When I was in elementary school, a particular exercise used to be performed with poor conviction, but still remains in my memory: alphabet worksheets. A page filled with «f»s, one with «c»s, one with «d»s. Lower case, upper case, block letters, cursive.
In a book in many ways revolutionary, