TARTARIA TABLETS

3. A challenge to some of the myths on those mythical artefacts

i) Tărtăria inscriptions are a genuine product of European literacy
Any parallelism between Tărtăria inscriptions and Mesopotamian writing appears weak for chronological and graphical reasons.
Firstly, the development of the script found in Transylvania predated similar evolutionary trends in Mesopotamia by almost a millennium.
Secondly, if one compares the European signs with those on the ATU-list in Green and Nissen 1987, ^[38] one can not observe any substantial convergence.
In conclusion, chronological and graphical motives exclude outside influences on the formation of the Danube sign system; either from the drift from east to west of the idea of writing; or in terms of any significant contribution to the sign inventory.

The acknowledgement that the Danube valley developed its own system of writing seven millennia ago has important cultural repercussions that sweep away many long-standing ideas about European prehistory and has forced the reorganization of its dates and chronological sequence, and has changed profoundly the geographical location of its cradle regions. In fact the birth of writing goes further back in time from the kingdoms and the great city-states of the bronze age to the semi-egalitarian villages of Neolithic peasants and its centre of gravity moves from the Near East to Southeastern Europe.

The recognition of the start-up in advance of a script in Southeastern Europe is pushing the revival of the corresponding civilization: the Danube one. Indeed the existence of a European ars scribendi (art of writing) has been considered one of the indicators capable of determining that the "early civilisation" status can no longer be limited to the regions which have long attracted scholarly attention (i.e. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the ancient Indus valley and nowadays Bactria Margiana in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Yangtze valley in China, Jroft valley in Iran). It has on the contrary to be expanded to embrace the Neolithic and Chalcolithic civilisation of the Danube Valley. And a very important line of reasoning is that from some points of view this European region has to be placed in a prominent position in cultural affairs with referens to the others.