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4 DEBUGGING THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A REPERTORY OF THE SOUTHEASTERN EUROPEAN SIGNS 4.A The presence of an inventory as a key element for any system of writing The present section intends to focus on the features of the inventories that have been already addressed concerning the signs of a script that developed in Southeastern Europe during the Neolithic and Copper Age times. Though this script is now lost and it is unlikely it will ever be possible to decipher it, one can try to identify some elements of its semiotic code and particularly shapes and categories of signs. The reoccurrence of the same signs and groups of signs on artifacts of the Danube civilization points to the fact that they include precise standard shapes and that scribes may have made use of a common inventory. This topic will be introduced by notes concerning the inventories of the already deciphered scripts when they may be in alignment with the Danube script. In fact, every system of writing employs a catalogue of signs and each group is distinct, defined, and limited. An inventory is a precise corpus of signs and not an account of marks drawn according to the writer‘s individual expression. The presence of an inventory of signs is one of the four essential elements of any system of writing which distinguish ars scribendi from other communicational channels, such as calendars, symbols, accounting systems, heraldic markings, etc. Therefore, a preliminary step in the deciphering process of an ancient script is compiling a catalogue of all the apparently different characters occurring in the texts and attempting to identify the variations each character may undergo. If one was to take a typical chapter of an ordinary novel printed in English, it would be a fairly straightforward matter, by careful study and comparison of the thousands of characters in the text, to work out that they could be classified into a set of signs. However, texts of ancient scripts such as the Danube script were handwritten with a sharp stick or a bone on irregular surfaces of clay, rocks, or bone. The rough and restricted surfaces conditioned and limited the graphic expression. The task of isolating and detecting the signs is made far more difficult by the possibility to represent the same sign in dissimilar ways as allographs, which are the alternative forms of a letter of an alphabet or another unit of a writing system.1 Signs were also joined up by ligatures and positioned in spatial association with symbols. A key challenge for the decipherer - who naturally cannot be sure in advance that different-looking signs are in fact allographs of the same sign - is how to distinguish signs which are genuinely different, such as 'I' and '1', from signs which are probably allographs (for example, ), without knowing the phonetic or conceptual values of the signs under examination. Based on practice in known writing systems, an undeciphered script as the Danube one may contain several allographs of the same basic sign. Unless epigraphers became able to distinguish the allographs with a fair degree of confidence, generally comparing their contexts in many very similar inscriptions, they can neither correctly classify the signs in the Danube script in order to build an inventory of them; neither establish the total number of signs. However, in decipherment the number of different signs can be a clue to the type of script involved without revealing the phonetic or conceptual values of the signs. A small number, between 20 to 40 signs, indicates an alphabet or a consonant script (like Hebrew and Arabic). A greater variety, between 40 to 90 signs or so, suggests a syllabary or an abugida.2 Several hundreds or more, point to a logosyllabary that mixes relatively small numbers of phonetic signs with large numbers of logograms, such as found in Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Babylonian cuneiform, Chinese script and Japanese kanji (Chadwick 1958: 41-43; Coe 1999: 43-44; Robinson 2002: 40-43).

1 The same sign written in a variant form is known in epigraphy as an allograph (Hawthorn London 2000). 2 Abugida (or alphasyllabary) describes a writing system in which each character denotes a consonant associated with a following, specific vowel (Thus, in an abugida there is no sign for "d", but instead one for "da", if "a" is the inherent vowel). When a different vowel is wanted, it is added to the consonant or a diacritic or some other consistent modification is made to it. An abugida is to be contrasted with a syllabary, where symbols with similar sounds look nothing like one another. About half the writing systems in the world, including the extensive Brahmic system used for most Indo-Aryan languages, are abugida (Daniels, Bright 1996: 4). See paragraph 1.C.b “Phonetic writing systems”.

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When Champollion began dealing with hieroglyphics, or Rawlinson and others began working with cuneiform, they could count signs in the available inscriptions, but the idea that the number of signs might convey important information about the structure of the writing system was not understood. Based on the number of Linear B signs, Michael Ventris was convinced that it was a syllabic script, rather than an alphabet or a logosyllabic one, which was an important historic step for decipherment of this Aegean system of writing. 4.B Inventories of the “cracked” scripts: Analogies with the Danube script 4.B.a The syllabic list of Linear B signs Linear B was the script of the Mycenaeans and it is the earliest European script we can understand. Sir Arthur Evans named it “Linear” because the signs were uncomplex outlines and “B” because it was predated by another linear writing he called “A”. Linear B is the first Greek writing system and has proved to be the oldest surviving record of the ancient Greek dialect known as Mycenaean, which was spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete by the Bronze Age populations from 17th to 11th century BCE. The Mycenaean Greek dialect belongs to the Indo-European Arcado-Cypriot family and predated by 900 centuries the earliest Greek literary evidence, i.e. the Homeric poems. The Mycenaean Greek dialect was the ancestor both of the Arcadic, spoken in the first millennium BCE in the mountainous region of Arcadia (Peloponnesus), and of the Cypriot spoken in Cyprus, eccentric to the Aegean See barycentre, where was written in Cypriot-Syllabic. Linear B is a quasi-syllabary, i.e., a system that uses syllabograms as its basic letters but represents some syllables with letter combinations rather than single letters. Therefore, this script is a principally syllabic with additional pictographic/ideographic and numerical components. Linear B consists of about 87 signs. Its inventory is composed of seven elements:

i mostly of open syllabic signs of the ‘consonant + vowel’ form (e.g. na, ne, ni, no, nu). Closed syllables consisting either of vowel + consonant or of consonant + vowel + consonant do not occur.

ii signs for pure vowels: a, e, i, o, u iii a supplementary group of signs which are not strictly necessary but may be used either as

abbreviations or to give a more accurate spelling, reducing the risk of misinterpretation iv over one hundred pictograms and ideograms v metric signs vi arithmetic sings of a number system based on 10 vii short vertical lines as word separators.

