The Danube That Never Fell Silent
Vinča signs, Serbian word families and the long memory of the Balkans
Elena Buran | Research essay
A house of woven branches stands beside the Danube. Its walls are covered in clay. A vessel carries a few incised marks. Thousands of years later, a Serbian speaker can still say koš, plesti, praviti, pravilo and upravljati — combinations of ancient words sharing common root describe processes that have retained their meaning since the time when kuće su se plele od pruća. How are these worlds linked: a house, a sign and a sentence? A sentence describes a process; the words involved in this process collectively form a certain field of meaning.
My proposal is to study the Balkans not only through the names of conquerors or the movement of peoples, but through the continuity of actions: building, weaving, cleaning, speaking, gathering, judging and deciding. Serbian gives these processes an unusually rich and connected vocabulary. Archaeology, historical linguistics and ancient DNA offer maps of the same landscape at different scales. When we align them, recurring patterns become visible that none of the maps reveals alone. This essay develops that interpretive method from the perspective of living cultural inheritance.
The Danube had houses, crafts and order long before Rome
The Vinča cultural horizon flourished in the central Balkans during the late Neolithic, broadly between 5300 and 4500 BCE. At Vinča–Belo Brdo, near Belgrade, archaeologists have documented dense settlements, pottery, figurines, weaving and other developed crafts. Reconstructed dwellings show rectangular houses built with a wooden or woven framework covered in clay, the technique known as wattle and daub. This was not an empty territory waiting for a Roman road. It was a complex human environment with an established material culture. [1, 2]
In Serbian, blato means mud or clay-rich wet earth; prut is a rod or twig; plesti means to weave or braid. Koš denotes a basket or basket-like container, and košnica a beehive. These are words for describing material technologies employed in the Danube basin many millennia ago. To make a basket or a wall, one gathers flexible rods, establishes direction, interlaces the structure, and, where necessary, seals it with earth. Such a sequence is simultaneously practical knowledge and a sequence that can be explained in language. The linguistic question is whether the depth and internal organisation of these word families preserve traces of earlier ways of learning and doing.
A basket for produce, a woven shelter for bees and the framework of a house are different objects, yet their makers solve related problems of direction, connection, enclosure and support. A person does not first invent a rule and then decide to weave; rules also emerge from the repeated practice of making. That is why complete networks of actions and terms deserve comparison with excavated tools, dwellings and ornaments.
When an action becomes a family of words
The most promising linguistic evidence is often not an isolated similarity between two words. It is a productive family of forms that allows a speaker to move from an object to an action, a correction, a standard and a social role. Consider two Serbian clusters.
Practice or idea
Serbian lexical material
What the comparison shows
Woven structure
plesti, pleten, pleter, pletenica
A family centred on weaving, braiding and interlacing
Container and shelter
koš, košara, košnica
Related object words worth comparing with traditional craft
Direction and correctness
pravo, pravac, praviti, pravilo
A productive semantic path from “right/straight” to “making right”
Ordering and governance
napraviti, ispraviti, popraviti, uprava, upravljati
Derived forms expressing production, correction and administration
The prav- family is especially instructive. Related Slavic material connects praviti with *pravъ, “right, straight, correct”; older and modern uses include making, setting right, arranging and governing. This relationship is independently supported by comparative etymology. A family of words can therefore connect physical direction, correctness and administration. [15]
My interpretation begins with this movement from setting something straight to doing something correctly and then directing collective affairs. A craft produces a rule; a rule can guide a community. Plet- and prav- are normally placed in different etymological families. The question explored here is whether an older system of gestures, signs and coordinated practices could help explain why such families work together so naturally in describing one process: making a sound structure.
Yet a linguistic root and the root of a cultural practice are not necessarily the same unit of analysis. Imagine that you live in a pine-covered landscape beside the Danube, where flexible shoots can be cut and woven into baskets, walls and the frames of dwellings. You take a rod, a prut, prepare it until it is ready (spreman), and set it in the required direction (pravac), straight enough to establish the frame (kostur) of a basket (koš). One hand fixes the line; the other bends and interlaces the next rod. From that repeated work emerge practical instructions: plesti (to weave), praviti koš (to make a basket), praviti kuću (to build a house), pratiti (to follow or keep track of a line), and pravilno (properly). To be u pravu is to be right. In this reconstruction, the craft does not merely produce an object. It trains the hands to coordinate direction, strength, sequence and correctness, concepts that later serve the ordering of a household or community.
The Serbian word koren, “root,” offers a model for the structure I am describing. A seed gives rise to roots that enter the earth, an upright trunk and branches (grane) spreading into leaves, flowers and fruit. The visible crown depends on a network largely concealed below the surface. Serbian speaks of a koren reči, a root of a word, and of roots of kinship and belonging, alongside rod and narod. A person, an institution, a family of words or a computer program can all be pictured as a tree: origin, branching, transmission and growth. This is the background against which I propose examining grana and gramma, not as an accidental rhyme, but as a possible trace of older conceptual operations of marking and differentiation.
