Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A system of marks, of more or less geometric lines, whorls and squiggles, has been found on a number of tablets, figurines, pottery, and amulets in south-east Europe, in Romania and Bulgaria in what is known as the Vinca culture. Associated with undoubted pictographs – goats, animal heads, ears of corn – these were found in burial and apparently sacrificial contexts, dating from c. 4000 BC. The Gradesnica Plaque, discovered in Vratsa in western Bulgaria in 1969, is even older, dating to 7,000–6,000 years ago.²⁶ The signs associated with this Vinca culture have been analysed according to which type of artefact they appear on – amulets or pottery, for example. The analysis has shown that their distribution is consistent. There is a corpus of 210 signs, forming just five core groups: straight lines, crosses, chevrons, dots and curves. But these nowhere form texts. Instead, they seem to be symbolic designs, no doubt with religious rather than economic meanings. They comprise a form of proto-writing.

Some scholars believe that the users of these ‘Old European’ scripts (to use Marija Gimbutas’ phrase) were forced out of their native lands by invading Indo-Europeans. Harald Haarman, of the University of Helsinki, is one of those who believes that the Old Europeans may have been driven to places like Crete. There, at Knossos and elsewhere, in the early twentieth century, Sir Arthur Evans and his colleagues uncovered a major civilisation – the Minoan, with Bull and Snake worship among its common features. But the Minoans also produced two scripts, known to us as Linear A and Linear B. The use of the term ‘Linear’ was originally Gimbutas’ idea, to stress the mainly linear (as opposed to pictographic) qualities of the Vinca signs. But while Linear B was famously deciphered by the English amateur, Michael Ventris, in the 1950s, and shown to be a form of Greek, Linear A has never been deciphered. Haarman suggests that this is because Linear A is not an Indo-European language at all but an ‘Old European’ one. Haarman says he has found fifty signs in Linear A that are identical with Old European (see Figure 3).

The most recent candidate for the birth of writing takes us to India. There, traditionally, the earliest major civilisation was known as the Indus civilisation, the capitals of which were Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, dating back to 2300–1750 BC. In May 1999 it was announced that a tablet, 5,500 years old, and bearing an inscription, had been discovered at Harappa. A month later, another announcement claimed that the script had been deciphered. This script consisted of a double M, a Y, a lozenge with a dot at its centre, a second lozenge, somewhat deformed, and a V. According to Drs Jha and Rajaram, this means ‘It irrigates the sacred land.’ The language is allegedly ‘pre-Harappan’, much more primitive than other Indus seals. Four other examples have been found in the region. The Indian scholars believe that this script, like other primitive scripts elsewhere, does not use vowels, though in this case the use of double consonants, as in the double M, is meant to indicate vowels. In other words, it shows early writing in the course of evolution. Scholars associated with the discovery believe this is enough to move the ‘cradle of civilisation’ from Mesopotamia to the Indus region.²⁷ These are the latest researches, and in time they may well change the way we think about origins. For the present, however, the Vinca markings do not comprise full-blown scripts, while the tablets discovered in and around the Indus region are only a handful of examples. While undoubtedly intriguing, even promising, we must await further discoveries before abandoning Mesopotamia – and cuneiform – as the earliest example of true writing.

Figure 3: Signs common to Old European script and Linear A

[Source: Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 70]