It was often hard to decide whether two marks represented different letters or variants of the same letter. The graphological analysis of the texts in Linear B reveals sixty-six scribal hands in the Knossos archives and forty-five at Pylos. The differences among the scribal hands, however, indicate individual varieties of the script and not regional ones. Linear B was written more or less in a standardized way at all places where the Mycenaean administration was installed. Nevertheless, “standardization” does not mean that the scribe wrote a “copy-book” by hand. There were many personal variations. The following chart features the basic Linear B syllabary as agreed today (Robinson 2002). i.–ii. Open syllabic signs and signs for pure vowels It consists of signs for the five vowels and signs for each of the twelve consonants combined with each of these vowels. Gaps in the table may indicate that there never existed a sign for that value or that are still unidentified. The forms on show are merely typical specimens. Dealing with a handwriting, there where a number of variant forms in use. The shown values are not strict representation of the sound, but merely conventional notations, and interpretation is needed to reconstruct from them the spoken form. As any other script, Linear B signs are an outline notation that the reader has to fill in for himself. Even the Mycenaean reader must have been left a lot

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of guesswork to understand words out of what he read on the tablet. This situation would be quite intolerable if script were used for correspondence or legislations. In fact, it has been used for lists and accounts read only by the writer and his colleagues working in the same administration or archive.

Fig. 4.1 – Stirrup jar with Linear B inscription. It comes from the Perseia Well, outside the

Mycenae acropolis ( Late Helladic phase, LH IIIB, 13th century BCE). The inscription consists of five ideograms with transliteration: e-ra, ka-ta-ro. The meaning is either “virgin oil” (έλαιο καθαρό), or “to Hera (the) pure”, i.e. to the Goddess Hera this pure (virgin oil) is dedicated.

National Museum of Athens inv. 7628. (Photo Merlini 2005).

iii. Optional signs used either as abbreviations or to clarify the spelling of a word In addition to the standard syllabic grid, there are 16 optional signs used to clarify the spelling of a word in order to reduce the risk of misinterpretation. Some of these signs can be considered abbreviations in that they represent diphthongs.3 Linear B was apparently designed for a non-Greek language, as it does not fit the sounds of Greek very well. In fact, it is likely that Linear A was used to write the pre-Greek language of Crete, and the Greeks developed Linear B adopting and adapting Linear A for their own use, but without changing how the system fundamentally worked. In doing so, they inserted in Linear B some necessary "spelling conventions" to represent sound patterns found in Greek but not in the syllabary.

3 Note that I use traditional transcription here, where j actually represented the sound [y], q is actually the sound [kw], and z is theorized to be [dz].

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First, there are many Greek sounds that are missing in Linear B signs, such as [g], [kh], [gw], [b], [ph], [th], and [l]. To solve this problem, signs for similar sounds are used instead (K Lo 2004):

o p-signs are used for [p], [b], and [ph]; o k-signs are used for [k], [g], and [kh]; o t-signs are used for [t] and [th]; o q-signs are used for [kw] and [gw]; o r-signs are used for [r] and [l].

Another inadequacy comes from the fact that Linear B signs usually represent open syllabic signs of the form consonant + vowel (CV), but the syllabic structure of Greek allows initial consonant clusters, ending consonants, and diphthongs. Here it is the solution: in the case of a syllable with an initial consonant cluster, individual consonants in the cluster are written by a CV sign whose vowel matches the vowel of the syllable. Therefore, for example, the word tri is written as ti-ri, and khrusos as ku-ru-so. Linear B often omitted sounds in initial consonant clusters. Anyway, ending consonants such as [l], [m], [n], [r], and [s] are not usually written (for example, the Greek word for seed, sperma, would appear in Linear B as "pe-ma."), whereas other consonants such as [k] and [p] are written in a way similar to initial consonants. The following chart shows how ending consonants are written out (K Lo 2004). Diphthongs are similar to ending consonants in that sometimes they are written and sometimes omitted. Diphthongs ending with [-u] are usually written out completely, with a preceding sign denoting the first vowel in the diphthong, followed by the u sign that denotes the diphthong’s second vowel. For example, the word leuka is written as re-u-ka. The optional sign a2 also stands for a word-initial [au] diphthong. A diphthong ending in [-i] usually omits the second vowel of [-i], such as poimen is written as po-me, and pherei as pe-re. However, occasionally all vowels in the diphthong are indicated, either by spelling out each of the vowels in the diphthong (such as the city "Phaistos" is written as pa-i-to), or with the optional signs illustrated above (such as a3 and ra3). Diphthongs with starting [i-] or [u-] are usually written completely. In some cases, vowel-only signs are used to indicate the second vowel in the diphthong (such as [kia] is written as ki-a). However, most of the time, a sign of either the wV or the jV type is used to indicate the entire diphthong, with the vowel in the preceding CV sign matching the first vowel in the diphthong sign (in this case, [kia] is written as ki-ja). In a few cases, an optional sign with a diphthong, such as dwe and twe, is used. iv. Over one hundred pictograms and ideograms In addition to phonetic signs, Linear B also employs several pictograms and ideograms. The pictograms represent people, animals, plants, a variety of commodities and physical objects (mainly items that were traded as Linear B was used mainly for recording transactions). Some pictograms are recognizable at first sight, while others are more iconic or symbolic and become clear only by identifying the context in which they were used. Chadwick mentions the interesting example of the sign intended as “cloth” which was probably in origin a picture of an upright loom with weight at the bottom to keep the warp under tension (Chadwick 1987: 22). The signs for “wheat” and “barley” have outlines that look more like the plants. Similarly, “wine” illustrates a vine growing on a trellis, and “olive oil” is a deformation of an olive tree. Not all the pictograms and ideograms have been deciphered. Chadwick stresses that pictograms and ideograms were not used as means of writing a word (logograms), but merely as symbols to indicate what the Mycenaeans wanted to count, like men, women, horses, gold, bronze, and wheat. This means that they are normally found only before numerals. In some cases, the word describing the object being counted is first spelled out syllabically, and then the relevant pictogram or ideogram is written before the numeral (Chadwick 1987: 22). Some syllabograms are also used alone as ideograms following two cases. In some situations scribes employed the acrophonic principle (for example, in English a picture of the sun could represent the sound /s/); and in other situations they used syllabograms which are straightforward abbreviation of Greek words (o for o-pe-ro meaning “deficit”). In general, the phonetic values of these syllabograms do not match the word they represent. For example, the ideogram for 'sheep' is the qi syllabogram, but 'sheep' in Mycenaean Greek should be owis (compare with Classical Greek ois, Latin ovis, etc). Maybe the reason is that these dual-role