The relationship between the Serbian grana (‘branch’) and the Greek gramma (‘inscribed mark’, ‘letter’), from which grammar derives, deserves a deeper examination through the ancient practice of creating and interpreting signs. Before a letter became an abstract unit of an alphabet, it was a line — crta in Serbian — drawn or engraved on stone, metal, or clay. The Greek verb graphein itself originally meant ‘to scratch’, ‘to draw’, or ‘to write’. Every line creates a distinction: it separates one sign from another, just as a branch separates from the trunk of a tree. Serbian preserves an extensive network of concepts around grana, grananje (‘branching’), and granica (‘boundary’), expressing differentiation within an interconnected structure. This is precisely what grammar does: it distinguishes meaningful units, establishes their boundaries, and organizes their relationships. Consider the visual proximity of N and M, neighboring letters in the ancient Greek and Etruscan alphabets, whose angular forms differ in the arrangement of their strokes. Could grana and gramma preserve two developments of an older conceptual root, one describing the branching of a living structure and the other the differentiation of written signs? I propose that their relationship should be investigated through the continuity of signs, physical actions, and semantic functions, rather than judged by modern word forms alone. The Etruscans engraved sequences of signs, sometimes without spaces between words, while readers had to distinguish meaningful units to understand the message. In this sense, grammar is not merely a set of linguistic rules invented after writing. It expresses a fundamental operation of human intelligence: recognizing a common origin, distinguishing its branches, and reconstructing their relationships within a meaningful whole. This is the principle of koren (‘root’) and grana (‘branch’), preserved in Serbian as a living model for understanding language, knowledge, and civilization.
This is also how I propose to examine the Vinča signs. A sign such as K could have operated as a miniature gesture or mental scheme capable of combination with other signs. In that model, KR and KL may be branches of a shared symbolic trunk, not meaningless coincidences. Compare KR/KL, BR/BL, HR/HL and SR/SL in Serbian: krst and klizati, brz and blizak, hrast and hlad, srce and slika. I do not claim that every pair must descend from the same historically reconstructed spoken root. I argue that the patterned contrast of strokes and sounds may be approached as a system of human actions: R suggesting firmness or orientation, L suggesting lateral movement and flexibility. Anyone weaving a basket uses both hands. One fixes the frame; the other moves the next rod. The task is to examine the interaction of geometry, gesture, sound and word families across dated materials.
The verb pratiti (“to follow”) belongs beside pravac (“direction”) and plesti (“to weave”) in this practical reconstruction because each describes part of a coordinated action. The comparison is not restricted to dictionary headwords. It asks how signs, manual skills and inherited ways of explaining work may have formed a common conceptual environment.
Vinča signs: gestures, sunlight and the problem of proof
I have proposed reading certain Vinča marks as condensed human actions and orientations. A shape resembling Д-d can be imagined as a person with two legs on a path and a vertical line suggesting a body. Crossed, radiating and curved forms invite comparison with sunlight, horizon, flow and water. H, X, S, C, V, W and M form a useful visual set for comparative observation. In this model, signs are not merely pictures of objects; they may encode something a person does, shows or explains. After all, these are cognitive signs.
Incised Neolithic marks and later Etruscan, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters belong to different dated archaeological contexts; similarity of outline therefore has to be studied alongside medium, direction, repetition and use. Researchers have described Vinča marks as possible ritual signs, ownership marks, notation or early writing, and their precise function remains debated. [3, 4] The existence of this debate does not diminish the marks themselves. It makes a large, dated and openly comparable catalogue of them particularly important.
Yet for those familiar with the Serbian language and culture, these ancient signs are far from mysterious. They intuitively recognize forms and meanings that have been preserved for thousands of years, first carved into stone and later woven into the ornaments of traditional clothing. The continuity is striking. These signs intertwine like maps of human life, describing paths, relationships, actions, and the order of existence. We have already discussed woven beehives, made from branches and natural materials. Here, another remarkable connection emerges: researcher Aleksandar Mitić has identified what he interprets as a bee motif on Vinča figurines, drawing a connection to the traditional Serbian ornament known as Bela Pčela (“White Bee”). In this cultural interpretation, the bee is more than a decorative symbol. It represents the ancestor and the feminine competence to gather, nourish, organize, and sustain the household, just as bees gather resources and maintain their hive. Seen in this context, the Vinča signs are not merely isolated geometric marks. They become elements of a coherent symbolic language, reflecting practical knowledge, ancestral memory, and the continuity of values passed from one generation to another. Moreover, the motif of the epic and the motif of the ornament are both referred to in Serbian as splet — a word we have already encountered. Thus, a woven dwelling for a bee or a woven dwelling for humans transforms into a woven ornament that contains life.
The practical next step is to begin with well-provenanced Vinča objects, record each sign and its orientation, and compare recurring combinations with later inscriptions and Balkan ornament. A proposed gesture or meaning should explain recurring patterns, not a single attractive outline. This method would make an intuitive recognition communicable to readers who did not inherit the same cultural familiarity.
Who Inherits a Civilization: The Conqueror or the Custodian?
Who is the true heir of an ancient civilization? The army that conquered its territory, the empire that imposed its administration, or the people who continued to build their homes, preserve their knowledge, teach their children, recognize their symbols, and practice their ceremonies?
This distinction is fundamental to understanding the cultural history of the Balkans.
