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The Vinča symbols, sometimes called the Vinča signs, Vinča script, Vinča-Turdaș script, Old European script, etc., are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennia BCE) artifacts from the Vinča culture of Central Europe and Southeastern Europe. The symbols are mostly considered as constituting the oldest excavated example of "proto-writing" in the world; that is, they probably conveyed a message but did not encode language, predating the development of writing proper by more than a thousand years. ==Discovery== In 1875, archaeological excavations led by the Hungarian archeologist Zsófia Torma (1840–1899) at Tordos (today Turdaș, Romania) unearthed a cache of objects inscribed with previously unknown symbols. In 1908, a similar cache was found during excavations conducted by Miloje Vasić (1869–1956) in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade (Serbia), some 120 km from Turdaș. Later, more such fragments were found in Banjica, another part of Belgrade. Since 1875, over one hundred and fifty Vinča sites have been identified in Serbia alone, but many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated.〔Tasić, Nikola, Dragoslav Srejović, and Bratislav Stojanović. "Vinča: Centre of the Neolithic Culture of the Danubian Region". Belgrade: Centar za arheoloska istrazivanja Filozofskog fakulteta, 1990. http://www.rastko.rs/arheologija/vinca/vinca_eng.html (accessed 2009.06.22).〕 Thus, the culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture, and the symbols are often called the Vinča-Turdaș script. The discovery of the Tărtăria tablets in Romania by Nicolae Vlassa in 1961 reignited the debate. Vlassa believed the inscriptions to be pictograms and other items found at the same place were subsequently carbon-dated to before 4000 BCE (while the tablets themselves cannot be dated by physical or chemical methods〔Merlini, Marco; Lazarovici, Gheorghe: (Settling discovery circumstances, dating and utilization of the Tărtăria tablets ) (PDF; 10.8 MB). In: Acta Terrae Septemcastrensis. Band: VII. 2008. Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. ISSN 1583-1817〕), thirteen hundred years earlier than the date he expected, and earlier even than the writing systems of the Sumerians and Minoans. However, the authenticity of these tablets is disputed.〔Qasim, Erika: ''Die Tărtăria-Täfelchen – eine Neubewertung''. In: ''Das Altertum'', , vol. 58, 4 (2013), p. 307–318〕 To date, more than a thousand fragments with similar inscriptions have been found on various archaeological sites throughout south-eastern Europe, notably in Greece (Dispilio Tablet), Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Romania, eastern Hungary, Moldova, and southern Ukraine. Most of the inscriptions are on pottery, with the remainder appearing on ceramic spindle whorls, figurines, and a small collection of other objects. Over 85% of the inscriptions consist of a single symbol. The symbols themselves consist of a variety of abstract and representative pictograms, including zoomorphic (animal-like) representations, combs or brush patterns and abstract symbols such as swastikas, crosses and chevrons. Other objects include groups of symbols, of which some are arranged in no particularly obvious pattern, with the result that neither the order nor the direction of the signs in these groups is readily determinable. The usage of symbols varies significantly between objects: symbols that appear by themselves tend almost exclusively to appear on pots, while symbols that are grouped with other symbols tend to appear on whorls. The importance of these findings lies in the fact that the bulk of the Vinča symbols was created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets even dating back to around 5300 BC.〔Haarmann, Harald: "Geschichte der Schrift", C.H. Beck, 2002, ISBN 3-406-47998-7, p. 20〕 This means that the Vinča finds predate the proto-Sumerian pictographic script from Uruk (modern Iraq), which is usually considered as the oldest known script, by more than a thousand years. Analyses of the symbols showed that they have little similarity with Near Eastern writing, leading to the view that these symbols and the Sumerian script probably arose independently. Although a large number of symbols are known, most artifacts contain so few symbols that they are very unlikely to represent a complete text. Possibly the only exception is the Sitovo inscription in Bulgaria, the dating of which is disputed; regardless, even that inscription has only around 50 symbols. It is unknown which language used the symbols, or indeed whether they stand for a language in the first place. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vinča symbols」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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