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signs were taken over from Linear A, where the sound may have been that of the initial syllable of the name in the pre-Greek language of Crete (Chadwick 1987: 30).

Fig. 4.2 - Linear B inventory. (After Robinson 2002: 88).

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In addition, ideograms can be created by putting two or more syllabograms into a ligature (a fusion of originally separate signs into what is then effectively a new single sign, thus allowing the desired meaning to be expressed more quickly). Finally, animals and the sex of the animal can be marked by diacritical markers to the sign. The basic ideogram usually represents the species of the animal, whereas two short horizontal lines denote the male, and Λ identifies the female.

Fig. 4.3 – Ideograms in Linear B. (After Encyclopedia Britannica).

v. System of measurement Metric signs are a special type of ideogram. There are three series of metric signs: for weight, dry measure and liquid measure. The Mycenaeans must have also a system of linear measure, but there is no trace of it. The divergence of the systems of measurement between Linear B and Linear A was demonstrated by E. L. Bennett Jr.

Fig. 4.4 – The Linear B system

of weights.

Fig. 4.5 – The Linear B system of

dry measures.

Fig. 4.6 – The Linear B system of

liquid measures vi. Numerical system In the decipherment of Linear B, the first step towards the solution was the explanation of the numerical and metrical systems. The numerals were straightforward and were tabulated by Evans at an early stage. The number system of Linear B is fundamentally base-10. It has five signs, each of which denotes a power of 10,

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i.e. a vertical line stands for 1, a horizontal line for 10, a circle for 100, and so on. The number system included fractions, but not having the number 0. It is not a not positional system and figures up to 9 are represented by repeating the sign the appropriate number of time. To write a number, you begin with the highest power of 10, and go toward lower ones. For each power of 10, you repeat the corresponding sign until you reach the desired multiple. Here an example follows:

Fig. 4.7 – The number system of Linear B.

Fig. 4.8 – How to write a number.

Fig. 4.9 - Tablet from the Mycenaean House of the Oil Merchant, which is recording a quantity of wool to be treated for knitting or coloring, ordered by a young woman. National Museum of

Athens inv. 7671. (Photo Merlini 2006).

vii. A method to divide group of signs Scribes divided the signs of an inscription into groups using a small short vertical bar placed just above the line. The length of the groups varies from two to eight signs. As any other ancient script, Linear B employs signs, which are an outline notation that the reader has to fill in for himself. Indeed each sign of the inventory is not a strict representation of the sound, but merely a conventional notation. Therefore, an interpretation is needed to reconstruct the spoken form. Even the Mycenaean reader must have had to guess to understand the proper words from the signs he was reading on the tablet. This situation would be quite intolerable if Linear B was used for letters or legislation. However, it was used for lists and read only by the writer and his colleagues working in the same administration or archive. It is obvious from the tablets that Linear B was written in horizontal lines running from left to right. On most tablets, each line of text is written above a horizontal ruled line, and words are separated by a vertical stroke, a space, or a change in the height of the letters.