Inheritance is not simply a matter of biological descent or political control. It involves material culture, language, practical competencies, spiritual knowledge, ethical principles, and the voluntary transmission of meaningful traditions. A conqueror may occupy a country, rename its cities, seize its resources, and impose new laws. None of these actions automatically makes the conqueror the creator or legitimate custodian of the civilization already established there.
The Danube basin was a center of settled life, craftsmanship, symbolic expression, and organized communities thousands of years before Rome existed. Archaeological discoveries associated with the Vinča culture include houses, sophisticated pottery, figurines, ornaments, weaving implements, ritual objects, and evidence of early copper metallurgy. At Pločnik, the National Museum of Serbia documents settlement and production extending across much of the sixth and fifth millennia BCE. [27]
These people already possessed the competencies required to organize their homes, produce food, work with materials, communicate through symbols, and transmit practical knowledge. Civilization did not arrive on the Danube with Roman legions.
The question we must investigate is what happened to those competencies, symbols, and cultural values through the following millennia.
Ancient Communities, Common Customs, and Changing Names
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described the Thracians as the most numerous people known to him after the Indians. He observed that they lived under many regional and tribal names while sharing many customs. His account offers an important picture of the ancient Balkan world: a populous region containing multiple communities whose shared cultural practices did not require political unification under a single ruler.
This raises a question that the history of conquests and dynasties does not answer. When a political name disappears, must the knowledge, practices, and descendants of the people who lived under that name also disappear?
We can follow a river through centuries even when its banks, settlements, rulers, and languages change. In the same way, cultural continuity should be examined through the knowledge that people repeatedly recognize, practice, and transmit.
For this investigation, Serbian provides an especially rich living system. Its networks of words describing making, building, moving, following, governing, reading, cleansing, honoring, and participating in ceremonies allow us to examine the relationships between physical actions, human understanding, and social organization.
The proposed connection between these networks and the older symbolic cultures of the Danube is central to this research.
Conquest Is Not the Same as Inheritance
Rome’s own foundation myth tells of Romulus killing his brother Remus. This is a myth, not evidence about the character of every Roman, but its symbolism is striking when compared with Rome’s later claim to civilize the peoples it conquered.
Roman expansion into the Balkans involved military campaigns, taxation, recruitment, and the suppression of resistance. The Great Illyrian Revolt of CE 6–9 was provoked by grievances that included taxation and forced military recruitment. Its scale demonstrates that the inhabitants of these territories were not passive recipients of Roman civilization. They were established communities defending their interests and their right to determine their own future.
The Roman Empire incorporated these territories into its administrative system. But imperial administration is not the origin of the older culture that existed beneath it.
Centuries later, Ottoman rule introduced another system of domination. The devşirme, remembered in Serbian as danak u krvi, involved the collection of Christian boys for the service of the Ottoman state. Children were removed from their communities, converted to Islam, and trained for military or administrative service. This historical institution is documented both in Ottoman studies and in accounts from the affected Balkan societies.
Such a practice cannot be presented as the peaceful transmission of the values of the families from whom those children were taken.
The distinction becomes even clearer in the twentieth century. The hooked cross, known in various ancient societies long before National Socialism, had associations with prosperity, the sun, and well-being. The Nazi movement appropriated this ancient form and transformed it into an emblem of racial domination and mass violence. The age of a symbol does not confer legitimacy upon those who seize it and reverse its meaning.
Conquest can interrupt a tradition, distort its symbols, or impose a different political order. It cannot retroactively become the source of the knowledge that preceded it.
The Living Evidence of Serbian Cultural Competence
We should now return to the people who continued to live in the Balkans, generation after generation, maintaining households, agriculture, crafts, ceremonies, and communities.
One of the clearest examples is the Serbian slava, the family celebration of a patron saint. The National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Serbia describes a detailed sequence of actions: preparing ritual bread, decorating it with symbols, lighting a candle, reciting prayers, sharing food, offering ceremonial toasts, and bringing relatives and guests together.
Women play a particularly important role in preserving the knowledge of these ceremonies, including their sequence, meanings, and proper performance. This is not simply a collection of decorations or religious gestures. It is a living system of competencies transmitted through the family.
The same principle appears in Serbian kinship language and the ancient cultural significance of bees.
Serbian linguist Marta Bjeletić, a researcher at the Institute for the Serbian Language of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, has examined the expression bele pčele (“white bees”). In traditional beekeeping, the term described a successive swarm produced during a particularly abundant season. It subsequently became associated with distant descendants, prosperity, fertility, and the continuation of the family line.
Here we see an extraordinary semantic connection: the reproductive organization of bees becomes a model for understanding human generations, abundance, and continuity. Practical knowledge of nature develops into a concept of family and inheritance.
This is precisely the kind of development we must examine when studying Serbian roots such as koren (root), grana (branch), rod (kinship or lineage), praviti (to make), pravac (direction), pravilo (rule), čin (act, order, or rank), čist (clean), čast (honor), and učestvovati (to participate).
These words open a field of investigation in which craftsmanship, observation, ethics, and communication can be studied as interconnected processes rather than isolated vocabulary.
The signs of the Vinča culture, the geometric forms preserved in Balkan ornamentation, and the ordered practices of Serbian communal life offer another dimension of this inquiry. I propose examining them as possible expressions of a long cultural tradition in which a sign could function not merely as a letter, but as a gesture, an image, a mental scheme, and an instruction for meaningful action.
