and some even assert that they don't really exist at all. So where do these symbols come from? What might they have been used for? Are they a script or the earliest proto-writing in the world? And more importantly, I think, is what can all this tell us about the nature of this fascinating ancient society and its people? This is the story of the Mysterious Vinča Symbols. First we'll take a moment to go from the world's oldest writing to the writing of the future. This video is sponsored by Novium, creators of the Hoverpen. 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The hoverpens are very cool, and they'd make an amazing gift for a loved one who would appreciate something like this. Use my code DANDAVIS or hit the link in the description to get 15% off all hoverpens only for the next 48 hours and 10% off after that, with free worldwide shipping. Thank you to Novium for sponsoring the video. To appreciate the different interpretations of these symbols, it's important to understand the society that made them. Because it's such an extraordinary claim, we have to ask whether it's even plausible that these people developed a script so much earlier than they did in Mesopotamia. The period we call Neolithic Europe began after about 7000 BC with the migration of Anatolian farmers across the Aegean, bringing their domesticated plants and animals with them, and their descendants had spread throughout the Balkans by about 6000 BC. A succession of societies would rise and fall here, from the Neolithic through to the Chalcolithic or the Copper Age. There were many related archaeological cultures in different parts of this region over time, but collectively it's sometimes called Old Europe, a term coined by Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas. Others have preferred to call it the Danube Civilization, after the major river running through it. This group of societies developed innovative technologies like copper and gold metallurgy and even the earliest tin bronze known in the world, and probably a kind of early, slow-turning potter's wheel to help finish their beautiful, sophisticated painted pottery. These groups also created uncountable thousands of ceramic figurines that took different forms in different societies, but often represented stylized female bodies. These societies also developed complex and long-range trade networks due to a demand for copper, gold, special Aegean shells, quality stone, salt and other minerals that could stretch for hundreds of kilometers. Settlements often had dedicated craft workshops, turning out ceramics, stone tools and metalworking, and their religious practices were also complex and sophisticated, often using these figurines in domestic rites. With some societies building dedicated ritual buildings, researchers call temples or shrines, with altars, decorative bullheads and sometimes large figurines like statues overlooking ritual hearths or ovens, and others developed complex rites involving masked participants. And we must remember that this was such a long time ago. The peak of Old Europe, say about 5,000 to 4,500 BC, is long before the invention of the wheel or of writing anywhere in the world and before the first cities were built in Mesopotamia and Egypt. In fact, according to academics like David Antony, Old Europe was one of, if not the most, sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world. Researchers believe that Old Europe had developed or was developing many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization that would later emerge in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River. However, Old Europe or the Danubian civilization seems to have suffered a decline or even collapse after about 4,300 BC, and then another final decline between about 3,500 and 3,300 BC. These declines likely had many causes, including a change in climate and plague. And instead of being able to recover and perhaps come back stronger, they instead came to be dominated by neighbouring Indo-European speaking cultures who ultimately overwhelmed them, and most of their great achievements were lost and forgotten. Until at least the late 19th century, when archaeologists began investigating the many Tells across the region, these were artificial hills created by generations of occupation, often centuries and even thousands of years of occupation. Digging into the Tells revealed the layers of the various societies that rose and fell over time, with the various distinct cultural layers assigned to different archaeological cultures. One of the most sophisticated and most well-known is the Vinca culture, which thrived between about 5,500 and 4,500 BC. It developed along the Middle Danube and its tributaries where they established sometimes large and usually well-defended settlements. The most thoroughly excavated site is Vinca itself, near Belgrade, which gave the culture its name. The strange symbols were first noted during excavations there in the early 20th century. Archaeologists found small groups of signs incised on pottery sherds and figurines, usually made before firing. Similar marks have since been found on artefacts from dozens of Vinca sites, and more broadly in other Old European cultures, suggesting a shared symbolic repertoire across the region. The most famous examples are the so-called Tartaria tablets. Discovered in 1961 at Tartaria in Transylvania, Romania, these three small clay plaques bear short sequences of incised signs. One depicts stylised animals alongside abstract symbols. The others show combinations of lines, crosses and tree-like motifs. They were found in what's often called a ritual pit, together with human remains and other artefacts. The remains were radiocarbon dated to around 5300-5200 BC. Now there has been much controversy about these tablets, due to a lack of clarity on how they were excavated and due to how they were inexpertly preserved, which partially destroyed them and meant direct dating was impossible. They've even been called outright fakes, which is possible and I don't discount that at all. You can read all about the details and debates for yourself if you like. I'll leave sources in the description as always. The hypothesis that seems most likely to me is that the partial remains of a woman in her 50s were buried along with various broken figurines and these tablets. She might have been what archaeologists these days would call a ritual specialist