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Linear B is considered by scholarship to be the latest of the writing systems and much later than the other two found on Crete. There is a quite general consensus that it mainly (but not completely) derived from Linear A in order to write a different, non-Minoan language deciphered by Ventris as an archaic form of Greek (forty-five Linear B syllabic signs have close equivalents in Linear A inventory). It is still unknown where, when, why, by whom, and under what circumstances this writing system was devised for such a purpose, although several suggestions have been proposed. 4.B.b The 56 signs of the Cypriote syllabary As in the case of Linear B, the Cypriote syllabary is well understood and documented. It was employed on Cyprus, on the eastern edge of the Greek world, to write Greek during the Bronze Age, from about 800 BC to about 200 BC. The inventory consists of 56 signs, each of which represents a vowel or different syllable starting with a consonant and finishing with a vowel. Structurally, the Cypriote syllabary consists of combinations of up to 12 initial consonants and 5 different vowels. Long and short vowels, double consonants, pre-consonant nasals were not indicated in the writing (Coulmas 1996: 106). Not all of the 60 possible consonant-vowel combinations are represented. Since the script could only represent syllables of the shape consonant + vowel (or vowels alone) and to accommodate syllable-final consonants, some consonants in clusters were not written, while others were written with the aid of an "empty" or "dead” vowel that was not pronounced. For example, it took two letters to represent a CV syllable, the first representing the initial consonant and the vowel and the second representing the final consonant and an unpronounced vowel. The dead vowel often matched the vowel in the middle of the syllable, but in word-final position, /e/ was the preferred dead vowel, as in the second syllable. As mentioned above, the Cypriote syllabary also had no way of distinguishing the long vowels /e:/ and /o:/ (spelled H and Ω in the Greek alphabet) from the short vowels /e/ and /o/ (spelled E and O in the Greek alphabet). Therefore, many of the phonemic distinctions of Greek were not represented. Yet the precise formulation of the rules determining which consonants were omitted and which were written, and how the extra vowels were selected, remain elusive.

Fig. 4.10 – Comparison between Linear B letters (on the left) and Cypriote syllabary letters (on the right).

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The Cypriote syllabary distinguishes among a different set of initial consonants than Linear B: the labio-velar (q-) series has disappeared due to changes in the pronunciation of these words; unlike Linear B Cypriot maintained a distinction between [l] and [r], though no longer between [d] and [t]. The Cypriote syllabary was usually written in horizontal lines running from right to left (the opposite of Linear B), but several of the individual signs are virtually identical or very similar in shape to Linear B signs as shown in the image below (Masson 1983) and have the same values as the corresponding signs in Linear B (Chadwick 1990: 185). The above-mentioned features make the Cypriote syllabary difficult to read. In the view of the much simpler coeval alphabetic writing, a matter of discussion is why the Cypriote syllabary continued to be employed for Greek language for several centuries throughout the classical period, until the spread of the Macedonian empire under Alexander the Great when a standard script for the Greek world was adopted (Chadwick 1990: 185; Coulmas 1996: 106). Here the Cypriote syllabary follows normalized forms because there are minor differences in the forms of the signs in use at different sites.4 The signs shape is clearly not pictographic (Daniels, Bright 1996: 130), as in the case of the Danube script. Even if the signs of the Cypriote syllabary seem to be derived from Cypro-Minoan scripts, their syllabic values are known for Greek and not for the Eteo-Cypriot language, which was also written in that script (Pope 1975: 135).

4 /j/ is really /y/.

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Fig. 4.11 - The Cypriot syllabary.

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4.C Essayistic inventories of the Neolithic and Copper Age script from Southeastern Europe A systematic inventory of the script that flourished in Southeastern Europe in Neolithic and Copper Age times is still unsettled. This hard task was attempted by a few scholars on individual basis starting from the turning between 1960s and 1970s: Janos Makkay in Hungary, Shan Winn in the USA, Harald Haarmann in Finland, Gheorghe Lazarovici in Romania, Andrej Starović in the Republic of Serbia, and Marco Merlini in Italy. Most of the older cataloguing research concentrated on selecting a list of signs from the two leading cultures - Vinča and Turdaş, - in order to record their similarities in shape and their common correspondences with systems of writing from Crete, from Troy, from Sumer, and from Egypt. The challenge to create an inventory of the signs actually started in early 1970 with Gimbutas’ conceptualization of the issue and Winn’s pioneering work on the field. Haarmann improved and provided a framework to Winn’s list. Other more limited attempts have been made to sort out the distinctive set of signs of a particular and limited area (a region, a district, or even a single settlement). Lazarovici, Starović, and Merlini derived their inventories from a database, which is also capable of statistic queries and analysis into the semiotic field. In the present section, I collect the succeeding contributions for comparison and for the identification of trends and sights for future tasks. 4.C.a General inventories 4.C.a.1 A range of 300 signs from Turdaş sorted out by Zsófia Torma Baroness Zsófia Torma was the pioneer of the Southeastern Europe approach to writing, as early as 1874.5 Excavating the Transylvanian site of Turdaş, beside the river Mureş, which flows into the Tisza, a tributary of the Danube, the Hungarian archaeologist recovered extraordinary fragments of sides and bottoms of vessels, figurines, spindle-whorls, and weights bearing strange signs which have been incised or painted not as ornamentation but as pictographic and even abstract-linear characters. Between 1875 and 1891, Torma identified and arranged a corpus of more than 300 signs. Many of them are known solely from her unpublished but meticulously illustrated notebook. M. Roska edited large sections of it (Roska 1941). However, part of the record remains unpublished. Most of the signs are abstract motifs and groupings of lines, but also schematized representations of human beings, animals, and structures occur. It was the birth of the “Turdaş script” (Makkay 1969; 1990 and bibl.). Torma presented the signs found at Turdaş and in neighboring settlements comparing them to the scripts from Asia Minor (Troy, Caria, Panfilia) and Cyprus (Torma 1879) and guessing the presence of “Babylonian cultural elements” (Torma 1902), but without giving information about the precise provenance and the stratigraphic circumstances. 4.C.a.2 Lists of Vinča and Turdaş signs for comparison purposes In the last century, sets of signs from Vinča and Turdaş have been established neither to make an internal analysis of them, nor to investigate the organization of the sign system. The main aim was to look for parallels with Near Eastern or Anatolian scripts of the fourth and third millennia BC to document the hypothesized impact of the Near Eastern culture on the uncivilized Southeastern Europe. After the discovery of Troy with its marks incised on vases and spindle-whorls, Heinrich Schliemann noted similarities between Turdaş signs and those from Troy, Egypt and Crete. Some letters from Schliemann to Torma in the archive of the Muzeul Naţional de Istorie a Transilvaniei Cluj-Napoca document his knowledge of Turdaş discoveries and interest in comparing them to Trojan ones. In 1898, Paul Reinecke drew a comparison between the Troy and Turdaş signs on pottery (Reinecke 1898: 97-103, fig. 8). However, according to Makkay the shapes of signs detected by him are not precise (Makkay

