About the Signs and Symbols… Tracing Europe’s Earliest Script: A 150-Year Quest and Gheorghe Lazarovici’s Intellectual Journey

Abstract This article situates Gheorghe Lazarovici’s contribution within the 150-year history of archaeo-semiotic research devoted to decoding and understanding an early script that flourished in south-central Europe from the Early Neolithic to the Late Copper Age. The pioneers of this intellectual effort included eminent archaeologists such as Baroness Zsófia Torma, Heinrich Schliemann, Flinders Petrie, Miloje M. Vasić, and V. Gordon Childe. After nearly a half century of neglect, the possibility that the Tărtăria tablets (ca. 5300 BCE), discovered in 1961, may represent the ‘most ancient European library’ has prompted a systematic re-evaluation of archaeological and semiotic materials accumulated in the museums of the Danube basin. Several projects have aimed to establish a comprehensive inventory of the so-called Danube script. A more sustained scholarly initiative began in the early 1970s, with Marija Gimbutas’ conceptualization of the problem and Shan Winn’s foundational corpus, later revised by Harald Haarmann. Gheorghe Lazarovici and Marco Merlini, expanded these efforts by creating extensive databases that enabled statistical queries and semiotic analyses. The Danube script appears to have developed indigenously and to have played a significant role within the institutional, economic, and social networks of the advanced cultures that flourished along the Danube and its tributaries. Collectively, these societies can be described as a “civilization” comparable, in scale and complexity, to those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, and Iran. This early experiment with literacy started around 5900–5800 BCE, within the Starčevo-Criş (Körös) IB/IC and Karanovo I horizon—roughly two millennia earlier than any other currently known form of writing. From its core area in the central Balkans, the script rapidly spread northward to the Hungarian Great Plain, westward to the Adriatic coast, southward into Macedonia and Thessaly, and eastward toward Ukraine. The Danube script flourished until approximately 3500–3300 BCE, when a period of economic and social upheaval led to its decline and eventual disappearance.