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Tărtăria, Săliștea, Alba County, Romania

Tărtăria tablets

Pit charcoal and bone in the late sixth millennium BC (the tablets themselves were never dated)

The round tablet. A hole is punched near the edge. Incised signs fill the face, and a cross divides it. The scale in the frame runs from 0 to 3 centimetres. The other two tablets are not in this photograph. FlorinCB, CC BY 3.0. Shown unedited.

In 1961 a pit at Tărtăria produced three small clay tablets with signs cut into them. A human skeleton from that pit has a radiocarbon date in the late sixth millennium BC. The tablets themselves have never been dated. They were bathed in acid and then baked.

Why this is extraordinary

Three small clay tablets with incised signs came out of a pit at Tărtăria, in Alba, in 1961. The excavator called the pit ritual and linked it to a pit-house nearby, both in one level of the dig. One tablet is a disc with a hole near the edge and a cross cut across the face. In the photograph a scale bar marks 3 centimetres. The signs are the kind of marks grouped as Vinča signs, a Neolithic habit of the Danube region, cut into pots and figurines as well as into these tablets.

The date everyone quotes is not a date on the clay. Human bone from the pit, sample Rome-1631, is 6310 ± 65 radiocarbon years, about 5370 to 5140 BC when calibrated at one standard deviation. Animal bone from the bottom of the pit-house, Rome-1655, is 6210 ± 65, about 5280 to 5060 BC on the same terms. A 2005 paper treats those two results as overlapping and the pit and the house as the same horizon, and says older doubts about a mixed pit do not hold. The tablets had already been through hydrochloric acid, because a restorer took a lime-rich surface for a crust, and they were later soaked with a consolidant and heated. No photograph from before that treatment is known. A mineral look at the fabric found sand-rich clay and no carbon to measure. The radiocarbon clock cannot be started on them.

So the signs sit in a dated pit only if they were in it. The first publication did not show them there. That missing frame is the whole of the intrusion argument, and the 2005 dates do not replace it. If the association holds, the signs are late sixth millennium, Vinča, and more than a millennium older than proto-cuneiform. Whether they write language is a further step. A script records speech. A mark can name a maker, a rite, or a count. These signs repeat, which both a script and a mark must do. No string of them has been read as a sentence.

No sky figure, no star and no sun, is cut on the round tablet in a way the sources read as astronomy. The cross divides the face. It has not been shown to be a map of the sky.

What this changes: if the tablets belong to the skeleton’s pit and the signs record language, notation on clay in Transylvania is older than the Mesopotamian tablets it has been compared with, and the comparison is a likeness of simple shapes, not a lesson from the east. If the tablets were not in that pit, or if the signs are marks, the radiocarbon date remains the date of a person, and the clay is a Vinča object whose year is only as good as the association.

Why it matters

If the signs are a script, and if the tablets belong with that skeleton, people in Transylvania were recording something in clay more than a thousand years before the earliest Mesopotamian tablets. If the signs are marks of ownership or of a rite, or if the tablets fell into an older pit, the date is the date of a grave, not of a writing system.

The excavator called the pit ritual and tied it to a nearby pit-house in the same level. There are three tablets. One is the round piece with a hole, often treated as an amulet. The signs are incised. They are compared with the wider Vinča sign corpus of the late Neolithic in the Danube basin. They have also been set beside proto-cuneiform, which is later.

Photo tour

1 photograph, unedited. On a phone, swipe the row. Choose one to look closely.

The round tablet. A hole is punched near the edge. Incised signs fill the face, and a cross divides it. The scale in the frame runs from 0 to 3 centimetres. The other two tablets are not in this photograph. FlorinCB, CC BY 3.0

What is still unexplained

These sit beside the consensus account, with the same visual weight. None of them is marked solved.

Open A date on a skeleton, not on the clay The human bone from the pit is Rome-1631, 6310 ± 65 radiocarbon years, which at one standard deviation calibrates to about 5370–5140 BC. Animal bone from the bottom of the nearby pit-house is Rome-1655, 6210 ± 65, about 5280–5060 BC at one standard deviation. A 2005 restudy treats the pit and the house as one level and says the two dates overlap, so the tablets’ context is that horizon. The tablets were not the samples. After they came out of the ground they were soft and crusted. A restorer put them in hydrochloric acid. They were later hardened in a vacuum with an organic consolidant and heated. There are no photographs from before that treatment. A mineral study found them sandy and without the carbon a radiocarbon test would need. The clock cannot be moved onto the clay.
Open Signs, and what would count as writing Writing, here, means a system that records language, not a picture and not a tally by itself. The Tărtăria signs repeat shapes known on Vinča pots and figurines across the Danube Neolithic. Repetition is what a script needs, and it is also what a potter’s mark or a ritual stamp needs. Nobody has shown that a string of these signs matches a sentence in a known language. The comparison with proto-cuneiform is the chronological trouble. Those Mesopotamian tablets are late fourth millennium. If the Tărtăria pieces are sixth millennium and are the same kind of record, the Danube signs are earlier and independent, or the resemblance is a coincidence of simple strokes. Simple strokes, a cross, a line, an animal-like nick, arise more than once.
Open A pit that was not drawn in place The first publication did not show the tablets in the ground, in a drawing or a photograph, among the bones. Later argument has said the pieces could have been intrusive, or even that they were not from this pit. The 2005 paper answers with the shared level of pit and house and with the two radiocarbon results. That answers a mix-up of layers if the tablets were in the pit. It cannot answer a tablet that was never in the pit, because the picture that would show it there was not published. Both the association and the doubt are stuck with the same missing frame.

