Gradeshnitsa tablets

{{Short description|Bulgarian Neolithic artefacts with incised marks}}

{{multiple image

| align = right

| direction = horizontal

| width = 150

| footer = The face and the backside of a copy of the Gradeshnitsa tablet

| image1 = Vratsa-history-museum-Gradeshnitsa-tablet-face.jpg

| alt1 =

| image2 = Vratsa-history-museum-Gradeshnitsa-tablet-back.jpg

| alt2 =

}}

{{See also|Old Europe (archaeology)|Prehistoric Europe}}

The Gradeshnitsa tablets ({{langx|bg|Плочката от Градешница}}) or plaques are clay artefacts with incised marks. They were unearthed in 1969 near the village of Gradeshnitsa in the Vratsa Province of north-western Bulgaria. Steven Fischer has written that "the current opinion is that these earliest Balkan symbols appear to comprise a decorative or emblematic inventory with no immediate relation to articulate speech." That is, they are neither logographs (whole-word signs depicting one object to be spoken aloud) nor phonographs (signs holding a purely phonetic or sound value)."{{cite book |last1= Fischer |first1= Steven Roger |title= History of Writing |date= 2003 |publisher= Reaktion Books |isbn= 9781861891679 |page= 24 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=Ywo0M9OpbXoC&pg=PA24 |access-date= 28 February 2015}} The tablets are dated to the 4th millennium BC and are currently preserved in the Vratsa Archeological Museum of Bulgaria.[http://www.omda.bg/public/engl/history/selishte21_engl.htm The Gradeshnitsa Tablets]