The Gradeshnitsa tablets ( bg, Плочката от Градешница) or plaques are clay artefacts with incised marks. They were unearthed in 1969 near the village of
Gradeshnitsa
Gradeshnitsa ({{lang, bg, Градешница) is a village of the Vratsa Province, Bulgaria.
The village is notable for the Gradeshnitsa monastery (situated 1.5 km west of the village), and for the neolithic Gradeshnitsa tablets now kept ...
in the
Vratsa Province
Vratsa Province ( bg, Област Враца ''Oblast Vraca'', former name Okrug, Vraca okrug) is a Bulgarian province located in the northwestern part of the country, between Danube river in the north and Stara Planina mountain in the south. I ...
of north-western
Bulgaria
Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedon ...
. Steven Fischer has written that "the current opinion is that these earliest Balkan symbols appear to comprise a decorative or emblematic inventory with no immediate relation to articulate speech." That is, they are neither
logograph
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, ...
s (whole-word signs depicting one object to be spoken aloud) nor
phonograph
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
s (signs holding a purely phonetic or sound value)."
The tablets are dated to the 4th millennium BC and are currently preserved in the Vratsa Archeological Museum of Bulgaria.
The Gradeshnitsa Tablets
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See also
* Cucuteni-Trypillian culture
*Sinaia lead plates
The Sinaia lead plates are a set of lead plates written in an unknown language or constructed language. They are alleged to be a chronicle of the Dacians, but are considered by most scholars to be modern forgeries. The plates were written in the G ...
*Tărtăria tablets
The Tărtăria tablets () are three tablets, reportedly discovered in 1961 at a Neolithic site in the village of Tărtăria (about from Alba Iulia), in Romania.
The tablets bear incised symbols associated with the corpus of the Vinča symbo ...
*Prehistory of Southeastern Europe
The prehistory of Southeastern Europe, defined roughly as the territory of the wider Southeast Europe (including the territories of the modern countries of Albania,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, Monte ...
*Vinča symbols
The Vinča symbols, sometimes known as the Danube script, Vinča signs, Vinča script, Vinča–Turdaș script, Old European script, etc., are a set of untranslated symbols found on Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennium BC) artifacts from the Vi ...
Further reading
*Ivan Raikinski (ed.), Catalogue of the Vratsa Museum of History, 1990.
External links
References
4th-millennium BC works
1969 archaeological discoveries
Archaeology of Bulgaria
Inscriptions in undeciphered writing systems
Prehistory of Southeastern Europe
Proto-writing
Vinča culture
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