6,000 Year Old Trypillian Temple Discovered in the Ukraine

Angela

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This is the article from Discovery News:

http://news.discovery.com/history/a...-possible-sacrificial-altars-found-141021.htm

"Recent research using geophysical survey indicates the prehistoric settlement is 238 hectares (588 acres), almost twice the size of the modern-day National Mall in Washington, D.C. It contained more than 1,200 buildings and nearly 50 streets.

Built before writing was invented, the temple is about 60 by 20 meters (197 by 66 feet) in size. It was a "two-story building made of wood and clay surrounded by a galleried courtyard," the upper floor divided into five rooms, write archaeologists Nataliya Burdo and Mykhailo Videiko in a copy of a presentation they gave recently at the European Association of Archaeologists' annual meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.
To refresh all our recollections see the Wiki article below. In this particular case, it seems to have gotten the basics right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture

Archaeologists found that when this prehistoric settlement was abandoned, its structures, including the newly discovered temple, were burnt down, something that commonly occurred at other Trypillian culture sites."

Another example of "Old Europe".

To refresh our recollections, this is the Wiki article, which in this case seems to be quite well written and objective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture
 
 
bicicleur said:
as for the invention of writing have a look at

is it writing or not?
Click to expand...

Its impossible to tell from the data we have. The problem is, if you have only a relatively small corpus, an undeciphered script is essentially unreadable. We also do not know what kind of language the script encoded. It is clear however, that the script dissappeared and left no descendants.
 
Yet another really nice find in Ukraine. I still find the size those communities grew to, amazing.
Regarding the writing, well I respect what Taranis has said about too little data to form a positive opinion. At the same time, albeit to my untrained eye, I think some of the script looks convincing for at least some style of message conveyance.
 
hope said:
Yet another really nice find in Ukraine. I still find the size those communities grew to, amazing.
Regarding the writing, well I respect what Taranis has said about too little data to form a positive opinion. At the same time, albeit to my untrained eye, I think some of the script looks convincing for at least some style of message conveyance.
Click to expand...

But here's the thing: we don't know what type of script we're talking about. The majority of the world's scripts are either syllabaries, "proper" alphabets (consonants + vowels), abjads ("pure" consonant alphabets), or logographic, or a combination of the aforementioned: Egyptian hieroglyphs for example were a combination of an abjad (even, uniquely, multiple consonant roots) and logographic signs. The Cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was essentially a syllabary combined with logographic symbols, but it originally started out as purely logographic.

If the Vinca script was purely logographic, there's no way to decipher it because no information what so ever about the underlying language is conveyed. Even if the script wasn't purely logographic and something else, you'd still need a sufficiently large corpus to decipher it. There were literally thousands of samples of Linear B necessary to decipher it, despite the fact that it conveyed a language that has living relatives.
 
The discovery of this temple is potentially ground-breaking as it would mean that the world's first city could have belonged to the Trypillian culture and not the Sumerian culture, as was usually assumed. The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture was already known for having the largest and most populous settlements on Earth around 4000 BCE, but these settlements were referred to by archaeologists as towns, and not cities, because they lack the political or religious buildings associated with cities. This temple fills the gap, and we can know talk of at least one Trypillian city in the Late Neolithic period.
 
Taranis said:
But here's the thing: we don't know what type of script we're talking about. The majority of the world's scripts are either syllabaries, "proper" alphabets (consonants + vowels), abjads ("pure" consonant alphabets), or logographic, or a combination of the aforementioned: Egyptian hieroglyphs for example were a combination of an abjad (even, uniquely, multiple consonant roots) and logographic signs. The Cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was essentially a syllabary combined with logographic symbols, but it originally started out as purely logographic.

If the Vinca script was purely logographic, there's no way to decipher it because no information what so ever about the underlying language is conveyed. Even if the script wasn't purely logographic and something else, you'd still need a sufficiently large corpus to decipher it. There were literally thousands of samples of Linear B necessary to decipher it, despite the fact that it conveyed a language that has living relatives.
Click to expand...
Thanks for this,Taranis. Yet again you remind us, there is much that should be considered.
 
Taranis said:
But here's the thing: we don't know what type of script we're talking about. The majority of the world's scripts are either syllabaries, "proper" alphabets (consonants + vowels), abjads ("pure" consonant alphabets), or logographic, or a combination of the aforementioned: Egyptian hieroglyphs for example were a combination of an abjad (even, uniquely, multiple consonant roots) and logographic signs. The Cuneiform script of Mesopotamia was essentially a syllabary combined with logographic symbols, but it originally started out as purely logographic.

If the Vinca script was purely logographic, there's no way to decipher it because no information what so ever about the underlying language is conveyed. Even if the script wasn't purely logographic and something else, you'd still need a sufficiently large corpus to decipher it. There were literally thousands of samples of Linear B necessary to decipher it, despite the fact that it conveyed a language that has living relatives.
Click to expand...

You are right. But the fascinating thing is that you can find the Old European symbols in nearly every old "scripts". Look at the phonecian Script i contails nearly all vinca symbols.
 
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