The Oldest Pictograph for Copper

Last year, during our visit to the Cretan site of Knossos and their wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated in large part to one of the greatest peaceful periods in human history, I didn't hide my admiration for the old Minoans and their way of life. I even said I would move to Crete without second thoughts if I had a time machine, mainly to avoid the hostility of the world order we are currently living in today. At the time, considering only the European continent, I was under the impression that cultures like Minoan were rare and the Bronze Age society we glimpsed on Crete was maybe walking on the edge of being the only one in the history of mankind. To say the least, I couldn't be more wrong.

Only a couple of millennia before the late Neolithic period, known as the Chalcolithic or simply the Copper Age, there was an old European society that lived for centuries and also flourished in peaceful harmony and perfect equilibrium with nature, themselves, and their immediate land, where they built large settlements with big houses, streets, and infrastructure. And one of their major cities, by using vocabulary for describing settlements built 7000 years ago, existed almost next to my backyard. So to speak.

Prehistoric Europe, probably like everywhere else in the world, has experienced a civilization boom after the Neolithic revolution and invention of agriculture, along with the domestication of wild animals. That also included a boost in population and ways of living, and in these parts of the world, for almost eight centuries, if not longer, rose a civilization that belonged to the well-known Turdaș-Vinča culture. Many archaeologists today consider this early civilization for the throne of being the first independent and distinguished modern humans and true civilization cradle.

More than ten major settlements were found, and most of them were in the process of excavation throughout Serbian territories, with the addition of several more within neighboring lands, especially Transylvania in central Romania. These people not only perfected agriculture but also were the first to initiate the Copper Age in world history. The art of pottery was their hallmark, and many alien-shaped figurines triggered a wave of 'ancient astronauts' theories, and I will only quote one of the referenced articles: "The appearance of these figurines is striking. Many depictions of extraterrestrials in ancient literature and art reference the same oval-shaped heads, enormous almond eyes with dark pupils, and small noses and mouths". Whether or not this is evidence enough to conclude that Vinča people were in contact with extraterrestrial beings who helped them to achieve a higher level of life, I will let you conclude or ignore, but one thing is for sure: these people, along with their way of clothing and decorating, early metallurgy, and the functionality of their large, for the time, houses and settlements, were almost on the same levels of civilization as the old Minoans who lived and flourished three millennia later.

If you add to the facts that pottery was practiced at the household level with artifacts clearly created and shaped by children, along with evidence that women's clothing included mini-skirts and trousers, it is really fascinating. All vanished civilizations from ancient times earned their place in the evolution of humanity, but those of them who practiced or invented something for the first time and what we today take for granted represent our true and genuine heritage. Within the humanity tree, Vinča people deserved a very special place for two very important things in our evolution as a species.

They developed one of the earliest forms of proto-writing, which still waits for definite evidence of whether or not it overgrown simplicity over centuries and became the true representation of their spoken language. The second achievement is indisputable for most scholars. This culture was the first one, in the current knowledge and archaeological evidence, to learn how to smelt copper ore. They were the pioneers who took the big step toward the end of the Stone Age.

Vinča-Turdaș symbols were found practically everywhere engraved on artifacts excavated in Serbia and Romania. Hence the name by which it is known; like with Cretan civilization, we don't know how they called themselves. Most of the inscriptions are on pottery, and the vast majority of the inscriptions consist of a single symbol. This indicates that symbols are used similarly to what we are familiar with today as "icons", and lots of different pictographs are probably designed to identify the object they are engraved on, the content of it, the owner, value, and measure, perhaps even the ancient logo of the household or manufacturer. Most likely the names of individuals as well. For example, the name Cochise of Native Americans' Apache means "oak wood", and one of the Vinča symbols most definitely means the same thing. No doubt there were a series of pictographs related to copper and whatever they made out of it.

However, over the time of civilization's existence, the script probably evolved along, and these three tablets in the image above, found at a site in the village of Tărtăria, indicate more complex writing that most likely represents words of their language. So far, no "Epic of Gilgamesh" alternative has been found, but lots of work on sites is still ahead, and I am sure many other sites are still waiting to be found. Even so, Vinča symbols predate the earliest Sumerian cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the first Minoan writing by far.

