Klára Friedrich

Lord Colin Renfrew, a professor at Cambridge University is the „top gun” in the field of historical research. One can read in his book: Before Civilization (Hungarian edition by Osiris 1995) that the Vinca culture’s other characteristic -- which has come into the focus of attention lately -- was the fashion of scratching signs onto ceramics and other clay objects. We have the descriptions of decorative signs on two hundred clay fragments from the other very important location of the Vinca culture, Tordos in Rumania. I have to mention that, 125 years ago, Zsófia Torma drew attention to the objects which Renfrew mentions as „lately” coming to the focus of attention and that the signs, which he calls decorative elements, are in reality runic signs, which were also saved for us by this archaeologist. It is to Renfrew’s merit that he presents in his book much more precise drawings of the tablets than those of many Hungarian researchers.

The research team of Knight-Lomas, in their book: A múlt üzenet (Gold Book Kft. 2001) (Uriel’s Machine, 1999) states that, as a result of the examination of the strata surrounding the finds and the radio-carbon process, it was discovered that the symbols on the Tatárlaka tablets were much older than the oldest Sumerian symbols. It would seem that, even after this sensational news, the archeological establishment ignored the whole problem but, as much as they wished to remain within their own paradigms, the experts were forced to recognize that, if there were connections between the two writing-systems, then the Sumerians must have learned from the Transylvanians.

Richard Rudgley, the young anthropologist and religious historian, who was born in 1961, published a book in 1998 which was published in Hungary (no date) by the Gold Book Kft, under the title: A kőkor elveszett civilizációi (The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, 1998). The author is well-informed. He includes in his bibliography the names of Professors László Vértes and Gyula Mészáros, and quotes from Professor János Makkay. It is strange that he does not mention the name of Zsófia Torma, although he knows of her activities, since he starts his chapter concerning the finds of Tatárlaka by stating that decorated shards of clay pots from prehistoric times were discovered first in 1870, in Transylvania, in Torda, near Kolozsvár.

On the other hand he calls Marija Gimbutas, who used Zsófia Torma’s material, a „charismatic Lithuanian archaeologist”. Rudgley shows the precise drawings of the tablets from Renfrew’s book. According to him, the bracelet was not made of shells but of vertebrae. He believes correctly that there is nothing to substantiate Vlassza’s opinion concerning cannibalism during sacrificial activities.

Our tablets became the center point of the debate about carbon-dating procedures. Those who did not accept the new results stated that the measurements were faulty, that the Tatárlaka signs were just an imitation of the Sumerian writing and were brought to Transylvania, only after their development and then spread to other regions. In that case, their date of origin would be later, in the Bronze Age, which is not likely from an archaeological point of view. Finally, these researchers were forced to accept that writing spread from the Carpathian Basin toward the South and that our tablets are a clear proof of this, together with written relics of the Tordos-Vinca, or rather the Bánát culture and others. Regrettably this „realization” does not appear either in the school-books or in the history-books of the past decades.

Concerning the dating of our ancient script András Zakar, (who was the secretary of Cardinal József Mindszenty) states the following in his book: Az írás bölcsőjénél (At the Cradle of Writing): „The history of the origin of the runic and pictographic scripts fades into the dim distance of thousands of years.” (Magyar őskutatás, November 1970)

I present my conclusions in a summary divided into three parts, according to what we know, what is debated and what we do not know.

We know that the location is Transylvania, more exactly Alsó-Tatárlaka where archaeologists found the grave of a human in his/her forties.

4. Was there cannibalism, or „only” a human sacrifice or did our Tatárlaka ancestor die of natural causes?

5. Are there only Sumerian pictographs on the tablets or writing, which we call today Székely-Magyar Runic Script?

1. On the basis of radiocarbon-dating, Hans E. Suess, an American chemist, established the age as 7500-7000 years, in other words 5500-5000 years B.C. Since 1966, there is a more accurate method, dendrochronology, which utilizes tree-rings in dating, according to which one has to add 700 years to every tree-ring for each find, which is older than 3000 years. According to this method, our tablets are 8200-7700 years old, the product of an already developed system of writing and, even if we are very modest and add only 300 years to this process, we can state confidently that the first writing on our planet, after the last Ice Age, belongs to us, Hungarians, because at least four Székely-Magyar runic letters are identifiable on this disk.

