The Literacy of Prehistory
by Radivoje Pešić
Excerpt from Vinča: The Signs and Fate of European Civilization (coming soon from PRAV Publishing), translated by Jafe Arnold.
If we bring ourselves to face science’s latest, fundamental discovery that water holds memory, then it is certain that the Danube holds in its memory many bygone times and the civilizations that made up those times. Across all those times, those historically known to us as well as those still unfathomable, the Danube, by the power of attraction of its energies embodying the sacred conception of survival, offered motherly shelter to natives as well as those passing through. Enlivened with its sacred energy, the hearths of many civilizations endured along its banks and cast the spiritual force of its light into times and worlds to come.
The earliest civilizations of the old continent, the so-called “land of the setting sun,” arose and flourished on its banks, but the river itself continued to rush to the East, to the source of light and truth, as if to show these worlds the potential of this way.
Across an altogether vast area stretching between the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea, the Carpathians and Crete, in the Neolithic period from the 6th to the 4th millennia BC, we have the first appearance of writing, a script that preceded all the writing systems known to date. We find the richest treasury of this first appearance of writing in the Middle Danube Basin, not far from Belgrade, at the monumental archaeological site of Vinča, after which this script is named. Vinča, however, is not the only archaeological site in the Balkans that brings today’s civilization face-to-face with a rich treasury of literacy from a world which we all too often see as a world of primitive spiritual life. The literacy of Vinča spread throughout both space and time, reaching nearly unimaginable dimensions, and all the natures of its morphology — pictograms, ideographs, and letters — influenced the development of later civilizations’ literacy.
The Pannonian Plain, whose southern edges are splashed by the enchanting currents of the Danube, is a singular treasury of this literacy. This is attested by an abundance of archeological sites: Starčevo, Gomolava, Donja Branjevina, Vatin, etc. From the Younger Stone Age marked by the Starčevo culture around 6000 BC to the Vinča culture and the Late Bronze Age to which the Vatin group belonged up to 1400 BC, the paleo-script of the Pannonian Plain is confirmation of the continuity of the development of the Vinča script. The early traces of this script are preserved in synthesized messages and spiritual laws that were engraved on ceramic objects for everyday use and on votive figures which represent compressions of the spiritual mechanics of the prehistoric world.
Today, we find ourselves astonished by prehistoric man’s sophisticated morphological precision as represented in these inscriptions, as well as by the very fact of the great consistency of his spiritual identification with this writing. On the other hand, a great number of records confirm that this literacy was widespread, which leads us to the conclusion that it was not the privilege of a chosen few, but a spiritual necessity among far wider circles.
Many of the civilizations that moved across the Balkan Peninsula could not resist falling under the influence of this spiritual expression. They adopted the sacrality of the letter as the most profound sacrality from which the world of pure consciousness arises and in which it lives on. They either adapted to its principles or adapted these principles to their own energy of spirit.
The Pannonian syllabary remained in use for a long time as the only textbook of the old Europe’s literacy and as the singular source for the syllabaries of later Eurasian civilizations. Today, this syllabary draws us nearer to times which we cannot underestimate. And this is not all. It is as though the syllabary tests our readiness to purely and correctly receive its message, whose contents we will soon come to know.
With freedom of spirit, prehistoric man formulated his ideas and images through his script. Feelings of emptiness and loneliness are foreign to him; he does not isolate himself socially, but rather is drawn towards community and intellectual communication. He does not separate himself from the future and the past, and he does not represent a so-called “free-floating world.” On the contrary, he is conscious of his past and has respect for it; he is thankful for everything that this past has left him, and he lives in direct proximity to it. The past is present in his everyday life; his experience of it is lived. This is confirmed not only by burial manners and the very space for burial which he shares with his living space, but also by how he lives in accordance with three principles on three temporal levels which he sees as belonging to him at the same time as he belongs to them. Prehistoric man is a man of powerful emotions and a just relation to the community, to nature, and to himself. He does not change the world by the dint of his life and activities, which are not a ceaseless struggle for bare survival. He discovers the world. He discovers the world around himself and within himself. He has his desires and dreams, for he is human. However, according to the opinion of some researchers, this man does not belong to historical consciousness, but rather to mythological consciousness. Such concepts have led to more recent civilizations exhibiting an indifferent attitude towards the spiritual endowments of prehistoric man. As it turns out, however, the boundary between the historical and the mythological disappears from one day to the next. And yet, the old civilizations, hitherto ignored by more recent ones, cause headaches for the civilizations of high technology, for they present the essential, existential solutions that are beyond the reach of technology.
