Zsófia Torma (26 September 1832 – 14 November 1899) was a Hungarian archaeologist, anthropologist and paleontologist.
Torma was born in Csicsókeresztúr, Beszterce-Naszód County, Austria-Hungary (today Cristeștii Ciceului, Bistrița-Năsăud County, Romania). After her parents died, she moved with her sister to Szászváros, now in Romania, where she began to study the snail farms she found in Hunedoara County.
Torma was mostly self-educated. In 1875, she was encouraged by Flóris Rómer, considered by some to be the father of Hungarian archeology, to begin her own excavations of the ancient settlement of Tordos, along the Mureş river. The symbols and scripts on clay objects she found during an excavation in Hunyad County became an archaeological sensation. She also found artifacts of the 6,000- to 7,000-year-old Tordos culture, some of which were covered with Vinca symbols.
Source: Zsófia Torma – Wikiwand
The Vinča culture (Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [ʋîːntʃa]), also known as Turdaș culture, Turdaș–Vinča culture or Vinča-Turdaș culture, is a Neolithic archaeological culture of Southeast Europe, dated to the period 5700–4500 BC or 5300–4700/4500 BC.
Source: Vinča culture – Wikiwand
The Vinča symbols or Vinča–Turdaș signs (among other names) are a set of untranslated symbols found on Neolithic era artifacts from the Vinča culture and related “Old European” cultures of Central Europe and Southeastern Europe. Whether this is one of the earliest writing systems or simply symbols of some sort is disputed. They have sometimes been described as an example of “pre-writing” or “proto-writing“. The symbols went out of use around 3,500 BC.
Source: Vinča symbols – Wikiwand
Biography of Archaeologist Zsófia Torma
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Zsófia Torma was the first to discover the Neolithic culture of Tordos, drawing attention to the connection between the signs of Tordos and the Assyrian-Babylonian literacy, the penetration of Sumerian literature through Southeastern Europe.
She worked in Tordos for twenty years, more than thirty years before the discovery of the carefully collected, extremely valuable finds and dissertations on them, as the Vinca-Tordos culture was only explored in 1908.
Gizella, Edit Novák (2016)