The Measure of Civilization Is What People Preserve
Ancient DNA studies help reconstruct movements and intermarriage among populations. They tell us something about the people who lived in a region, but they do not establish who deserves to be recognized as the custodian of its ethical and cultural inheritance.
The survival of a civilization cannot be reduced to a percentage on a genetic chart. A skill survives when it is taught and practiced. A word survives when people use it to understand and communicate. A ceremony survives when successive generations recognize its meaning and willingly perform it.
This is the dimension in which Serbian cultural inheritance becomes especially important. The Serbian language, its extensive networks of related words, its living ceremonial vocabulary, its traditions of family continuity, and the symbols preserved in material culture provide a means of investigating the ancient intellectual heritage of the Danube and the Balkans.
Christian teaching offers a concise ethical measure. In Matthew 7:16, Christ says, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
A civilization should therefore be judged not merely by the territories it ruled or the monuments erected in the name of its rulers, but also by the results of its actions: what it created, whom it protected, what knowledge it transmitted, and how it treated human life.
Empires rise, impose their power, and disappear. Their conquest does not erase what existed before them, and it does not automatically make them the rightful heirs of their subjects’ achievements.
The deeper history of the Balkans must be sought in the knowledge and traditions that people themselves continued to preserve.
The central question is not who last ruled the Danube. It is who kept its civilization alive.
Three maps of one history: archaeology, DNA and living language
Imagine three transparent maps placed over the Danube basin. On the first are the settlements, houses, marks, tools and ceremonial objects. On the second are the movements of human populations, recorded in ancient genomes. On the third are place-names, word families, grammatical patterns, craft vocabulary and practices that people still recognise. None of the three maps is a substitute for another. But when their features align at an independently dated point, they may illuminate a history obscured by changing state names.
The 2023 Cell study of 136 ancient individuals from Balkan sites provides an especially useful population map. During the Roman imperial centuries, the study found extensive movement, including Anatolian-related ancestry, but relatively little detectable ancestry from the Italian peninsula. After late antiquity, it recorded major movements of people related genetically to eastern European populations. Present-day Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Romanians were modelled with roughly 50–60 per cent of that eastern European-related component, alongside ancestry linked to earlier Balkan and, in some cases, Roman-period Anatolian populations. The authors describe substantial continuity between medieval populations and many people living in the region today. [6]
The result matters in two directions. There was large-scale movement, so a picture of immobile communities would be too simple. But there was also survival and mixture, so a story in which a new political or linguistic name means the total disappearance of previous inhabitants is equally inadequate. The question raised here is whether some families and cultural skills moved away from the Roman frontier and returned over later generations, meeting related practices that had remained in the Balkans. This movement-and-return scenario is an avenue for research, not an event that the genomes alone can identify.
A Nature study published in 2025 analysed 555 ancient individuals and documented substantial sixth- to eighth-century migration associated with the spread of Slavic languages, with strong variation by region. This is the demographic layer against which local archaeological transitions and linguistic distributions should be compared. The arrival of families from the north or east and the preservation of older practices in the south are not mutually exclusive processes. [7]
The temporal order is important. Large-scale Slavic settlement was already under way in the sixth to eighth centuries, while the Christianisation of Slavic communities and the development of the later Serbian Orthodox religious tradition took place over subsequent centuries. A possible return of people from northern or eastern regions cannot simply be dated to the arrival of Orthodoxy. What can be investigated is how Christian ceremonies subsequently reorganised, preserved and transmitted practices of family gathering, ritual bread, blessing and shared responsibility.
This is the point of looking for cultural inheritance rather than a single ancestral percentage. The genomic map tells us where population continuity and migration may have occurred; the linguistic map asks what people could still name, teach and perform; the archaeological map asks which of those practices can be recognised in dated objects. An alignment across all three would be more informative than any isolated percentage or word resemblance.
Etruria, Vinča and the Danube: signs, rituals and cultural memory
Long before Roman dominance, the Etruscans built cities, operated sanctuaries, inscribed bronze and gold, and represented musicians, dancers and communal meals in their funerary art. The National Etruscan Museum preserves the gold tablets of Pyrgi, found at the sanctuary serving Caere: two texts in Etruscan and one in Phoenician record a sacred dedication associated with Thefarie Velianas and the goddess Uni/Astarte. These are not merely shapes on a wall. They are evidence of ritual, authority, intercultural diplomacy and a community able to organise and inscribe consequential acts. [28]
The Etruscan world should therefore enter this essay not as an appendix to Rome or Greece, but as a civilisation whose own ceremonial knowledge and symbolic technology require examination. Images of ritual feasting in the tombs of Tarquinia show people gathered around food, music, dance and the remembrance of the dead. The surviving forms are different from a Serbian slava, yet they allow us to compare how a community links a structured meal with ancestry, social relations and sacred meaning. [30, 37]
Which history of the signs are we actually explaining?
There are two different historical problems: the emergence of geometric signs themselves and the transmission of a particular alphabetic sequence. A cross, a branch, a zigzag or an angular M can exist as a ritual or mnemonic form long before it acquires the sound value of a letter. Vinča artefacts carrying incised marks predate the earliest surviving Etruscan inscriptions by several millennia. The older Danubian horizon must therefore be included in any study of the cultural life of those shapes. A statement about a later alphabetic model cannot, on its own, identify the first community to attach meaning to a line.
