The Sinaia lead plates () are a set of

lead Lead () is a chemical element; it has Chemical symbol, symbol Pb (from Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a Heavy metal (elements), heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale, soft and Ductility, malleabl ...

plates written in an unknown language or

constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary, instead of having developed natural language, naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devise ...

. They are alleged to be a chronicle of the

Dacia Dacia (, ; ) was the land inhabited by the Dacians, its core in Transylvania, stretching to the Danube in the south, the Black Sea in the east, and the Tisza in the west. The Carpathian Mountains were located in the middle of Dacia. It thus ro ...

ns, but are considered by some scholars to be modern forgeries. The plates were written in the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

with a few other character additions.

History

The origin of the

Sinaia Sinaia () is a town and a mountain resort in Prahova County, Romania. It is situated in the historical region of Muntenia. The town was named after the Sinaia Monastery of 1695, around which it was built. The monastery, in turn, is named after ...

lead plates is obscure. The first known mention of them was when the 200 lead plates were discovered in the warehouse of the Bucharest Museum of Antiquities,

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

, in the 19th century. Of the 200 pieces originally in the collection of plates, only 35 are known to remain today, but there are some photos of some of the rest.Petan, Aurora
A possible Dacian royal archive on lead plates
'' Antiquity Journal'', Vol 79 No 303, March 2005 (part of Antiquity's non-peer reviewed "Project gallery" When discovered they were ignored and considered to be forgeries because they appeared new, with no traces of corrosion. They were not considered valuable enough to be evacuated with the rest of the Romanian Treasure to

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

in 1916, during

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. However, some renewed interest in the plates among non-scholars has been shown more than a century later, following the publication of a report about them by engineer Dan Romalo in 2003. According to "an oral tradition", the lead plates are in fact copies made at the Nail Factory of Sinaia in 1875 from the originals, which were allegedly made of

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

, and they were kept for a while at the

Sinaia Monastery The Sinaia Monastery, located in Sinaia, in Prahova County, Romania, was founded by Prince Mihail Cantacuzino in 1695 and named after the great Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt. As of 2005, it is inhabited by 13 Christian Orthod ...

. Allegedly, the gold was used either in the building of

Peleș Castle Peleș Castle ( ) is a Neo-Renaissance palace in the Royal Domain of Sinaia in the Carpathian Mountains, near Sinaia, in Prahova County, Romania, on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia, built between 1873 and 1914 ...

, or the plates were part of the Romanian Treasure which was never returned by Russia after World War I. An analysis made at the in

Măgurele Măgurele is a town situated in the southwestern part of Ilfov County, Muntenia, Romania. It has a population of 14,414 as of 2021 and hosts several research institutes. In 2024, new buses were donated from the Voluntari district. It is rapidly ...

concluded that the composition of the plates is very similar to printing lead manufactured in the 19th century.

Description

Most of the plates are roughly rectangular, with the exception of one round plate. They have dimensions between and . Most are written using

scriptio continua (Latin for 'continuous script'), also known as or , is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case. In the West, the oldest Greek ...

in the

, with a few additional signs; the text includes "V" from the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

and signs for

palatal The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly sepa ...

"c" and "g" resembling those of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

. They also include text written in some unknown scripts that do not resemble any known written alphabet. In addition to the text, the plates also contain many complex illustrations, including those of armies, kings, cities, temples and buildings.

Language

The language appears to have some

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

traits, but it has nothing in common with what linguists expect to be

Dacian language Dacian () is an extinct language generally believed to be a member of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that was spoken in the ancient region of Dacia. The Dacian language is poorly documented. Unlike Phrygian languag ...

, as no correlation with the Romanian language substrate can be found. Also, unlike any known Indo-European language, it appears to have almost no

inflections In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, anima ...

, nor

declensions In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to wikt:decline#Verb, decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, ...

. In addition, almost all nouns end in "-o", including names which had other endings in Latin and Greek, e.g. , , and . There are some words borrowed from Greek ( from , , from ) and Latin, but some important words such as the alleged words for "king" () and "priest" () do not appear to have any known Indo-European cognates.

