Alba Regia. Annales Musei Stephani Regis. – Alba Regia. Az István Király Múzeum Évkönyve. 10. 1969 – Szent István Király Múzeum közleményei: C sorozat (1969)
Tanulmányok – Abhandlungen - Makkay János: The Late Neolithic Tordos Group of Sign. X, 1969. p. 9–49. t. I–IV.
TANULMÁNYOK — ABHANDLUNGEN THE LATE NEOLITHIC TORDOS GROUP OF SIGNS The Neolithic site of Tordos, known all over the world, La luncä (— meadow, grove) stands on the left bank of the Maros at the point where the river, flowing southwards, turns to the west. The person who really discovered the site, Zsófia Torma, the first female archaeologist in Hungary, may have seen it in its original or almost original extent in the first years of the last third of the nineteenth century. The measures given by her (950 mx 700 m, i.e. 722 thousand m 2 , 178 acres) are quite extraordinary. 1 It is a great pity that the quickly diminished settlement, washed away by the inundations of the Maros, cculd not be saved, or at least its finds collected systematically. This is borne out by the fact that the preserved firds are derived almost exclusively from the collecti ig and excavating activity of Zsófia Torma, falling between the years 1875 and 1891 most probably. 2 We know, however that the settlement was diminished by the Maros also in the following five decades, so that most of it had been washed away by the 1930s. 3 This lamentable fact is not altered by the verifying excavations executed by Márton Roska at four points of the settlement in 1910, as his squares were too small, so they did not contribute much to the definition of the stratigraphical circumstances, inner arrangement and typology of the settlement. 4 Though in 1941 Roska published the finds collected by Zsófia Torma in the form of a catalogue (rendering a most valuable service to research thereby), a systematic arrangement of the Tordos finds has not been made even after him. In all probability, this fact was (and is) due also to the dispersion of the material : according to the custom of the time, the Tordos finds were divided between the Transylvanian Nation1 TZsGy 7. This measure is astonishingly large : even if we consider that the strata of the settlement are not too thick, they attain 2 m altogether (ibid. 14). This extension of 178 acres, stated in 1879 (ZSÓFIA TORMA: Neolithic Settlements in the County Hunyad (in Hung.). Erdélyi Múzeum, Kolozsvár 1879, VI. 5— 7, 130) surpasses the area of Troy II (2 l / 4 acres) or even that of Homeric Troy (5 acres) by far. This area is almost the half of the territory of Hattusas: SETON LLOYD: Mounds of the Near East. Edinburgh, 1963, 83. 2 TZsGy 4,5. The National Museum of Kolozsvár has inventoried 9673 objects altogether. 3 SKS 8. * TZsGy. 9-15. al Museum, the Székely National Museum, the Hungarian National Museum, the private collection of Endre Orosz, 5 in fact foreign institutions too, such as the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Swedish National Museum and several collections in Germany (e.g. Berlin). 6 It was found out recently that numerous Tordos finds, allotted in the past century to the Museum of the Bethlen College at Nagyenyed, comprising several hundreds of idols (!), remained unpublished to our day. 7 These circumstances hinder even the reconstruction of the history of the settlement on the basis of a typological systematization of the finds, as was done (this being the only possible solution) in the cas2 of a Vinca settlement with a very similar history, in fact perhaps a more important one, the famous Belo Brdo. It is the merit of M. V. Garasanin to have classified the Tordos settlement in the Vinca — Tordos (— Vinca A — B) culture; he was right in stating that Tordos only existed in the early phase of the Vinca culture, of long duration. 8 By accepting the dating of Garasanin (with the proviso that the beginning and the end of the Tordos settlement, as far as they are not exactly coincident with the very beginning of Vinca A, or the end of Vinca B, respectively, might be defined more exactly) we have defined unequivocally the probable extreme boundaries of the date of all Neolithic finds in the settlement for our following investigation. The more than 300 incised signs visible on the most varied Tordos finds : on the bottoms and sides of the vessels, on idols and weights, 9 were identified, arranged and interpreted in a lecture by Zsófia Torma as follows: "Die Vortragende führte aus den Inschriften der aufgefundenen Thongegenstände (Sonnenscheiben, Idole, u. a.), welche sie zur Besichtigung vorwies, den Nachweis, dass babylonische und assyrische Kultur auf Dazien Einfluss ge5 For the rest he was the first to excavate or collect finds at the later so famous site of Alsótatárlak: Erdélyi Múzeum 25 (Kolozsvár 1908)259. в ERR 288, 290. 7 The kind oral communication of N. Vlassa in 1967. 8 HVG passim and BRGK 39 (1958) 13. 9 N. VLASSA: Dacia 7 (1963) 494. 9