and in previous decades they'd call a priestess or shaman. Whether any of the societies of Old Europe had a dedicated social class of priests is unclear, but it might be the case that these ritual specialists were often the ones making these signs on artefacts. Two of the three Tartaria tablets seem to fit over one another and might have been worn together as pendants around the neck, perhaps by the woman who was buried with them. Another famous artefact is the Grodzisznica tablet from Bulgaria, dated to around 5000 BC, which has strange swirling markings on both sides. An extremely rare wooden example was found in Despilio, Greece, dated to about 5200 BC. This was a lakeshore site and timbers here have been preserved in the anaerobic sediments. We have to imagine that there were thousands of decorated wooden artefacts in Old Europe that have been lost to time. But most symbols found in Old Europe aren't in clusters like on these tablets. Most of them only appear by themselves, on fragments of ceramic pottery or on clay figurines. Occasionally they're in sequences of two or more. And there are hundreds, some say thousands, of different symbols recorded, although many of these appear to be variations of simple shapes like crosses, chevrons, lines, comb-like marks, spirals and those branching motifs. Since the 1960s, there have been many attempts to categorise these signs into meaningful systems. Believers in these signs say that they represent a system of notation or communication rather than mere decoration. That they are either ideographic, logographic, syllabic or even alphabetic symbols, or perhaps all of these. Some people have attempted to link the signs to motifs seen in Paleolithic cave art and to Minoan Linear A and to Etruscan script or even to Cyrillic. Attempting to prove a continuous tradition reaching back from the Ice Age all the way through to today. And there have even been proposed translations of sequences of Vinca script. Unfortunately, these supposed links and translations are merely fantastical pseudo-scholarship in my opinion. So what actually are these symbols and could they be a form of proto-writing? And what even is writing or proto-writing anyway? Writing could be defined as a system of graphic signs that record language, signs that represent spoken words or sounds in a systematic, repeatable way. True writing records statements in the spoken language, while proto-writing usually refers to symbolic systems that convey limited information but don't fully encode language. They may represent ideas, numbers, objects or names, but not grammar or full sentences. And writing has only been developed perhaps four times in human history. The earliest was Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia developed from around 3200 BC and which evolved quite clearly from accounting systems related to trade. Egyptian hieroglyphs developed from about 3100 BC and everyone knows about them. Chinese oracle bone script developed from about 1200 BC and is most notable perhaps for evolving from ritual practices. And Mesoamerican scripts like the Olmec and Maya developed from perhaps around 500 BC and often recorded events and dates. Early writing systems show a limited set of standardised signs used repeatedly and used in sequences where they have a clear linguistic structure. Symbols with concept, word or sound values. The Vinca symbols predate these writing systems by over 2000 years, but since they don't meet the above criteria, we can say pretty categorically I think, that the Vinca symbols or Danubian script are not writing. They are not in fact a script. It's possible they could be something more like the so-called Indus script of the Indus Valley civilisation, dating to after around 2600 BC, which is probably best understood as proto-writing. It also, like the Vinca symbols, has a huge number of supposed signs and very short, inconsistent sequences. The Vinca symbols as proto-writing is a plausible hypothesis. This argument is set out in the works of Maria Gimbutas between the 1970s and the 1990s, where she argues there was a consistent and widely understood symbolic expression in motifs on pottery and figurines. She even interprets and explains the meanings behind these motifs and reconstructs the religious beliefs and gods of old Europe. Gimbutas has been rightly criticised for massively overstating her case, but you can't fault some of her reasoning on the meanings behind the motifs, as it's just common sense. For example, the lozenge shape often incised over the bellies of female figurines. It would be reasonable to assume that this represents the womb. This same lozenge motif then appearing on pottery could reasonably be interpreted as carrying the same or associated meanings like fertility or femininity. You can make similar conclusions about triangles, often incised on the pelvic region of female figurines. There's no doubt they had a rich and sophisticated artistic and ritual culture, and this is one of the main points I want to convey with this video, that they were living in a world filled with symbolic, artistic expression. They could draw upon a broad range of decorative motifs for their ceramics, and no doubt for the walls of their houses and temples, and their clothing and perhaps tattoos and body paint too, and other things we can't see anymore, and this range of decorative motifs would include symbols with deeper meanings. Take the snake motif for example. Some versions of them are clearly snakes, while others take more abstract forms. The snake symbol, whether more realistic or more abstract, presumably had layers of meanings, from simply representing a snake, to conveying whatever associations snakes had for these people, perhaps ideas like rebirth and transformation and healing. Perhaps it could be the emblem of a snake deity, which also had these associations. With symbols, there can be many layers of meanings at the same time. In that context, someone incising a short snake-like squiggle on a figurine or a tablet, would then convey these ideas for themselves and for anyone in their society who understood the meanings. That's not to say there was necessarily a widespread, consistent corpus of symbols everyone understood. Perhaps the most common ones, seen across time at many sites, would have been, especially by the artists and ritual specialists most closely engaged with these things. But I suspect most of the