Original article (in Serbian) was published on 19/10/2024; Author: Marija Zemunović
Politika published a text “The Cyrillic Origin of European Literacy” in which the author presents several inaccurate claims – about the so-called “Vinca script”, the Cyrillic order of letters in ancient Roman books, and the Etruscan linguistic tradition. The article was published the same day in the printed edition, in the “Among Us” section, written by readers of this paper.
“Letter records found in Vinca”
The author relies on pseudoscientific theses about the so-called “Vinca script”, which we have previously discussed: writer Radivoje Pesic presented his “interpretation” of this script in the 1980s, and the same idea was promoted by Jovan Deretic in his book “Ancient Serbia”. The author of Politika’s article states the following:
After the last Ice Age (approximately 10,000 years BCE), conditions suitable for life were created. The development of the Danube civilization followed. Letter records were found at the archaeological site of Vinca on the Danube and at the site of the village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria (in the Greek part of Macedonia).
However, the relevant academic community does not believe that the Vinca script existed, nor that the system of signs from Vinca can be considered a script, and thus not a precursor to “European literacy”. The idea of the “Vinča script” as a Vinca writing system belongs to the realm of pseudoscience. Aleksandar Palavestra from the Department of Archaeology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade wrote in the paper “The Invention of Tradition: ‘Vinca Script’” precisely about this issue:
Based on the existing evidence, it can be concluded that there is no Vinca script. Not even a proto-script! After the exhibition in Novi Sad (and the published catalog), I would say that, generally, apart from sporadic cases, there are no signs either. ‘Vinca script’ is just one link in a chain of various invented traditions that always thrive in circumstances of a shaken identity of a community, as a surrogate for legitimacy and cement for national and social cohesion.
In the text “Why Vinca Script is Not a Script?”, Danas explains that we are dealing with isolated signs: they are too few, heterogeneous, and unsystematic to form a script. Furthermore, there are neither words nor sentences in the so-called “records”, let alone any text.
“In ancient Roman books, letters have been arranged in Cyrillic order”
The article also mentions examples intended to show that letters in various ancient scripts were presented in Cyrillic order, in order to support the claim from the title about the Cyrillic origin of European literacy.
According to the book “Post Scriptum: The History and Significance of the Art of Writing”, the oldest confirmed alphabet is Phoenician: “Phoenician is the first script in which one sign represented one sound, in contrast to complex other scripts such as cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs. It developed from the aforementioned proto-Sinaitic, which developed in ancient Egypt for communication among Semitic workers, and was influenced by Egyptian hieratic,” writes Kristina Sekrst, a linguist from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.
She explains that the order of letters also developed from proto-Sinaitic to its derivatives. “As for the order, it is the following — such an arrangement was inherited from proto-Sinaitic scripts, partly even from Egyptian hieroglyphs (where one can easily see the similarity of some Egyptian signs). Therefore, a similar order will be seen in, for example, Semitic languages, since it originates from the same proto-Sinaitic root, so it is not surprising that we have aleph as the first letter in Hebrew script, followed by bet.
The author of Politika’s article states that “ancient Roman, i.e., Etruscan books, which were in use 3,000 years ago, arranged letters from A to Š”. It is worth noting that the author uses the adjective “Etruscan” twice and misspells it both times, omitting the second letter “r.”
Sekrst explains that “ancient Roman” and “Etruscan” are not synonyms, as they do not refer to the same culture, and the order did not go from “a” to “š”, but rather — from “a” to “f” more likely. She says that we do not know much about Etruscan, but the current consensus in the field is that the Latin alphabet developed from the Etruscan alphabet: “The sequence is as follows: hieroglyphic writing > proto-Sinaitic writing > Semitic scripts, including Phoenician syllabary > Greek script > Etruscan script > Latin alphabet”, states Sekrst.
“The Greeks are not of European origin”
The controversial text also states that “the Greeks are not a people of European origin—they settled in the northern Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE”. However, the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that the Greeks “are of Indo-European tribes of European origin”: “From 1800 BCE, the first early Greeks arrived at their later settlements between the Ionian and Aegean Seas. The merging of these earliest people who spoke Greek with their predecessors produced a civilization known as Mycenaean”.