Radivoje Pešić made this comparison central to his study of the Vinča marks. He catalogued recurring signs and argued that the complete repertory of Etruscan alphabetic shapes can be matched with forms in the Vinča corpus. A Serbian RTS feature on his work presents the comparison together with his observations about links to early Greek letters and later Cyrillic signs. [26] His comparative tables provide a concrete starting point: each shape can be drawn, identified on a dated object, counted and compared with its possible descendants. My approach adds the question of practice: what human gesture, direction, working operation or ritual sequence could such a mark once have made intelligible?
The conventional model of Etruscan alphabetic writing links its eighth- and seventh-century BCE forms to a western Greek alphabetic tradition. The Marsiliana d’Albegna writing tablet, which bears an alphabetic sequence, is among the evidence used for that reconstruction. [31] The model addresses the attested ordering and sound functions of letters in the first millennium BCE. It does not demonstrate that Greek speakers invented the earlier geometric forms, the practices represented by them, or the Etruscans’ religious culture. Conversely, the greater age of some Vinča forms does not by itself establish a continuous phonetic alphabet from the Neolithic to Etruria. I propose testing the relationship at the level of shape, contextual function, sign combinations and practical meaning rather than collapsing those questions into a single claim of borrowing.
Ritual knowledge existed before the classical Greek world
Crete makes the same distinction visible. The Minoan palatial world flourished long before classical Greek city-states, and its art preserves repeated scenes of organised action, sacred objects and ceremonial performance. At Knossos, the famous bull-leaping fresco, dated to approximately 1450–1400 BCE, depicts an ordered sequence of movements involving both male and female participants. The Heraklion Archaeological Museum interprets the motif in connection with palace ideology, skill and religious meaning. [29] These are historically dated ceremonial representations; they do not require a later Greek account to become evidence of early ritual intelligence.
The question is not whether different Mediterranean communities ever exchanged letters or words; they plainly did. It is whether a much older repertoire of signs, gestures and ceremonies survived through such contacts and was repeatedly reinterpreted. Etruscan signs, Minoan images and Vinča marks belong to different ages and settings. Their comparison becomes illuminating precisely when the chronological differences are kept visible and the common operations of marking, gathering, blessing, measuring and transmitting are investigated.
Caere, caerimonia and the structure of a ceremony
The English ceremony comes through French and Latin caerimonia, a Latin word whose deeper derivation remains obscure; one traditional proposal connects it with Etruscan religious practice or the city of Caere. [12] The written route by which English inherited the word should not be mistaken for the origin of ceremonial behaviour. Ritual feasts, processions and sacred offerings existed long before the Latin expression was recorded. When we study the Etruscan city of Caere together with the sanctuary at Pyrgi, the possible Etruscan association becomes a serious research question grounded in a known ceremonial setting, not a decorative resemblance.
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Serbian provides a different kind of access to the process. Čin and činiti name acts and doing; čitati reading; čist cleanliness; čast honour; učestvovati participation. The forms need not all be labelled one dictionary root for the entire ceremonial process to be cognitively connected. These are the actions by which people prepare a place, interpret a sign, recognise one another and agree upon a common order. My monograph Etruscan Language: Access Code to Ancient Knowledge (2025) applies this practice-centred method to the Pyrgi tablets and the Tabula Cortonensis. [20] The aim is to read not only what a sequence of letters might sound like, but which organised human action the inscription represents.
Language classification cannot be reduced to one grammatical feature
Etruscan is often discussed together with Lemnian and Rhaetic as part of a proposed Tyrsenian language family; specialists note its extensive use of suffixes and an agglutinative morphological profile. [32] Yet agglutination is a way of forming words, not a genetic test for identifying a language family. Serbian also builds dense chains of prefixes, stems and suffixes; Italian continues complex derivation and inherited verbal endings. A comparison of Etruscan with Balkan languages cannot be settled by pointing to the presence or absence of suffix chains. It must examine repeated forms, functions, sound patterns and attested texts. That is why the Serbian word networks in this essay matter: they supply complete processes for comparison, not merely a few short look-alike syllables.
The Language of Signs: Why the Structure of Etruscan Deserves Reconsideration
Why should the combination of meaningful elements into a word be treated as evidence that Etruscan belongs outside the Indo-European family? Agglutination describes a method of word formation, not necessarily the ancestry of a language. Serbian combines roots, prefixes, suffixes, and endings into complex expressions of actions, relationships, and processes. Italian does the same, although its structures have developed differently. Even the strengthening and doubling of consonants, so characteristic of Italian, may result from several processes, including assimilation, the joining of elements, and expressive emphasis. None of these features alone establishes or excludes a common linguistic ancestry.
Consider the comparison reka — rekati — irritò. I am not claiming that their common origin has already been established. I am drawing attention to the relationship between sound, articulation, action, and meaning. In the Serbian and Italian versions of The Little Prince, the narrator’s emotional reaction is expressed through naljutilo and irritò. The Italian word, with its doubled r, offers a particularly forceful auditory impression. Serbian, meanwhile, allows us to explore extensive networks connecting speech, sound, movement, and the expression of emotion. The question is whether some differences between Balkan and Romance word formation may reflect older practices of combining signs and modifying their expressive force. Such comparisons deserve examination at the level of entire semantic networks, not merely isolated dictionary entries.