Prof. János Makkay is a supporter of the pre-carbon-14 traditional dating-system and places the time of the Tatárlaka burial into the time-frame of 3000 B.C. and with this, into the Vinca-Tordos culture.

The find can therefore be placed into the Neolithic Age, which the Hungarian archaeologist, Professor Gyula László, determined to be between 5000-2300 B.C. According to this, the culture, which created the Tatárlaka find, may go back to the Middle Stone Age (8000-5500 B.C.)

We can find an abundance of data concerning the Hungarian cultures of the Neolithic Age in the works of Professors Gyula László and Nándor Kalicz and also in the publications of the Hungarian National Museum, which are provided with its exhibition on this subject.

2. None of the researchers dealing with the Tatárlaka find – with the one exception of Professor János Makkay – mentions the vessel with a tubular stand or the broken piece of the great vase and, with the exception of István Erdélyi, none of them mentions the clay anchor. Even Vlassza mentioned these objects only later and he did not establish the measurements of the grave. The Tatárlaka find is inseparably connected with the name of this Rumanian archaeologist, who was only 27 years old when he discovered this burial site. It would have been a gift from fate if Zsófia Torma had found these tablets; her unselfish work would have deserved this.

The Hungarian archaeologist, Miklós Gábori, wrote a postword to the book of the French archeologist and ethnographer, André Leroi-Gourhan: Les religions de la préhistoire Paléolithique, (Az őstörténet kultuszai, Kozmosz Könyvek 1985). We learn from this book how a proper excavation should be conducted: „The excavation of the microstratigraphic layers of the site, sliced up into no more than one centimeter-thick pieces, the documentation of each quarter meter in a 10x10 centimeter quadrant-net, a very detailed drawing of the site with a great number of photographs...”

28 fragmented idol statuettes, among them a piece, called a handle-like fragment with a face on it

There are differences in the descriptions of the measurements of the last objects. According to Vlassza the disk is 6.6 cm. in diameter, the rectangular tablet with a hole drilled into it is 6.8 x 3.7 cm., the rectangular tablet with the animal forms is 5.75 x 4.15 cm. Vlassza did not give their thickness and, for this reason I offer the data of the French researcher, Emilia Masson: The diameter of the disk is 6 cm., its thickness 2.1 cm. The width of the tablet with the hole is 6.2 cm., its height 3 cm., its thickness 0.9 cm. The width of the tablet with the animal figures is 5.2 cm., its height 3.5 cm., its thickness 1.6 cm. Before firing, the signs were not scratched into the clay, but were pressed into it with a writing stylus.

3. According to the excavating archaeologist, Vlassza and the expert on Sumerian studies from the Laboratory of the Archeological Institute of the Soviet Academy of Science, (whose name is surrounded by secrets like the Tatárlaka tablets), the gender of deceased was male. According to János Makkay, however, the gender of the deceased is not known.

Since the opinion of the Scientific Academies and their experts is held in high esteem, popular opinion accepted the gender of the Tatárlaka person as a man. However, I could not rest because of the shell-bracelet which was found next to the body and, since I had read in Professor Makkay’s book that the gender of this person is not known, I believed that my suspicion was validated and the person of Tatárlaka was a female. Even the laboratory may err, especially in a bone-fragment which is 6-7000 years old. And let us remember the case of the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi, whose remains were diagnosed as a female skeleton. Objects can speak and, in this case, the shell-bracelet should have the chance to talk. According to my view it was a woman, who was placed to rest in the Tatárlaka grave.

4. We can give a more definite answer to question four: it is certain that our ancestor has not been eaten. Our logical thinking tells us that in a literate culture this could not have happened and I cannot imagine it happening even in ancient times. However, to support my layman’s opinion, I looked up the writings of experts: Leroi-Gourhan’s book discusses in detail the ancient bone-cults and funeral ceremonies and he finds no proof for cannibalism, particularly its religious significance.

In her book: Az ősember Magyarországon (Ancient Man in Hungary, Gondolat Publ. 1970) Vera Csánk Gábori discusses the cave-finds and later, the Gravetti population’s relics and she establishes twice the fact that cannibalism has to be ruled out. If this is so among the ancient people of the Paleolithic period, then it should be doubly ruled out in the Neolithic population, who created revolutionary new objects in the fields of architecture, animal husbandry and the development of writing.