5 Viz. 3.A “Early intimations of script-like signs from Turdaş and Vinča, Troy and Knossos”; 8.B.c.3.a “Script-like signs from the earliest excavations”; 8.B.c.2.d “The inventory of the “Turdaş script” signs according to the databank”.

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1969: 10, note 11). Hubert Schmidt collected 17 Turdaş script signs in order to compare them with the inscriptions on “pre-historic” Egyptian (Proto-Egypt and XII Dynasty), Trojan, and Aegean vessels from the sanctuary of Phylakopi on Melos island (Cyclades) (Schmidt 1903: 459, fig. 41).

Fig. 4.12 - Signs of the

Turdaş script according to Schmidt.

(After Schmidt 1903).

Fig. 4.13 - Schmidt’s problematic conversion table between the Turdaş signs

and alphabetic sounds. (After Schmidt 1903).

From the point of view of the construction of an inventory, Schmidt’s main contribution was the establishment of the Troy-Turdaş connection through a systematic framework based on a distinction between signs and ornaments. According to him, the graphemes of the Turdaş script were incised into the soft clay and may be clearly distinguished from decorative motifs (Schmidt 1903: 438-469). On this basis, Schmidt published a problematic conversion table between the Turdaş signs and alphabetic sounds (Schmidt 1903). When Sir Arthur Evans discovered new scripts in Crete, he was aware of parallels at Troy, Egypt and of “identical” examples at Turdaş and other Danubian sites (Evans 1897: 391; 386 for the chart). At the beginning of Evans’ research, single signs from Knossos and Troy, as well as those from Vinča and Turdaş, had been noted on the vases only underneath the bases or low on the sides and were interpreted as potter’s or owner’s marks. However, sometimes the Trojan signs appeared in groups and as early as 1874 a form of Greek language was being extracted from them. The occasional occurrence of groups of Turdaş signs like those from Troy and their similarity in shape with writing in Crete and Egypt had been noticed by Evans. Therefore, it was widely accepted that they might not merely reflect the existence of potter’s marks, but might

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represent the remnants of a rudimentary system of writing with its peculiar set of signs (Hood 1967 notes 14 and 15). The discoverer of the eponymous settlement of the Vinča culture, Miloje Vasić, stated that the groups of signs occurring especially on vessels had the value of letters in a proto-Greek script (Vasić 1908; 1930). The finding at Vinča of numerous incised signs, although less than those occurring at Turdaş (Milojčić 1965: 261, notes 3 and 21), was significant because they enlarged the geographic horizon of the comparison and proved that the existence of a system of signs was not an isolated phenomenon along the Mureş river, but typical of the whole Vinča culture. At the same time, there would have been a chance to identify at Vinča what was omitted at Turdaş: the exact date of the finds with signs, i.e. the stratigraphic range of their occurrence. This did not happen, however, owing to the questionable methods of Vasić’s excavation (Makkay 1969: 10) that led him to conclude that such “pictographic signs or marks… occurred at Vinča in every level” (Vasić 1910: 31, 38, fig. 16). Gordon Childe identified Vinča and Turdaş as belonging to essentially the same culture and, in 1927, he brought attention again to the resemblances between signs found on pottery from these two prehistoric settlements and signs in Predynastic Egypt and at Troy (Childe 1927: 83, 88; 1929: 31, 33). In order to make the comparison, he collected a set of 13 Vinča-Turdaş (in old-fashion terminology, nowadays actually Vinča A-B2) signs. According to Makkay, he only recapitulated Schmidt’s cataloguing (Makkay 1969: 10). However, they have only six signs in common. The disagreement between Childe and Schmidt indicates that scholars were unable to produce a sign list identifying which marks were actually signs of writing and not symbols or decorations and, among the signs of writing, which were different and which were just idiosyncratic variations of the same sign. For decades, semiotic research could not determine if there was a coherent set of signs, i.e. an inventory.

Fig. 4.14 - Vinča and Turdaş set of signs sorted out by Childe. (After Childe 1927).

