The discovery of some mysterious tablets at Tartaria (Alba County, Transylvania) has lead some enthusiasts to question the generally accepted theory that Sumer is the cradle of civilization.

Tartaria is a rural settlement of approximately 5000 inhabitants, situated on the Northern side of Sureanu Mountains, on river Mures, not very far from Zlatna region (famous since Antiquity for its gold and copper deposits) and 18 – 20 km far from the sites of two important Neolithic cultures: Turdas and Alba Iulia – Lumea Noua. Some archaeological excavations were executed here between 1895 and 1910 and the results (the discovery of some intriguing artifacts, among which a pot dated as being older than the seals from Sumer) triggered the interest for this area.

In 1961, Nicolae Vlassa (archaeologist at the Cluj-Napoca Museum) discovered three little inscribed plates of baked clay, together with some funerary offerings and the bones of a mature human being. The Romanian archaeologist asserted that the person was a 35-40 years old man, possibly a shaman or priest, but later research on the bone structure revealed that it was an old woman (usually referred to as Milady Tartaria), possibly a holy person. The way this character died also started a controversy: some say she or he was burnt, other claim that he or she was part of cannibalistic rituals.

But the most passionate controversy concerns the tablets. They are engraved with some pictographic signs that have led some to claim that we are dealing with the oldest writing system in the world, even a millennium older than the one from Mesopotamia.

The first tablet is rectangular and contains mixed pictographic symbols, zoomorphic, isomorphic and primal symbols – An animal tree, a spiral and an animal head.

The second tablet is round and it is divided in four quadrants by two engraved lines. The sky is depicted in the upper left one and the underground universe in the lower right one. The third tablet is rectangular and contains only zoomorphic and phitomorphic representations – a tree, a goat and a third engraving which seems to be the root of a tree.

The followers of this theory began finding arguments to sustain it. An example is a fragment from one of Plato’s writings, in which it is recounted how some bronze tablets were brought to the Delos Temple by some virgins from a region identified as North of Danube (Baia de Arama).

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