I debate the possibility of human sacrifice, or sacrifice in general. Researchers of our ancient Magyar religion did not find traces of such practices in our culture. They did find, in the mound-graves of the Scythian kings, death-companions and, there is mention that, at Attila’s burial, there were people killed by the arrow but these were certainly volunteers, who chose freely to accompany their lord into his new life. The historian, Thuróczy, mentions (we don’t find this in the works of the historians, Anonymus and Kézai) that the reigning Prince Álmos was killed on the soil of Transylvania because he was not permitted to enter Pannonia. We learn from Arab sources, quoted in the footnotes of the Chronicles, that the sacral killing of kings was a custom among the Kazárs, that their religion permitted human sacrifice but I am sure that the Magyars did not sacrifice their beloved prince.

How then did our Tatárlaka ancestor die? Today, a 35-40 year old man is in the most active, most productive cycle of his life, but was this true in the Neolithic? We can read in the 1976 edition of the Hungarian National Museum’s booklet entitled: Magyarország népeinek története az őskőkortól a honfoglalásig (History Of the People of Hungary from the Stone Age to Árpád’s Arrival) that the life-span of people in the New Stone Age was 27-31 years. 90 percent of the population did not reach age 45. So our ancestor’s age corresponds with today’s 70 years and we can state that he/she lived a respectably long life. It is a little unsettling to see the charred bones, which need an explanation, but if we look at the funeral customs of the millennia before Christ, we get a logical answer.

The cremation of the dead began in the Neolithic and it became widely accepted in the Copper and Bronze Ages. The cremated remains were placed into urns or pit-graves and surrounded with the vessels, which contained the food necessary for the afterlife and also idols which honored the Mother Goddess and other little statues. Nándor Kalicz’s book: Agyagistenek (Clay Gods) shows several urns with human forms and faces. The height of these is between 48 and 24 centimeters. In the back of the urn, at a spot that corresponds with the nape of a human neck, there is a hole through which the human bones could be placed into the urn. So the height of the urns explains the broken bones, which otherwise could not have been placed into the urn. David and Joan Oates, in their book: The Rise of Civilization (A civilizáció hajnala, Helikon Publ. 1983), show one such urn from 6000 B.C., which was found in Northern Mesopotamia. It is nicely painted, has a face and shows the head of a long-haired woman. Three vertical lines are painted under each eye. The given explanation is that they are beauty lines. But these are tears! The female’s face itself appears suffering, in pain. The pain caused by the loss of the beloved person appears on the urn’s „face” or on vessels, which were placed next to the dead.

Large vessels with faces were found in the territory of the Vinca culture but these did not always serve as urns. These vessels with faces clearly show our ancestors’ road toward the South. They appeared in Anatolia in 5000 B.C and later in Mesopotamia. Even before I was able to obtain Professor János Makkay’s book, I was convinced that there had to be an urn in Tatárlaka too, otherwise the bones would not have been broken. Earlier data did not indicate the presence of an urn and so I thought that, due to the sudden death of the person, there was no time to dry or to fire the clay urn and it was buried in a wet state and so it turned to dust over thousands of years. Based on Prof. János Makkay’s book, I see that my theory is validated. He states that there must have been an urn-burial and this large vessel must have contained the bones, the tablet with the hole was on the neck of the deceased, while the simple tablet without the hole was placed next to the body.

5. There is not only a Sumerian pictograph on the disk but at least four letters of the ancient Székely-Magyar Runic Script, the F, Z, NY and GY are recognizable.[1] As we shall see later, this Sumerian pictograph should be called more exactly the Carpathian-Basin pictograph. Coming back to the runic script, one can ascertain that this is not an isolated find, based on Zsófia Torma’s Tordos finds of more than ten-thousand tablets which even contain ligatures, which are the product of a more sophisticated mental process.

