From the age of translation agencies and certified translation bureaus, we take a leap in time to the first attested writings in the world. It is no simple matter to decipher the past and establish exactly the dawn of writing.
The Uruk tablets
Inscribed on 12 clay tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known literary work. Gilgamesh, as we know, was king of Uruk. It is therefore no surprise that the oldest known written text is the one on the Uruk tablets (3300 BC). It consists of economic records and is pictographic. Such a system cannot convey complex ideas, and over time the pictographic signs turned into a system that used syllables. Pictures can express simple ideas, so the sign for “mouth” also came to mean “to speak”. Signs also began to be combined: for example, the signs for mouth and water placed together meant “to drink”.
A crucial step was made when the symbol for a word came to express the sound, rather than the meaning, of that word. This is the rebus principle: in English, the word “belief”, for instance, could be written with the picture of a bee and the picture of a leaf. Gradually, pictorial signs became abstract symbols. Sumerian was the first language to be written in syllabic script, later adapted to write Akkadian.
The Tărtăria tablets
On the other hand, from their discovery to this day, the Tărtăria tablets remain a source of controversy. The tablets are small and made of fired clay: two rectangular ones with animal and plant representations drawn on them, and a third, round one with pictographic writing engraved on it. The “Old European” script did not serve economic, legal or administrative purposes. It was a sacred script, which emerged from the long use of graphic signs charged with particular symbolism; its appearance is closely linked to the developed cult of the female divinity. In the purely etymological sense, these signs are hieroglyphs, or sacred signs.
Radiocarbon-dated, the tablets turned out to be from around 5500 BC, before the first Sumerian inscriptions or, in Europe, the Minoan ones of Crete. Many foreign researchers, such as David Whipp, Boris Perlov or Iovan Todorovici, believe that the symbols on the artifacts represent the first writing in the world. The Tărtăria discoveries are part of a much larger Neolithic culture, called Vinča, which developed on the territory of today’s Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece. At the time it was the most advanced tribal society on the continent. Did human civilization and culture, as we know them today, perhaps begin in the Balkans? Opinions remain divided.