supposed symbols we see only had esoteric meanings for the people who made them and used them. One of the most common interpretations for single symbols seen on ceramics is that they were something like potter's marks, symbols indicating the identity of the individual potters who made them or the workshop they came from. Or perhaps the symbol indicated the family who owned the pot, or the wider clan group, or some other ethnic or social indication of ownership or membership. This seems quite plausible in a society that had workshops within settlements and that had differentiation between settlements and between groups of settlements. Symbols like that might have been drawn from a wider corpus or might have been unique. I also think it's plausible some of them could represent numbers, or tally marks, or aids to record counting, like dashes or lines in a series or patterns to keep track of numbers. This could have been useful in many contexts of course, like in manufacturing or in trade exchanges or in storage of supplies. But as far as I know, and I could be wrong, the surviving symbols and potential tally marks aren't usually found in relation to workshops or storage areas. Perhaps though tallies were noted during other kinds of activities. The other most plausible use for these symbols, outside of decoration and potter's marks, is in ritual practices. And that's not a cop-out because archaeologists can't work out a practical solution. This ancient society really did have a highly developed and deeply ingrained ritual life. Consider the thousands of ceramic figurines that have been found. The most notable of these, those with obvious intrinsic artistic merit or beauty, and the weirdest ones, have usually found their way to museum collections and display. But these were created by the greatest artists of their day, and also represent just a fraction of the total uncovered. Most of the uncounted thousands of figurines from old Europe are not beautiful and some can be barely distinguished from a lump of clay. But really these ones were like abstract symbols in themselves, conveying human figures but simplified to just the important elements that gave them meaning. Bits of clay pinched to form arms, eyes indicated by the press of a fingernail, and breasts roughly shaped to make it into a female. And onto these figures might be incised decorations, including symbols. Now it's important to say that in some cases, perhaps in many cases, the researchers who have examined and recorded these symbols might have been seeing things that weren't really there. Scratches and swirls that might have been meant to indicate hair or clothing or tattoos might be drawn down and recorded by researchers as wholly invented symbols. If you're looking for symbols in ancient cracked painted clay, you may well find them, even when they're not there. This natural human propensity for seeing patterns, for seeing what we want to see, might explain many of the symbols featured in the enormous supposed corpus of vinture symbols. But equally I believe there would be incoherent marks made on many of these figurines, because many were likely made with their eventual, even imminent, destruction or burial in mind. And I think it's plausible that the symbols in those various clay and wooden tablets could have had a similar function. It might be that making the markings was part of complex rites that ultimately involved the deposition of the tablet, the content of the messages conveyed, and the meanings of the symbols might not have been as important to the rite as the act of making them. The Tartaria tablets were found in what was described as a ritual pit, but might be better called a secondary burial. The woman who died might have been a ritual specialist who suffered from a disability in life. When she died, her remains were left exposed or buried somewhere else for months or years before her limbs and torso were buried in this new pit beneath the floor of a building, which might have been a shrine. Her head and probably her hands and feet were not reburied. I wonder if someone kept the skull of this honoured wise woman for future consultations. Into the pit with her partial remains went broken male and female figurines. Interestingly, the broken off parts were not included, just as the woman herself was not reburied whole. Perhaps she had made and owned, even worn, the three engraved tablets interred with her. The clusters of symbols could have conveyed some brief narrative or other information, even if only to herself and other initiates. And to everyone else who saw them, they were simply a symbol of her status in their society as someone able to read and make such signs. Or maybe they were made after she died, conveying some blessing or message to her or to the gods. Whatever all these symbols meant to the people who made them, when I see them I am mostly struck by what an advanced and complex society this was, 4, 6 or 7 thousand years ago or more. Civilizational development is not a set path. It's not like a tech tree in a video game that unlocks inevitable steps and one thing doesn't necessarily lead to another. Proto-writing doesn't necessarily lead to writing, in fact it almost never did anywhere in the world, but you can't help but think old Europe was on its way to that before its decline and fall. The vinture symbols aren't a script, they don't represent language, they aren't writing and they don't convey texts that can be deciphered, in my opinion. Nor are they records of trade transactions or receipts for goods, like in ancient Sumer, probably. And they don't seem to record events for posterity, like the Maya or Egyptians, as far as we know. But although we can't really read them, they do tell us that the vinture culture and old Europe more broadly had a rich and highly developed artistic and ritual tradition, thousands of years ahead of its time. Thanks again to Novium for sponsoring the video. Please remember to use the code DANDAVIS or hit the link in the description to get 15% off all hover pens for the next 48 hours and 10% off after that with free worldwide shipping. Thank you very much indeed to my patrons and channel members for supporting my work. If you haven't joined yet, please do so using the links in the description below. Now to find out more about this ancient European civilization, please watch this video on the astonishing vinture culture. Thank you for watching.