In the same period L. A. Waddel created a list of Vinča and Turdaş signs in order to make the first comparison between not only Trojan signs, but also Mesopotamian ones considering the signs on prehistoric pottery in the Danube Valley as “owners’ marks” in Sumerian writing (Jemdet Nasr pictographs) (Waddel 1929: 599 ff.). However, his methods and conclusions are questionable (Winn 1981: 4), due to his ignorance of the archaeological framework (Makkay 1969: 10). Still in 1969, in search for Minoan connections, the linguist V.I. Georgiev emphasized the resemblance of some signs placed on the Gradešnica shallow receptacle and the Karanovo stamp seal with the Cretan script (Georgiev V.I.; 1969: 11; 1970: 8).6

6 See § 5.H.a “One inscribed object, many published versions of its signs”.

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4.C.a.3 Makkay’s gathering and classification from Turdaş and beyond In 1969 Jànos Makkay published a classification of signs in an article devoted to the “Late Neolithic Tordos group of signs” (Makkay 1969), which involved 60 settlements of Southeastern Europe. He enlarged the horizon of the investigation from Turdaş because, according to him, the discovery in 1961 and the divergent valuation on the Tărtăria tablets made urgent two tasks: a) a concrete, detailed and systematic analysis of the numerous signs incised on vessels, weights and other objects from Vinča and related cultures; and b) an investigation of this European sign system as a result of a series of influences from the Near East and Anatolia. Indeed, he tried to compare the Neolithic European range of signs with Mesopotamian pictographs starting with the chronological connections he made for the Tărtăria tablets. The sites with signs considered in Makkay’s survey are (Makkay used the Hungarian term for some of them): Banjica, Judaidah, Buneşti, Lerna, Coşeşti, Vinča, Phylakopi, Obrež, Hódmezövásárhely-Kökénydombról, Hódmezövásárhely-Kotacpart, Gornja Tuzla, Koraj, Csóka-Čoka-Tüzköves, Üjtikos-Tikosdomb, Karataş, Vidra, Tărtăria, Predionica, Jablanica, Tsangli, Philippopol, Rakhmani, Grapceva-Spilja, Byblos, Zorlenţul Mare, Casabra, Neszmély-Tekerespatak, Wülperode, Dimini, Nándorválya, Dresden, Kenézlő-Fazekaszug, Puzsztaistvánháza, Tiszaug-Kisréti, Phaistos, Aradac, Kormandin, Gradac, Dikeli Tash, Grosspelsen, Gornj Grad, Pljosna Stijena, Gomolava, Hornsömmern, Altemburg, Brenndorf, Otzaki Magula, Ledina, Bilcze Zlote, Szentes-Jaksorpart, Szentes-Megyeháza, Szentes-Naghegy, Szentes-Ilonapart, Bodrgkeresztúr, Servia, Szelevény, Jászdózsa-Lencsépuszta, Sukoró-Tóradülö, Grabovac, Pusztaistvánháza Among the sites considered by the survey, Makkay assigned 17 to the Vinča culture:

i. Turdaş (= Tordos in Makkay) ii. Banjica

iii. Vinča iv. Obrež v. Gornja Tuzla

vi. Koraj vii. Predionica

viii. Jablanica ix. Zorlenţul Mare x. Nándorválya

xi. Kormandin xii. Gradac

xiii. Gornj Grad xiv. Pljosna Stijena xv. Gomolava

xvi. Ledina xvii. Grabovac.

Makkay ascribed 19 other settlements to Southeastern European cultures related to or contemporaneous with Vinča, “except for the pictographs of the Tărtăria tablets”:

i. Buneşti ii. Coşeşti

iii. Hódmezövásárhely-Kökénydombról iv. Csóka-Čoka-Tüzköves v. Üjtikos-Tikosdomb

vi. Vidra vii. Grapceva-Spilja

viii. Neszmély-Tekerespatak ix. Kenézlő-Fazekaszug x. Pusztaistvánháza

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xi. Tiszaug-Kisréti xii. Szentes-Jaksorpart

xiii. Szentes-Megyeháza xiv. Szentes-Naghegy xv. Szentes-Ilonapart

xvi. Bodrgkeresztúr xvii. Hódmezövásárhely-Kotacpart

xviii. Szelevény xix. Sukoró-Tóradülö. Makkay did not identify the cultures of the following sites with the presence of signs. In fact, this class is a chronological and geographical melting pot:

i. Lerna ii. Phylakopi

iii. Karataş iv. Tărtăria v. Tsangli

vi. Philippopol vii. Rakhmani

viii. Byblos ix. Casabra x. Wülperode

xi. Dimini xii. Dresden

xiii. Puzsztaistvánháza xiv. Phaistos xv. Aradac

xvi. Dikeli Tash xvii. Grosspelsen

xviii. Hornsömmern xix. Altemburg xx. Brenndorf

xxi. Otzaki Magula xxii. Bilcze Zlote

xxiii. Jászdózsa-Lencsépuszta. The Hungarian archaeologist accorded central importance to the Turdaş signs, and a secondary significance to the Vinča ones. He favored Turdaş for four reasons: a) the richness of the site; b) the nearness to the Tărtăria settlement; c) the assumption that most of the Vinča signs derived from Turdaş; d) the belief that Turdaş could give a better chance for identifying the chronology of the signs, whereas the marks found in the other sites may be dated to the Pločnik phase of the Vinča culture or do not allow an exact dating because they may be assigned either to the periods B or to C. With regards to the last point, Makkay believed that even if one is unable to assign the single signs to the different phases of Turdaş, the definition of the beginning of the use of the signs (the end of Vinča A, even if the very start-up is unknown), the flourishing time (Vinča B) and the end (the very end of Vinča B2) helps one in defining the period in which they were made. In conclusion, according to Makkay the Vinča culture applied pottery signs at the end of period A at the latest until the very end of B2 phase (Makkay 1969: 12). Enlarging the geographical range, the author maintained that pottery signs are unknown in the early ceramics. According to him, in the Vinča A period in all Europe incised or painted signs are identified solely in the Vinča culture as well as in one or two Greek sites and only the post firing ones are certainly pottery signs and not ornamental motifs.

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Fig. 4.15.a - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969).

Fig. 4.15.b - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969).

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Fig. 4.15.c - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969).

