vinča marks on the left side

The Vinča culture lived along the Danube and its tributaries between roughly 5300 and 4500 BCE. They made pottery, figurines, spindle whorls. On many of these objects they cut marks. Geometric. Combs, chevrons, ladders, crosses inside circles, the slash, the V, the X.

There are over 200 distinct signs in the corpus. The count varies by scholar. Winn cataloged 210 in 1973. Other counts run higher depending on what gets treated as a variant.

The marks are older than Sumerian cuneiform by more than a thousand years. They are older than Egyptian hieroglyphs. There is no known descendant script. Nothing carries forward.

The current consensus is that the marks are not writing. They convey meaning. They do not encode language. What they do instead is unsettled.

I have been reading Shan Winn, Harald Haarmann, and a 2016 paper by Marler. The marks recur across hundreds of kilometers. The same signs at Tărtăria, at Vinča-Belo Brdo, at Turdaș, at Banjica. People who never met agreed on what these were for.

The detail I keep returning to. On a subset of the figurines, the marks appear only on the left side of the body. Left shoulder. Left thigh. Left side of the face. The right side is blank. This is documented in the Tărtăria material and in figurines from the Gradešnica plaque region. Not universal. But present often enough that it has been noticed and not explained.

I counted the figurines in the Winn plates where the marks are clearly lateralized. I got seven. Then I counted again. Still seven.

The Tărtăria tablets, found in 1961 by Nicolae Vlassa, are three small clay objects. One is round, pierced, with marks arranged around a cross that divides the face into quadrants. One is rectangular with a register of signs across the top. One shows an animal and a branch and a row of signs along one edge. The find context was disturbed. The dating has been argued for sixty years.

The round tablet is read by some scholars clockwise starting from the upper right. By others counterclockwise starting from the lower left. By others not at all, on the grounds that reading is the wrong verb.

Haarmann's position is that the Vinča marks are a "sign system" rather than a script. He distinguishes between systems that record speech and systems that do something else. He does not say what the something else is. He says it is not our business to assume.

I want to note one more thing and then stop. The figurines with left-side marks are, in the cases I checked, also marked on the underside of the base. The base marks are different signs from the body marks. I have not found a paper that addresses this. It may be addressed somewhere. I have not found it yet.