This question becomes particularly important when we approach Etruscan inscriptions. The Etruscans possessed an elaborate ceremonial culture, and the materials on which they wrote were not chosen without purpose. The gold tablets from Pyrgi record a temple dedication associated with the goddess Uni and the ruler Thefarie Velianas. Serbian tradition allows to suggest that Thefarie Velianas is the title of the Grand Head — Tcara Velikog. And this was a ceremony for proposing a peace treaty to the Romans — which explains the inscription on the gold — taking place at a time when Rome had already begun to threaten the Etruscan cities. This makes sense. And this is just one small example of the difference in approaches to the study of Etruscan texts. The bronze Tabula Cortonensis concerns a legal transaction involving land. An interpretation based on Serbian roots, as presented in my book Etruscan Language: Access Code to Ancient Knowledge [20], suggests that the subject is not trade, but rather the provision of a space for schooling — something to which the Etruscans attached great importance. Furthermore, it stands to reason that such schooling would have been accompanied by ceremonies, much as it is today. These are documents of religious, legal, and social significance, not trivial shopping lists. Their material, location, ceremonial context, and relationship to the surrounding culture are essential to understanding their purpose.
In Etruscan Language: Access Code to Ancient Knowledge, I propose reading these inscriptions through the interaction of geometric signs, Serbian and Balkan lexical structures, ceremonial practices, and the organization of meaningful actions. A sign is not merely an abstract letter. It may preserve a gesture, a distinction, a direction, or a mental operation. When signs combine, they can generate more complex meanings, just as branches grow from a common trunk. Rather than treating the apparent isolation of Etruscan as the end of the inquiry, we should investigate whether the older symbolic traditions of the Balkans offer a way to recover relationships that conventional classifications have not yet explained.
The 2021 study of ancient DNA from Etruria and nearby regions identified considerable population continuity across parts of the first millennium BCE, followed by changes during Roman rule. [10] This does not assign a modern language to ancient bones. It does give us another historical map: an Etruscan cultural world whose people and practices did not simply appear from nowhere when their surviving inscriptions became visible. Aligning this evidence with the Danubian and Mediterranean material record is a more productive approach than treating archaeological, linguistic and genetic disciplines as mutually exclusive.
What a Serbian and Italian sentence lets us hear
A short literary comparison illustrates another part of my method. In a Serbian translation of The Little Prince, one reads: “I mali princ se nasmijao grohotom što me je jako naljutilo.” An Italian rendering gives: “E il piccolo principe scoppiò a ridere fragorosamente, il che mi irritò molto.” Both describe the same event: the prince laughs loudly and the narrator becomes angry. Their semantic destinations coincide, but the acoustic and grammatical routes differ.
Serbian gathers the event into nasmijao se, grohotom and naljutilo; Italian chooses the explosive verb phrase scoppiò a ridere, the noisy fragorosamente, and irritò. The word scoppiò is clearly reminiscent of the Serbian words kopje (“spear”) and ukopan (“rooted to the spot” / “dug in”), both of which relate to some military context and do not seem appropriate for a conversation with a child. And there are many such examples. Fragore is traced by the Italian dictionary Treccani to Latin fragor, connected with frangere, “to break”; irritare continues Latin irrītare, whose further etymology Treccani labels unknown. [33, 34] To my ear, the Italian phrasing foregrounds rupture, noise and irritation, while the Serbian sentence organises the same emotional sequence differently. This is a comparative observation about lexical choice and expressive sound, not a judgment about the people who speak either language.
The Serbian forms reći, rekao, reka, grohot, grana and related sounding clusters invite further comparisons with the sound patterns of Romance vocabulary, including the R and L alternations discussed earlier. My argument is that words can preserve the experience of gesture, impact, breath, movement and social action. Before proposing that one language borrowed a specific ancient root from another, however, we should first map the recurring correspondences and the contexts in which each language uses them. This would make the proposed old Balkan–Etruscan–Romance network a researchable account of semantic transformation rather than a list of isolated verbal likenesses.
The same enquiry applies to place names. Words such as varoš name a recognisable kind of urban place in Serbian usage, and similar names appear across the region. A map of their distribution, earliest written forms and local histories could be overlaid with the maps of settlement, crafts and ancient routes. But a modern meaning or resemblance alone cannot date a settlement or identify the first speakers who named it. A good historical map begins with the earliest available attestations. Every Serb knows that varoš refers to a part of a city, whereas Greeks cannot explain the meaning of this word — a term found in Greece, just as it is in Serbia and the rest of the Balkans.
The larger argument is now clear. The Etruscans were not merely a source of letters later appropriated by Rome. They preserved a social and ceremonial world of inscriptions, temples, feasts and remembered ancestors. The Vinča marks, the ritual imagery of the older Aegean, the Etruscan texts, and the living Serbian networks of signs and words should be brought into one comparative field. My proposal is that the deepest continuity lies in the competencies to make, distinguish, read, gather, honour and govern. The task is to reconstruct the routes by which those competencies survived, even when political powers changed the names on the map.
