Visitors Now: | |
Total Visits: | |
Total Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
Varla Ventura on real life horrors and the totally bizarre
In your Book of the Bizarre you mention the Transylvanian Tablets and since I have a Dracula aka Vlad the Impaler fetish would you tell us the tale?
VV: Yes! That is such a cool story. In 1961 archaeologists digging into a prehistoric mound in the Transylvanian village of Tartaria discovered several small clay tablets with bizarre inscriptions on them. Some believed the inscriptions to be sigils or magical signs, and others believed that they were important documents left behind for the singular purpose of being found—time capsules, perhaps. Using the modern method of carbon dating, the objects’ origin was placed at around 4000 B.C. The writing was believed to be of Mesopotamian origin, specifically Sumerian, the first written language. This suggests that the first evidence of writing could have begun in the backwoods of Transylvania!
The tablets were found in the lowest layer of the dig, in a sacrificial pit within a burial mound, and the pit also contained some scattered human bones. The bones bore symbols quite similar to the inscriptions on the tablets; the symbols were both from Sumer and from the highly advanced Minoan civilizations of Crete. But if the carbon dating is accurate, the tablets were made by a primitive Stone Age agricultural tribe known as the Vinca. The Vinca predated Sumerian writing by one millennium and the Minoan writing by two thousand years. Most scholars believe that the inscriptions were magical ciphers—spells and secret codes of this ancient farming tribe.
As an aside, if you are a Bram Stoker fan, in the Magical Creatures series I have several things of interest. One, The Vampyre, is the first vampire story published in English, predating Dracula by 70 years. It was written by John William Polidori who was, among many things, Lord Byron’s personal physician. Also, Stoker’s widow released a collection of short stories just after his death, and I’ve included two of them in my collection. The Burial of Rats and Dracula’s Guest. They are both amazing!
FOR MORE OF THIS BONE CHILLING INTERVIEW WITH VARLA VENTURA VISIT THE FOLLOWING LINK ABOUT REAL LIFE HORROR STORIES AND THE TOTALLY BIZARRE. BY VISITING MY ARTICLE YOU HELP ME OUT TREMENDOUSLY.
http://youtu.be/lWZ5tM314S4
http://youtu.be/HPzS0WtXsp4