The face and the backside of a copy of the Gradeshnitsa tablet
The Gradeshnitsa tablets (Bulgarian: Плочката от Градешница) or plaques are clay artefacts with incised marks. They were unearthed in 1969 near the village of Gradeshnitsa in the Vratsa Province of north-western Bulgaria. Steven Fischer has written that "the current opinion is that these earliest Balkan symbols appear to comprise a decorative or emblematic inventory with no immediate relation to articulate speech." That is, they are neither logographs (whole-word signs depicting one object to be spoken aloud) nor phonographs (signs holding a purely phonetic or sound value)."[1] The tablets are dated to the 4th millennium BC and are currently preserved in the Vratsa Archeological Museum of Bulgaria.[2]
- ^ Fischer, Steven Roger (2003). History of Writing. Reaktion Books. p. 24. ISBN 9781861891679. Retrieved 28 February 2015.
- ^ The Gradeshnitsa Tablets