Civilization as a stage in the development of society is characterized by a number of features, among which the presence of cities and writing is decisive. The emergence of these phenomena presupposes the presence of a producing economy and a social division of labor in society. Civilization emerges only after the transition to agriculture and / or animal husbandry, but by no means every agricultural and pastoralist society is a civilization.
The oldest writing
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Egyptian civilization was considered the most ancient civilization in the world. Later, with the discovery of Sumerian cuneiform, the civilization of Mesopotamia was considered the first. She held the lead until the 1960s.
In the middle of the twentieth century, excavations of the archaeological culture of Vinca began on the Balkan Peninsula and in the Danube region. In 1961, archaeologists discovered clay tablets with strange symbols carved into them near the village of Terteria in Romania. When objects from the cultural layer where they were found were subjected to radiocarbon analysis, it turned out that they were about 7,500 years old.
Later, objects with similar signs were found in other settlements of the Vinca culture in the territories of Northern Greece (Dispilio), Bulgaria (Gradeshnitsa), Serbia and other neighboring countries. They were all created between 5500 and 4000. BC.
The Vinca culture itself was the first culture in Europe, where, in addition to agriculture, they were also engaged in the processing of metals. Metallurgy here arose no later than in the Middle Eastern centers of civilization and obviously independently of them. If we consider the found signs as a writing system, then it turns out that the first civilization on Earth arose in Southeast Europe one and a half to two thousand years earlier than civilizations in Asia Minor.
The interpretation of the signs of the Vinca culture is controversial. It is still not clear what it is, therefore, it is not yet possible to decipher them. Some researchers insist that this is not just writing, but syllabic writing. Others argue that the Vinca signs are pictograms - conventional symbols, the third - that these are the simplest mnemonic records that do not carry meaning outside the specific situation when and for what they were written.
In any case, it is not yet possible to read them, since the language of their creators is unknown, and there are also no parallel records (bilinguals) of the same texts in some known language. After all, only the bilingual method was able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform.
Where did the Vincheans come from and where did they go?
The area of the Vinca culture entirely occupied the present territory of Serbia and partly Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Bosnia, Montenegro and Albania. Some of her items were also found in Moldova and Ukraine.
Many hypotheses have been created about the ethnicity of the bearers of the Vinca culture, but all of them are equally unprovable. American archaeologist Maria Gimbutas developed the concept of "old Europe", according to which the Vinca culture and a number of synchronous, as well as earlier and later cultures in Europe represent the legacy of disappeared peoples, wiped off the face of the earth by the subsequent invasion of Indo-Europeans. Common to "old Europe" was matriarchy and the worship of the Great Goddess. The peoples of “old Europe” did not know wars and property inequality, lived in unfortified settlements … In short, the feminist golden age, interrupted by the invasion of illiterate and bloodthirsty barbarians-Indo-Europeans, who were, in addition, male chauvinists …
Gimbutas believes that the predecessor of the Vinca culture was the Chatal Huyuk culture in Asia Minor. There were discovered the oldest cities on Earth, temples and other signs of civilization, besides writing. However, there are scholars who interpret the cult drawings found in Chatal-Huyuk as proto-writing.
British archaeologist K. Renfrew and Russian V. A. Safronov also recognize the Vinca culture as a succession of Chatal-Huyuk, but, unlike Gimbutas, they regard both as Proto-Indo-European. According to Safronov, the Vinca culture has not completely disappeared. Many of its cultural elements (such as, for example, a megaron-type house) directly passed into the later cultures of Europe, especially into the ancient Greek (Mycenaean) one.
The fate of the Vinca writing is also unclear. Gimbutas, developing the hypothesis that it was just writing, argued that the ancient Cretan Linear A (also still unread) was a later development of the Vincean sign system.
Many researchers do not accept the theory that the Vinca signs were the first writing in humans. They point out that Vinca was otherwise too underdeveloped for its native speakers to have no need for writing. In particular, the social stratification among the Vincheans was very weak or absent, they did not know the cities, they apparently did not yet have power.
However, not all signs of civilization arise simultaneously or in a strict sequence. Ethnographers know examples when property stratification arises on the basis of a manufacturing economy, and the oldest city on Earth, Jericho, also arose at the stage of gathering wild cereals.
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Genetic connections of Wincheans
Archeology cannot yet give an indisputable answer, where did the bearers of the Vinca culture come from and where they went later. Perhaps genetics will come to the rescue?
MT-DNA haplogroup K is found in representatives of both Vinca and Chatal Huyuk, as well as the Mesolithic culture of Lepenski Vir, which preceded Vinche in the Balkans. Other mtDNAs of the Vinci haplogroup are widespread in Europe and the Middle East. One of them - U2 - was found at four inhabitants of the Sungir site near Vladimir more than 30 thousand years ago.
The most common Y-chromosomal haplogroup of Wincheans is G2. At present, its greatest concentration is observed in the Caucasus mountains. In the Neolithic, preceding the creation of the Vinca culture, the G2 haplogroup was widespread among the inhabitants of the Middle East, from there its carriers during the "Neolithic revolution" spread widely in all directions, including Europe. Interestingly, the G2a2 subclade, to which most of the Wincheans studied so far belong, is often found in our time in the royal dynasties of Morocco and Jordan.
The region of the highest concentration of another Y-chromosomal haplogroup H found among the Vincheans is now South India. It is also widely found among the Gypsies (about 60%), Tajiks, Kurds and other peoples of the Aryan group.
Paleogenetic studies do not refute (although they do not prove) the possibility that the carriers of the Vinca culture were ancient Indo-Europeans. However, they could also be representatives of the Semitic-Hamitic or Caucasian family, as well as belong to the now extinct language family.
Yaroslav Butakov