An Introduction to the Study of the Danube Script
Harald Haarmann (Finland) and Joan Marler (USA)
Abstract
The early agrarian communities that developed in the Danube valley and its hinterland during the sixth and fifth millennia BCE produced innovative technologies and an exceptionally rich heritage of cultural symbolism. In a culturally interconnected zone extending throughout southeast Europe, a rich variety of signs and symbols with notational functions are found incised or painted on ceramics, sculptures, ritual items, and other artifacts. Core symbols that appear to reflect a large coinage of basic ideas—in the form of the spiral, the meander, the V sign and others—are wide-spread, while other symbols have a more limited range and are found only in certain regions. A closer inspection of ornamented and inscribed artifacts reveals that motifs in common use over an extended geographical area interacted with symbols of local range, forming specific regional networks. In the course of this process, sign use consolidated and assumed the character of an organized form of notation. Experiments with writing technology in Southeastern Europe produced an original writing system that is the first of its kind in world history.
The concept of writing in Neolithic societies poses a challenge to traditional concepts about the emergence of writing. This introduction examines some of the main assumptions comprising the parameters of the academic canon and offers a basic definitional approach to writing technology that may serve to stimulate and expand conventionally generalized viewpoints.
Progress in science arises, not from consensus, but from the exploration of new horizons which calls for discussions about controversies, instead of remaining silent about unresolved agenda. In this spirit, the Institute of Archaeomythology collaborated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Novi Sad in 2004 to sponsor “Signs of Civilization: An International Symposium on the Neolithic Symbol System of Southeast Europe.” Several papers presented at the Novi Sad symposium have been selected for this issue: by Romanian archaeologists Cornelia–Magda Lazarovici and Gheorghe Lazarovici, Italian researcher Marco Merlini, linguist Harald Haarmann from Finland, and Shan Winn from USA, a pioneer investigator of the Old European script.