To me, the Vinča-Turdaș script most definitely resembles all other linear scripts, which means by using the symbols it is possible to write complex lines and sentences, but I am far from being the expert in the field. However, this suggestion is sound, and lines of text dated to the period and found in two locations in Bulgaria and Greece support the hypothesis. For the theory to become proven or disputed, cracking the ancient code must be done first, but for all lost languages, this is not easy. For example, old Minoans used a "Linear A" script that is still a mystery even though it is related to its solved big brother, "Linear B". Its amazing that these three scripts are possible to download in the form of TrueType fonts, and just for fun, I used them in this image to print "Milan's Public Journal" in Vinča, Minoan, and Mycenaean. This is rubbish, of course, and all these people from the past would need very different keyboards to write their languages (letters of the alphabet would not do any good for their symbols), but still, it was fun to play with.

While the writing puzzle is still not solved, Vinča people who lived nearby natural deposits of copper ore very quickly developed a process to extract the metal from the mineral and to build various tools and weapons used only for hunting. One of such sites is the one from my neighborhood. Only an hour of driving to the south is the archaeological site of Pločnik, probably the first ancient city in the world where copper smelting was industrialized. We visited the site last weekend, where we found amazing replicas of Vinča people's homes and also a nearby museum in the city of Prokuplje with lots of excavated items from the site and lots of stories from the excavation itself.

Even today, there are deposits of malachite and azurite in the wide area where the site is located, and our guide hinted that in the past they were probably able to find them in the river as well. Both are common copper minerals that are melted at 700 °C. Campfires are about 200° short of the temperature needed, so they built square-shaped furnaces stored in larger buildings with pipe-like earthen blowers with hundreds of tiny holes in them used to blow compressed air directly into fire. Whether people, like Viktor in the above video, were manually blowing the air or they had some sort of leather bellows is still unknown.

The place is very big—more than 100 hectares. The ancient city was large and populated from 5500 to 4700 BC in a row until it was destroyed in a big fire by probably intruders from afar. What happened with survivors and where they moved after is also not known. Like Minoans, no peaceful society ever survived hostile events and probably ceased to exist entirely or fully dispersed among the newcomers. Anyhow, we were all carrying lots of impressions from the last weekend trip to the history of our own neighborhood, along with a piece of pottery, 7000 years old, we received as a gift from the excavation park. No words could describe all of our gratefulness, especially Viktor's, when he had to choose a piece that maybe once belonged to his peer from the early Copper Age.

The Minoan Legacy:
https://www.mpj.one/2017/07/the-minoan-legacy.html

Stone Age of Iron Gates:
https://www.mpj.one/2015/08/stone-age-of-iron-gates.html

Cyclops of Peloponnese:
https://www.mpj.one/2016/08/cyclops-of-peloponnese.html

Image & Video refs:
https://www.disclose.tv/the-danube-valley-civilization-script-is-the-worlds-oldest-writing-313756
http://korzoportal.civcic.com/julka-kuzmanovic-cvetkovic-plocnik-kako-doziveti-neolit/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ

Refs:
http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/serbiavinca.htm
https://cogniarchae.com/2015/10/29/tartaria-connection-between-vinca-and-proto-linear-b-script/
https://www.disclose.tv/mysterious-vinca-statuettes-evidence-of-extraterrestrial-contact-313094
http://www.ancientpages.com/2015/09/30/mysterious-ancient-vinca-culture-undeciphered-script/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinca_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinca_symbols
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/civilisation-script-oldest-writing
http://www.ancientpages.com/2018/02/17/7000-year-old-inscription-undeciphered-vinca-script/
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/vinca.htm
http://vrtoplica.mi.sanu.ac.rs/en/section/58
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting#Copper_and_bronze
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/17456/pdf
https://www.behindthename.com/names/usage/native-american

Serbian refs:
https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr/Плочник_(археолошки_локалитет)
https://www.serbia.com/srpski/posetite-srbiju/kulturne-atrakcije/arheoloska-nalazista/vinca/
http://muzejtoplice.org.rs/index.php/en/muzejtoplice
https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Civilization-Museum/Arheo-park-Pločnik

Childhood

I am watching my son grow up every day, and from time to time I can't stop thinking about how childhood occupies a special place within all memories acquired in everybody's life. I tend to think that this is not because we memorized childhood better than any other period of life; it's more that, compared to adolescence and later times, those moments are pure and clean, with not much tension, conflict, or seriousness of adult life. This is all about playing, learning new things, and enjoying pleasurable moments and events, and we are simply programmed to maintain nice memories better, while others not so pleasurable are stored deep in remote regions of our brains with a tendency to be quickly forgotten.

