The Tartaria Tablets: The Clay Tablets That Might Rewrite the History of Writing

Close-up photograph of a round clay tablet from Tărtăria, its surface divided into sections filled with incised symbols, with a 3-centimetre scale bar below it

About 6 min readIn 1961, three small clay tablets dug from a Neolithic pit in Transylvania were said to carry the world’s oldest writing — more than a thousand years before the Sumerians. Six decades later, archaeologists still cannot agree on what they are.