Language can describe the view from a mountain
One way I approach Serbian grammar is to imagine a person standing on a mountain, showing another person what exists, where it is, where one should go and what should be done. Its seven-case system can express identification, belonging, movement toward a recipient, the object of an action, address, means and location. I use the conventional case order as a cognitive map: a community observes a situation, identifies relationships and decides how to act. [21]
Relation
Serbian example
How it guides attention
Who or what? — Nominative
Planina je visoka.
Identify the subject: “The mountain is high.”
Of what? — Genitive
Sa vrha planine.
Locate a relation: “From the mountain top.”
To whom or where? — Dative
Prilazim selu.
Mark a recipient or direction: “I approach the village.”
What is acted upon? — Accusative
Gledam reku.
Identify the target: “I look at the river.”
Calling someone — Vocative
Prijatelju!
Address another participant: “My friend!”
By what means? — Instrumental
Putujem vozom.
Identify the means: “I travel by train.”
Where? — Locative
U selu razgovaramo.
Set the scene: “We speak in the village.”
This is a model of practical intelligence rather than a claim that a Neolithic teacher recited the cases in today’s textbook order. The strength of Serbian lies in how compactly its case forms articulate relations among people, places, objects and actions. As with woven construction, a change of position can change the function of the whole.
A circle of people, a ceremony and the meaning of slava
Consider a further group of Serbian words: čin, činiti, čitanje, čist, čast, učestvovati, početak, oči. Read together, they evoke a sequence: an occasion is opened, participants prepare, hands are cleansed, people look toward one another, a text or sign is read, honour is shown, and a common decision becomes possible. My interest is in the coherence of the process. The ceremonial order is intelligible through the living language because language names each competence required to carry it out.
We can trace elements of this logic in hospitality, communal assemblies, religious feasts and the Serbian family slava: a table is prepared; relatives gather; symbolic bread is marked and shared; blessings, readings and toasts renew social ties. In the Serbian National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage, slava is described not merely as a feast but as an ordered practice through which families preserve relationships and hand knowledge to younger generations. The record pays particular attention to women as custodians of the structure and meaning of the ritual. [11, 36]
Bela pčela (“white bee”), embroidered geometry, beehive forms and the ornaments preserved in Serbian dress and architecture belong to the same visual research. Marta Bjeletić’s study of bele pčele documents an especially revealing path: a term for an exceptional successive swarm becomes a name for distant descendants and a sign of prosperity. This is a documented semantic passage from knowledge of beekeeping to the organisation of family memory. [35] Comparisons with Vinča figurines, including the bee interpretation attributed to Aleksandar Mitić, should be made image by image, with archaeological and ethnographic provenance.
The repeated number twelve also invites inquiry. The twelve apostles, assemblies of twelve in regional traditions, and the twelve members of some English juries offer a rich comparative theme. Yet identical numbers do not prove direct transmission. Research on the medieval English jury traces it through Frankish, Norman and Anglo-Norman institutions, not a demonstrated Balkan Neolithic council. If a specific Serbian account describes an assembly of twelve, it should be quoted, dated and compared with the legal records rather than used as an automatic origin story. [19]
The name Slavs may also be examined through the way language communities understand speech, light, honour and shared activity. Slovo, slava, svet, svi and sve belong in the author’s broader network of symbolic associations, even where historical lexicography separates their individual word histories. My thesis concerns whether practices of speaking, gathering and recognising signs helped sustain the cultural identity of Balkan communities through changes of political name. [14]
Research programme: bringing the maps into alignment
To investigate Danubian symbolic continuity, we need a method that allows archaeology, language and population history to correct and enrich one another. I would begin with five practical tasks.
In IPER terms, intuitive intelligence proposes the connection; practical intelligence tests it on objects and lived actions; ethical intelligence asks what a community preserves and how it treats others; rational intelligence checks the chronological sequence. These are cooperating competencies, not rival authorities.
- Build a dated sign corpus. Record the archaeological context, date, medium, exact geometry and frequency of each Vinča mark. Keep later Etruscan and alphabetic shapes in separate chronological layers.
- Build a reproducible lexicon. For koš, plesti, praviti, čin, slovo, svet and the KR/KL families, record forms and contexts, and test whether proposed sign combinations explain whole clusters of meanings rather than isolated words.
- Test complete processes, not attractive pairs. Compare sequences such as building a woven wall or organising a collective meal with securely dated archaeological and ethnographic evidence.
- Test Etruscan readings against the full corpus. Use a fixed proposal for values and sound correspondences, then apply it to texts not used to create the proposal, including bilingual evidence and grammatical patterns.
- Treat genetics as an independent time axis. Compare periods of population movement with changes or persistence in settlement, crafts, burial and language, without assuming that a haplogroup identifies a spoken language.
Progress would include sign interpretations repeated across independent objects, semantic reconstructions that illuminate entire craft or ceremonial sequences, and Etruscan readings that clarify recurring grammatical patterns. The layered-map method can also show that one proposed path differs from another. That is part of how a serious reconstruction develops.
The Danube was inhabited, built upon and imagined long before Rome. Its later inhabitants did not begin their history from zero. Archaeology preserves houses and symbolic marks. DNA records the movement and persistence of people through centuries of upheaval. Serbian preserves dense word networks, grammatical relations and living rituals. I propose reading these maps together to investigate the survival of a distinctive Danubian system of cultural reasoning.