Researchers have proved that the Mesopotamian pictographic tablets are 1000-1500 years younger than the Tatárlaka tablets. Did it take this many years for our ancestors to reach Sumer? The Carpathian Basin is at least 6000 kilometers from the southern end of Mesopotamia in a direct line. If they traveled through the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor, the distance would be approximately 6200 kilometers, and if they crossed the Caucasus, about 6500-7000 kilometers. One man travels about 5 kilometers per hour. Since we do not know how strong our ancestors were in the New Stone Age but we do know that their average age was much lower than the average age of today, that the quality of roads was worse, that they also carried heavy loads, let us suppose they traveled only three kilometers per hour. In this manner, the 6700 kilometers would have been completed in 2230 hours. If they walked 8 hours/day, then this would take 280 days or 9 months. This is how much time it would take to reach Sumer from the Carpathian Basin, so they did not need 1000-1500 years to transmit the writing. Of course, the whole trip was not undertaken by the same people. My theory is – as I discussed in my book: Roga koronájá, concerning Roga’s crown – that our ancestors started out with two goals in mind: to become familiar with the globe and to transmit their knowledge. For this reason the migration out of the Carpathian Basin was continuous and also the return to the same place. Along the way they built guard-posts, which eventually evolved into great centers. The chain of communication between these guard-posts was fast. The messengers always used the same sections of the road and then others took over, who knew the topography (mountains, rivers, crossings), and carried the news, the teaching, the writing and raw materials to the next guard- station. As of today, we don’t have any data that they traveled on horseback in the New Stone Age but let us go back to the decipherments of Professor János Harmatta, according to which, among the votive gifts to four Sumerian deities, there were horses too.

Europe’s first representation of a wagon was found in Budakalász, made of clay in 3000 B.C. In his book: A bronzkor Magyarországon (The Bronze Age in Hungary Corvina 1977) Tibor Kovács, after examining several wagon models, came to the conclusion that, in Hungary, the horse was already wide-spread in the Bronze Age and its ability to carry weight and its speed was already utilized. It seems appropriate to mention at this point that, 3700 years later, the Swedish King Charles reached the Baltic port of Straslund, which belonged to the Turkish Empire at that time, in 14 days on horse-back. Along the way he stopped for a rest, on November 17, 1714, in the building on the corner of the Váci and Irányi streets in Budapest.

Zoltán Tamás Forray – as mentioned before – stated in his book: A kerék ősmagyar eredete (The Ancient Magyar Origin of the Wheel) that the wagon, as a vehicle of transportation and as a word and an idea spread from the Carpathian Basin throughout the world.

There are not only pictographs then on the Tatárlaka tablets but also the letters of the Székely-Magyar Runic Script, which is an advanced form of writing, where one sign marks one sound. The pictographic signs were used mutually and in the same way in the territories of the Tordos-Vinca (Bánát) culture by the Transylvanian indigenous population and by the Sumerians. The Sumerians – according to my thesis – are the descendants of the ancient population of the Carpathian Basin, who wandered south at an unknown time. I have a theory as to why the Sumerians did not adopt the runic letters, which are easy to create with a writing reed, a stylus, by pressing them into the clay tablets, but this is not the subject of this present writing.

6. The bracelet, which was found next to the bones, was probably made of shell. We presume this partly because, with the exception of Rudgley, everyone has stated this as a fact and partly because the main decorative objects at that time were shells. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that the researchers established the type of shell as Spondylus and the word spondyl means vertebra. Either Rudgley or the translator was careless in this matter. Leroi-Gourhan writes that already in the Old Stone Age, the people traveled great distances to obtain shells. In the Mas-d’Azil caves, which are half way between the Ocean and the Mediterranean, (where some runic-like letters were also found on some stones) shells were found from both places. People frequently traveled 100-200 kilometers for these shells. Vera Csánk Gábori found storage places for jewelry shells at an excavation by the river Ipoly, in Hungary.

7. Were the two statuettes made of stone or alabaster? Alabaster is a fine, granular, crystalline gypsum. We have several artistic alabaster relics from Sumer. The most famous is the one-meter high, 6000 year old vase, which shows lively scenes and which was guarded as a treasure, even in ancient times. It was one of the celebrated pieces of the Iraqi National Museum. We don’t know what happened to it after the Americans initiated a brutal attack against Iraq, in 2003, and the treasures of the Baghdad Museum were either demolished or stolen. On the basis of the Sumerian alabaster treasures, it is probable that the Tatárlaka statuettes were also made of alabaster. Professor Ferenc Jós Badiny also shows these two statuettes in his book entitled: Igaz történelmünk vezérfonala Árpádig (The Guiding Thread of our True History to Árpád.) Similar alabaster statuettes were found in Bezdéd and Szakálhát, which belong to the linear culture of the Hungarian Great Plains and are 5300-5000 years old. Their size is between 5 and 7 centimeters.

We do not know since when, for how long and what kind of research is being done on our tablets in Germany, where they are presently, according to the workers of the Kolozsvár Museum.

[1] (The double letters are composites to express one Magyar sound since the Latin alphabet is thirteen letters short of the needed sound-values. The translator.)