Fig 4.15.d - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969).

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Fig 4.15.e - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969).

Fig. 4.15.f - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings. (After Makkay 1969).

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Fig. 4.15.g - Makkay classification of the Late Neolithic Turdaş group of sings.

(After Makkay 1969). Makkay’s classification of Turdaş signs for the task of establishing an inventory of the Danube script has a series of limitations. Makkay collected a corpus of signs that occurred in a specific period in a definite area, but he did not have the intention to build an inventory of them. On one hand, he gathered marks as they appeared on artifacts making no effort to standardize them in order to compose a precise and systematic repertory out of the writer’s penmanship, mixed single signs and compound signs (e.g. the composite signs 3.10, 4.7, 6.20, 7.5, 10.5, 10.11, 13.1, 13.23, 13.24, 13.25, 13.27) and, finally, in case of single signs he did not enable the reader to distinguish if any of them was an actual isolated sign (a writing monad) or if it was a unit of a group sign that has been extracted from it. On the other hand, he did not publish the photos or the drawings of the inscribed objects. He presented just a set of marks that, sketched as they actually occurred on the objects but eradicated from them, appear abstract. Publishing the actual marks without their context (i.e. neither their normalized shape, nor as they actually occur on the objects, nor their position within the archaeological framework), Makkay did allow the reader neither to do an internal analysis of the sign system nor to check/improve the process of extraction and sorting out of the signs. The above-mentioned limits in Makkay’s survey are exacerbated by the fact that he worked only on published signs rather than with the originals. He was aware that this could impede completing and interpreting the fragmentary signs visible on potsherds, even if they are clearly distinguishable from ornamental elements. If the signs selected by Makkay are explicitly and definitely not ornamental, a third limitation is his lack of interest in distinguishing between symbols and script, considering the marks under study as “symbolical signs of a rectilinear or curved design” (Makkay 1969: 11). In fact, his criteria aimed to establish that they could not be regarded as customary elements of vessel decoration mixed rules designed to distinguish signs of a script and rules aimed to identify a symbolic code. This is a significant point because subsequent inventories have the same limitation (viz Winn’s, Lazarovici’s catalogues). Fourth, due to so many problematic archaeological excavations, many information concerning the inscribed artifacts are often missed: the position of signs on the surface of the vessels is very rarely stated; their measurements are hardly known; there is no statement on the method of their incision; and the data for the definition of their chronology are very defective (Makkay 1969: 11).

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Fifth, as mentioned above the author overestimated the Turdaş contribution to the sign system and underestimated the Vinča. Sixth, Makkay considered the signs from Vinča culture and neighboring cultures of Southeastern Europe as a whole. He did not deal with regional variants. Seventh, the author collected many signs from the Vinča culture and from its related and coeval cultures of Southeastern Europe, but contradicted himself maintaining that Turdaş signs have no contemporary European parallels at all because the occurrence of signs was restricted to the Vinča culture (Makkay 1969: 13, 14). Makkay did not care about this contradiction, because his statement that Turdaş and Vinča signs are isolated in Neolithic cultures of Southeastern Europe was instrumental in claiming their resemblance to Near Eastern-Anatolians signs and attempting consequently to prove that as early as the Vinča A period the appearance of Turdaş signs belonged to the framework of Near Eastern influences, connected to a feature of the Vinča culture that was unique among Southeastern European cultures. The assumed close Anatolian connection was transliterated in his framework into actual Anatolian origin of some elements including the signs. In other words, “even during the period Vinča A, perhaps in its beginning, such influences of Anatolian background and partly of Mesopotamian origin, directed towards the Danube region, have to be reckoned with, and these were accompanied by the appearance of pottery signs and ornamental motifs very similar to, even somehow connected with the Mesopotamian ones” (Makkay 1969: 14). For this reason, he did not create a historical framework for the not Vinča European signs and he did not investigate their interconnections with Vinča and neighboring cultures sign systems. The conflicting fact with is statement is that Turdaş and Vinča signs actually have many coeval or nearly coeval parallels in Southeastern Neolithic Europe. Eighth, another contradiction in Makkay’s framework negatively influenced the subsequent studies made by other scholars. On the one hand, he asserted he was attempting to compare Southeastern European signs with Mesopotamian pictographs, but on the other hand, he observed that usually the first ones were pottery signs whereas the second ones were pictographs. It is very important his stressing that very few of the European signs have a picture-like character which one may recognize as a living being or an object, etc. (Makkay 1969: 11), but how to compare these abstract signs with Near Eastern pictorial writing symbols? Finally, Makkay’s collection and classification of signs compared them with the signs of the Near Eastern Chalcolithic rather than to develop an internal analysis of a Neolithic and Copper Age European system of signs. Makkay’s pioneering classification of Turdaş signs has some remarkable sights for the task of establishing an inventory of the Danube script. First, he attempted to identify, detect, and classify marks that were clearly not decorative motifs vs. the mood of the time dominated by scholars with the propensity to claim that any mark is a decoration. Second, it is the first systematic gathering and classification of signs from the Neolithic of Southeastern Europe. The survey enlarged the traditional geographic boundaries considering not only Turdaş and Vinča settlements, but also the whole Vinča culture as well as the related cultures of Southeastern Europe. 4.C.a.4 Gimbutas’sacred stocktaking Marija Gimbutas posed the idea of an “Old European script” and established the first stocktaking of signs based on a conception that became widely popular. She considered over two hundred signs collected by her and other scholars as “sacred signs”. In The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) she identified 36 core signs which were abstract and arbitrary in original or had gradually become so (V, Λ, X, M, Y, N, the cross, the triangle, lozenge, zigzag, spiral, square, etc.).