An empire can take a city. It cannot guarantee that the people who remain will forget how to speak, build, gather or decide.
How to read the evidence together
Archaeology supplies dated objects; ancient DNA supplies dated patterns of population movement and mixture; language and ethnography supply observable structures of action and meaning. The proposed connection between the three is the author’s reconstruction. A comparison becomes stronger when each map supplies an independent and specific observation, rather than when one is made to speak for all the others.
Sources and author’s research
Numbered references correspond to the sources below. [20] is the author’s monograph, whose proposed interpretation is developed in this essay. Additional Serbian, archaeological, museum and linguistic sources are included in [26]–[37].
[1] Belgrade City Museum. Belo Brdo Archaeological Site, Vinča. Source ↗
[2] Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade. Drenovac: settlement chronology and architectural layout. Source ↗
[3] Andrej Starović (2005). If the Vinča script once really existed, who could have written or read it? Documenta Praehistorica 32. Source ↗
[4] Vanja Stanišić (1992). “Vinča script” or “Vinča signs”? Balcanica XXIII. Source ↗
[5] Herodotus. Histories, Book V, chapter 3 (English translation, Perseus). Source ↗
[6] Iñigo Olalde et al. (2023). A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations. Cell 186, 5472–5485.e9. Source ↗
[7] Nature research team (2025). Ancient DNA connects large-scale migration with the spread of Slavs. Nature 646, 384–393. Source ↗
[8] Theresa Huntsman, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013). Etruscan Language and Inscriptions. Source ↗
[9] Rex E. Wallace. How to Read Etruscan. Source ↗
[10] Cosimo Posth et al. (2021). The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect. Science Advances. Source ↗
[11] Nikola F. Pavković (2015). The Slava or Patron Saint’s Day among the Serbs. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 63(1), 123–145. Source ↗
[12] Online Etymology Dictionary. Ceremony: history of Latin caerimonia and the possible Caere connection. Source ↗
[13] Online Etymology Dictionary. Tsar: Old Slavic title ultimately borrowed from Latin Caesar. Source ↗
[14] Online Etymology Dictionary. Slav: disputed historical name; probable connection with *slovo. Source ↗
[15] Marko Snoj. Slovenski etimološki slovar: praviti and the *pravъ word family. Source ↗
[16] Institute of Archaeology, Belgrade. Naissus–Mediana: the imperial residence of Constantine the Great. Source ↗
[17] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The History of the Swastika. Source ↗
[18] TÜBİTAK Encyclopedia. Devşirme Sistemi: recruitment of Christian children under Ottoman rule. Source ↗
[19] Ralph V. Turner (1968). The Origins of the Medieval English Jury: Frankish, English, or Scandinavian? Journal of British Studies. Source ↗
[20] Elena Buran (2025). Etruscan Language: Access Code to Ancient Knowledge. Montenegro: Verbs-Verbi.com. https://www.academia.edu/129665501/Etruscan_Language_Access_Code_to_Ancient_Knowledge
[21] Mirković and colleagues. Rules vs. Statistics: Insights from a Highly Inflected Language (Serbian morphology). Source ↗
[22] Suetonius. Life of Tiberius, section 16 (on the Illyrian revolt of CE 6–9). Source ↗
[23] Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph. The Balkan Languages, chapter 4: Lexicon and Semantics (Turkish loanwords). Source ↗
[24] Treccani, Enciclopedia dell’Italiano. Infinito: historical Italian verb endings -are, -ere and -ire. Source ↗
[25] Treccani, Vocabolario. Andare: uncertain etymology and Latin vadere forms. Source ↗
[26] Radio-televizija Srbije (RTS) (2017). “Pedeset godina od otkrića Lepenskog Vira”: discussion of Radivoje Pešić’s Vinča/Etruscan sign comparisons. Source ↗
[27] National Museum of Serbia. Late Neolithic and Eneolithic Collection: Vinča-Belo Brdo, Pločnik and Belovode. Source ↗
[28] Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia. Pyrgi Tablets, official collection record. Source ↗
[29] Heraklion Archaeological Museum. The Bull-Leaping Fresco (Knossos, ca. 1450–1400 BCE). Source ↗
[30] British Museum. Etruscan World: religion, banqueting, metalworking and social life. Source ↗
[31] Scuola Normale Superiore, Mnamon: Daniele F. Maras, Etruscan writing and the Marsiliana alphabet. Source ↗
[32] University of Florence, PRIN Lingue e culture dell’Italia antica. The Etruscan language: morphology and Tyrsenian comparisons. Source ↗
[33] Treccani, Vocabolario. Irritare: from Latin irrītare, further etymology unknown. Source ↗
[34] Treccani, Vocabolario. Fragore: from Latin fragor, connected with frangere. Source ↗
[35] Dimitrije Bukvić (2021), Politika. “Od belog orla do belih pčela”: reporting Marta Bjeletić’s Serbian kinship and beekeeping research. Source ↗
[36] Etnografski muzej u Beogradu, National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Slava, krsno ime, krsna slava. Source ↗
[37] Smarthistory. Tomb of the Triclinium: Etruscan funerary feasts and social ritual. Source ↗