Prehistoric man left us with traces of his experience, and in so doing he confirmed that he was by no means a “free-floating world.” He had a comportment towards the future, a responsibility towards the future, a future to which, as we have already said, he belonged just as much as he belonged to bygone time. The inscriptions which the prehistoric world left on cave walls, stone slabs, ceramic objects, and wood present not only the history of his life, but also the orderedness of this life and the very need for such order. Thus, their messages are no mere disclosures of the secrets of this mysterious order, as if instructions for future times; rather, they are reminders of this way of life and way of thinking which, without a doubt, were one. In this way, they showed their belonging to the future.
The extent to which later civilizations conceive their presence in their own time in relation to belonging to the future is best confirmed by their inability to understand the language and script of their distant predecessors. Those sullen researchers who have made up their minds about the past through their individual disciplines have not only been confounded by the very thought of the possible existence of a writing script in distant prehistory, but have been so self-confident and self-conceited as to coldly deny such a possibility.
The question begs itself: who in this case is literate and who is illiterate? The one who doesn’t know how to write, or the one who doesn’t know how to read?
Today’s world has a huge record of archaic inscriptions. They emerged from several families of scripts. Their earliest traces go back to the 4th millennium BC. However, the most recent archaeological, speleological, and grammatological studies have pushed human literacy back into the much deeper past of up to 250,000 years. This is no sensationalism, but rather a moral deed on the part of conscientious researchers who long ago arrived at the understanding that man’s connection to writing is biological and his spiritual manifestation.
The documentation of the archaic script in the Balkans, particularly in the area of Yugoslavia, has changed many notions on the historical and geographical development and spread of writing. Even more significantly, this documentation offers confirmation of the existence of a linear alphabetic script as far back as the 6th and 7th millennia BC — a script which survives to this day.
Man wrote letter and number without hesitation in what is for us the still ungraspable, unfathomably deep past. This means that those bygone times were not poor.
In the deep past, man lived in a vertical, spiritual orderedness and was able to face and overcome all the riddles of life that he encountered, but he did not “master” them, because he lived as part of them in the general orderedness of ideal unity. He left all of his experience to future times in written messages, perhaps with the premonition that the balance of the pure structure would be disturbed. Whether suicidal atomic civilization will be able to reach the level of prehistoric man’s literacy and discover the real, perhaps salvational content of his messages depends on the spiritual energy we have left.
Bowing before the alphabet and revering it as a meeting place of unspoken secrets is characteristic of syncretism. For Francis of Assisi, every page of writing was sacred because letters themselves are sacred. The man of deep prehistory wrote out the letter. The archaeological record convinces us that this was a sacred act for him, for it opened up new expanses of history.
Constant divisions of the world, misunderstandings, self-conceit, and flight from the orderedness of natural development in favor of false goods — all of this is testimony to our being one step from the edge of a cliff, testimony to a flight from truth into hopelessness, all because, among other reasons, an alienated language is being used, a language that is only for mechanical communication, and man’s exalting feelings of love and joy for living in community and understanding are suppressed. Shall we leave ourselves to the rage of elements leading to the inevitable, final catastrophe already on display in our everyday view of a torn sky, or shall we accept, on the threshold of the third millennium, the glimmer of hope offered by turning to face our other side from a previous era, with all of its messages of spiritual experience? The truth remains before us and we must bow down before it, for only by the truth is it possible to live and make sense of our identity…
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Vinča: The Signs and Fate of European Civilization by Radivoje Pešić is forthcoming from PRAV Publishing.