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Fig. 4.16 - The core signs of the Old European script according to Gimbutas. (After Gimbutas 1991: 309, fig. 8-1).

Gimbutas stated that, in order to articulate concepts or sounds expressed by the core signs, they were subjected to formal modifications (by means of duplication or inversion or addition of diacritical markers such as a stroke or two, a dot, a curve) into a catalogue of over two hundred derivative signs. Consequently, according to Gimbutas the variations of the core signs are not due to regional deviations, to chronological evolution, or to the creativity of each writer. They are connected a precise strategy aimed to create the repertory of the system of writing which she called “The Old European Script” (Gimbutas 1991: 309; 1999: 43), “The Old European writing” (Gimbutas 1999: 43), or “The sacred script” (Gimbutas 1991: 307).

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Gimbutas criticized Winn’s absence of a distinction between signs of writing and symbols. Nonetheless, the task was very hard. She observed that about seventy marks out of the 210 identified from Winn were symbols universally used throughout Europe. Among them, more than sixty were pure symbols appearing in isolation, as single mark and not in rows of inscriptions. Nine symbols - V, M, X (or +), II, III, IIII, °°, °°°. °°°° - were an exception being incorporated in the script (Gimbutas 1991: 309). Concerning the developing area of the script, Gimbutas considered that “this earliest writing was not the ephemeral occurrence of a single locality but a widespread phenomenon”. She identified nearly one hundred sites known to have yielded inscribed objects. Most were from the Vinča culture and Tisza-Herpály-

Fig. 4.17 - Core signs (on the left) and derivative signs (on the right) of the Old European script according to Gimbutas.

(After Gimbutas 1991: 310, fig. 8-2).

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Csöszhalom complex in the Morava, Danube, and Tisza basins of Yugoslavia, eastern Hungary, Northwestern Bulgaria, and western Romania, and from the Karanovo culture in central Bulgaria and southern Romania. Inscribed or painted signs, unnoticed earlier, were being recognized on Dimini, Cucuteni, Petreşti, Lengyel, Butmir, Bükk, and Linear Pottery ceramics. Her conclusion was that “it is no longer proper to speak of the ‘Vinča script’ as the sole example of this phenomenon. Instead, this script was a universal feature of the most advanced cultures of Old Europe during the 6th and 5th millennia BC. Signs of this script are occasionally found on pottery and bone objects from Neolithic southern Italy as well as from the megalithic culture of western Europe” (Gimbutas 1991: 309). The stocktaking of sacred signs that Gimbutas tried to establish has several limitations for the task of setting up an inventory of the Danube script. Gimbutas did not systematize her set of signs in a standardized inventory:

o The signs are presented without numeration o The archaeologist maintained that the list has more than 200 signs derived from a number of core

signs. How many are the core signs? Gimbutas was hesitant on this key point. In the text, she maintained “about 30 core signs” (Gimbutas 1991: 309), in the related table she recorded 36 of them (Gimbutas 1991: 308 fig. 8.1), while fashioning the catalogue she employed only seven core signs: V, X, +, M, (, I, Π (Gimbutas 1991: 310 fig. 8.2), which formed 135 derivative signs. If one adds to the list the other 29 core signs, the number of signs introduced by Gimbutas in total is 171. Where are some thirty she missed?

o She did not establish semiotic criteria in order to distinguish between signs of writing and symbols. If she listed the nine ambivalent symbols, being incorporated in the script and contemporaneously in use as symbols as well, she did not register the other about sixty “symbols universally used throughout Europe” vs. the core and derivative signs of the script.

o She arranged the signs according to their shape and not to semiotic criteria, although she put in motion compositional rules of them identifying 36 core signs and their formal modifications.

o As result of the above-mentioned limitation, some derivative signs from her stocktaking borrowed by Winn are actually inscriptions and do recur neither in Haarmann’s repertories nor in my inventory. A number of signs recorded by Gimbutas as derivative are actually inscriptions made-up of two or more signs. For example, inscriptions according to a horizontal sequence are: , , , , . In vertical format, are: , , . Other supposed derivative signs are in fact inscriptions composed of signs connected by ligatures. For example, , , , .

o The set of signs sorted out by Gimbutas is not derived from a database. Being Gimbutas “sacred-centric” and “Great Goddess-centric”, she considered that all the signs were “sacred” and belonging to the “Great Goddess”. However, the actual problem is to give evidence to the selection of the sacred signs within the larger array of Neolithic and Copper Age marks. Gimbutas took into account not only the Vinča and the neighboring culture but also what she considered to be the “Old Europe”, an area which sometimes she judged from the Aegean and Adriatic, including the islands, as far north as Czechoslovakia, southern Poland, the western Ukraine (Gimbutas 1982: 17), and sometimes extended “from the Atlantic to the Dnieper” (Gimbutas 1989: XIII). Therefore, Gimbutas assessed a very large area that she examined as an undifferentiated whole. This affected the geographical distribution of the script. Gimbutas has the decisive merit to have posed the idea of an “Old European script” and have observed that it developed mainly in a magic-religious context and not for commercial transactions or for recording administrative documents. The remark that the main elements of the script are core signs, which are mainly abstract and are subjected to formal modifications in order to articulate concepts or sounds of an unknown language, is the most significant sight of the stocktaking of sacred signs from Gimbutas.