Debate and author

The scholarly consensus is that they are modern forgeries. According to the director of the Institute of Archaeology,

Alexandru Vulpe Alexandru Vulpe (June 16, 1931 – February 9, 2016) was a Romanian historian and archaeologist, member of the Romanian Academy and director of the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology. Life Vulpe was born in 1931 in Bucharest, the son of a ...

, it is obvious they were made in 19th century and this was the opinion of both

Vasile Pârvan Vasile Pârvan (; 28 September 1882 – 26 June 1927) was a Romanian historian and archaeologist. Biography Pârvan was born in Perchiu, Huruiești commune, Bacău County. He came from a modest family, being the first child of the teacher An ...

and the archaeologists who studied them after him, some believing they were created by

Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (; 26 February 1838 – ) was a Romanian writer and philologist who pioneered many branches of Romanian philology and history. Life He was born Tadeu Hâjdeu in Cristineștii Hotinului (now Kerstentsi in Chernivtsi ...

, who is known to have made other forgeries as well.Din tainele istoriei – Misterul tăblițelor de plumb
''Formula As'', n. 649; 2005 According to Vulpe, the tablets include only what was known before 1900, for example, it uses the spelling "Comidava" for a Dacian town, although now it is known that the correct spelling is "

Cumidava Cumidava (also Comidava, Komidava, ) was originally a Dacian settlement, and later a Ancient Rome, Roman military camp on the site of the modern city of Râșnov (15 km from Brașov) in Romania. Etymology After the Roman conquest of Dacia ...

", as found in 1942 in an honorific inscription dedicated to

Julia Mamaea Julia Avita Mamaea or Julia Mamaea (14 or 29 August around 182 – March 21/22 235) was a Syrian noble woman and member of the Severan dynasty. She was the mother of Roman emperor Alexander Severus and remained one of his chief advisors th ...

.Mihail Macrea, "Cumidava" in ''AISC'' 4, 1941–1943, pp. 234–261

References

Bibliography

*Dumitru Manolache, ''Tezaurul dacic de la Sinaia – legendă sau adevăr ocultat?'', Editura Dacica, 2006 * Bucurescu, Adrian, ''Tainele tăblițelor de la Sinaia'', Editura Arhetip, 2005 * Romalo, Dan, ''Cronica apocrifă pe plăci de plumb?'', Arvin Press, București, 2003 * Romalo, Dan, ''Cronica getă apocrifă pe plăci de plumb'', Editura Alcor, București, 2005 * Velcescu, Cornelia, ''Inscripții rupestre din Munții Carpați'', Editura MIRACOL, Burești, 2002 * Horia Turcanu (''Formula AS'')
"Misterul tăblițelor de plumb"
* Academia Republicii Popular Romîne, ''Documente privind istoria Romîniei: Introducere'', 1956 * Emil Vîrtosu, ''Paleografia româno-chirilică'', Ed. Științifică, 1968 * Horace Gray Lunt, ''Old Church Slavonic Grammar'', Walter de Gruyter, 2001 * Isaac Taylor, ''History of the Alphabet: Aryan Alphabets'', Kessinger Publishing, 2003 (1899) * Isaac Taylor, ''Greeks and Goths a Study on the Runes'', Kessinger Publishing, 2004 (1879) * Winfred Philipp Lehmann, ''Historical Linguistics: An Introduction'', Routledge, 1992 (1962)

External links

roken link
A possible Dacian royal archive on lead plates

Din tainele istoriei: misterul plăcuţelor de la Sinaia
(in Romanian, with photos of the plates)
100 de placi din aur inscriptionate intr-o limba necunoscuta descoperite la Sinaia
(in Romanian, with pictures of more than 20 of the plates)

(in Romanian, with photos) {{Dacia topics 19th-century archaeological discoveries 19th-century inscriptions Archaeological forgeries Constructed languages introduced in the 19th century Inscriptions of disputed origin Lead objects Sinaia