Hairdresser Shop

Today one small visit to the hairdresser triggered the extraction of some really nice memories from my childhood. This morning I took a walk downtown for some errands and decided to take some shortcuts through a couple of blocks where we lived most of my childhood. It was an old house my grandfather and his father built a decade or so after the Second World War, where we lived in a ground-floor apartment while my grandparents were situated a floor up. It was a house with a very nice front yard full of trees and flowers, and in the back were small ancillary buildings, garages, a workshop, and a miniaturized chicken roost where my grandmother produced nice, fresh, domesticated eggs. Chickens too. She was a master of preparing chicken soup from prime ingredients, meaning killing the bird, taking off all the feathers, taking out all the inner organs, and cooking the dish at the end. I remember once I had to catch a runaway chicken that slipped out of my grandmother's hands and escaped to the front yard—all that without its head. Ok, that wasn't one of those nice memories I wanted to share in the first place, but still a proud boy's experience not everybody can share. That said, let's get back to the main story. Our house was, not so long ago, torn down, and a new residential building was built on its foundation. This morning, following my route to downtown, I walked into the street where our house was and saw a new hairdresser shop in front of a new building along with a new bakery shop next to it. My hair doesn't require much maintenance, but yesterday was also the summer solstice, also known as the day when I cut my hair to summer length, so after little hesitation, I decided to stop by.

The main room was located (coordinately speaking) in the same spot where our living room was 40 years ago when I was the age of my son now. All the memories all of a sudden started to emerge, even those vivid images of the room back in time. I was the only customer, and I sat on the chair in the same spot where our old black and white TV set was placed, and perhaps one of the immediate emotions was created by the memory of the day when my parents bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art color TV set. I remember it barely fitting the old TV spot in the large living room cabinet. This was a change comparable with nowadays switch from old small CRT television sets to large flat LCDs, only with more enthusiasm simply because today we take modern innovative gadgets for granted more than was the case in the past.

Then and Now

In the middle of the haircut, the hairdresser was interrupted for a couple of minutes, and instinctively I glimpsed the rest of the room in all directions, and maybe even for a moment I was able to see the past. All the mirrors, the hairdresser gear and tools, chairs, waiting room, and photos on the wall started and faded out in front of my eyes and morphed into our small table, two armchairs, and a couch my father made along with many other pieces of furniture in other rooms. I also saw the kitchen, the big dining table, the old big telephone in the corner of the hallway, and the iron bunk bed for my sister and me, positioned exactly 5 meters away from my current position and located in the bedroom or within the next-door bakery shop, as in today. I was proud of my upper bed, where I spent lots of time as a boy, especially during winter times. This was also the playground for us kids, where we were doing homework and also performing Johnny Weissmuller's jumps from the upper bed down to my parents double. Summers were different; almost every suitable moment we spent outside in the front yard garden, where we used to have dinners and meals at the big round stone table under the cherry tree higher than the house itself. I was able to cross from one tree to another like a small monkey, and later, when I got a little older, this was my clubhouse where I used to read comics and magazines. I remember once I twisted my ankle in school and got myself a leg immobilizer for three weeks, which I spent entirely under the cherry tree in the special temporary bed my mother made for me. I was deeply touched when my complete class from school came to visit me the first day of my school absence.

We moved to a new house when I was about 11 years old, but that first decade of my life will always stay the most memorable of them all so far. The plot where the front yard was located is still intact next to the new building, but all the trees are long gone along with all the magic I experienced in there. One of the events I also remembered today was a night we spent in the open in that very front yard after a big earthquake happened in Romania back in the year 1977. There are lots more memories of that period in time, but I will stop here. After all, this is not a book of memories or anything; just a small flashback popped out of my head today. I also didn't include many covering photographs in order not to spoil the words, just these three portraying the place now and then. The first image above is the hairdresser shop taken by my smartphone, and I am sorry you can't see my state-of-the-art and ultra-fashionable haircut because of the flashlight, but I kind of did that on purpose. However, I will be returning here and not just for memories from my past but also because of great service, and I mean it fully when I let somebody carry scissors and sharp tools so close to my head. Seriously, I once had a bad experience with a sharp razor having a close encounter with my right ear, and from that time I am always having chills and goosebumps when I need a haircut. The second photo I made out of two images of the same spot. Left is me around the year of 1972 (perhaps a year or two later, but I can't be sure), and in the background you can see part of the house with two windows that are now hairdresser and bakery shops (shown on the right).

Batteries not included

So there you go, I might have been a little bit emotional in this post, but having a public journal like this is maybe why I started this blog in the first place so I could be able to remember and write about interesting events in my life I stumble upon from time to time.