Location and dating

Location
Tărtăria, in the commune of Săliștea, Alba County. The pin is the village. The tablets are held in Transylvania, not at the pit.
Period label
Current consensus — open to revision The bone dates fall in the late sixth millennium BC, inside the Vinča horizon. That is the age of the pit if the samples were not moved. It is the age of the tablets only by association.
How this dating was done
Radiocarbon on human bone and on animal bone. Typology of the signs against the Vinča corpus. The tablets cannot now be dated directly.
What could change it
A record, if one still exists in a notebook or a photograph, that shows the three tablets in the pit with the dated skeleton. Nothing in the clay itself will give a radiocarbon age after the acid and the baking.
Published ranges, drawn as bars. A bar is a claim about a span, not a point.
Human bone in the pitContested
Animal bone in the pit-house
5370 BCE5200 BCE5060 BCE
  • Human bone in the pit. Rome-1631, 6310 ± 65 BP, one-standard-deviation calibration about 5370–5140 BC. Dates the skeleton.
  • Animal bone in the pit-house. Rome-1655, 6210 ± 65 BP, about 5280–5060 BC at one standard deviation.

What is actually there

Open questions

Question Status
Were the tablets in the pit with the dated skeleton? Open. The 2005 paper says one level. The missing in-place picture is the objection that paper cannot close.
Do the signs record language? Open. They repeat. Repetition is not yet a reading.

The current narrative

Where publication stands today. It is the best-supported reading, and it is open to revision. It is not a verdict.

The current narrative — open to revision

Vinča signs of the late sixth millennium

The tablets belong to the pit, the pit belongs to the late sixth millennium BC, and the signs are the Vinča sign system, a repeated notation that is not yet shown to write speech.

What supports this

  • Two radiocarbon dates, on the skeleton and on animal bone from the adjacent house, overlap in the centuries around 5300–5100 BC.
  • The 2005 restudy puts pit and house in one level.
  • The shapes sit with Vinča signs on other objects of that culture, which gives them a home that does not need Mesopotamia.

What pushes back

  • The tablets were not dated, and the treatment destroyed the chance.
  • No published photograph shows them in the pit.
  • A repeated sign can be a mark of a maker or a rite. The step from a sign to a sentence has not been taken.

What would settle it

It is the centre because the dates and the Vinča comparison are the evidence that exists, and a script that writes a language would need a reading nobody has published. It moves if the tablets are shown not to have been in that pit.

Emerging narratives

Other published readings. Each may be right. None is adopted here unless the evidence carries it.

An emerging narrative

Not the date of that skeleton

The tablets are not securely the property of the radiocarbon sample. Without an in-place record, they may be intrusive, or their signs may be a different kind of object from the grave they were published with.

What supports this

  • The first report did not figure the tablets in the ground.
  • Acid and heat mean no one can now test the clay’s age.
  • A resemblance to much later Mesopotamian tablets has tempted a reading that the Danube pieces cannot support if they are sixth millennium, and that reading is a reason people have wanted them to be younger.

What pushes back

  • The 2005 dates were run to meet that doubt, and they put the pit and the house together.
  • Vinča signs of this look are a Neolithic habit. A later intrusion would still have to explain why the signs are those signs.
  • Wanting a Mesopotamian parallel is not evidence that the pit was mixed.

What would settle it

It stays because the missing picture is a real gap in the publication. It is not the centre while the only laboratory dates for the pit agree with each other and with the Vinča horizon.

Should the current view be reevaluated?

Open to revision

The skeleton’s date is a laboratory result. The tablets’ date is an argument about a pit that was not photographed. Open keeps the Vinča association and the gap in the record together.

What drives this

  • Rome-1631 and Rome-1655, both in the late sixth millennium BC.
  • Acid and heat, and no direct date on the clay.
  • Signs that repeat, and that have not been read as language.

This is the museum’s own weighing of the evidence. It is not a visitor vote, and it is separate from the slider.

Weigh it yourself

Anonymous. Nothing here is stored except on this browser. Your lean does not change the assessment beside it.

Vinča signs of the late sixth millennium Unsure Not the date of that skeleton

If the contested reading is right

What would follow if a reading that is not the consensus turned out to be true, and what could settle it. This explains the stakes. It does not adopt the reading.

The tablets are not from the dated pit

The late sixth millennium would keep its Vinča signs on pots and figurines, and these three tablets would drop out of the claim to be the earliest notation on clay. The skeleton would still be a burial of that age.

Why it is still worth a test

Any unpublished field drawing or photograph that places the tablets with the bones.

Sources

  1. New archaeological data referring to the Tărtăria tablets Documenta Praehistorica, 2005
  2. Tărtăria tablets Wikipedia, for the find and the sign corpus

Image credits

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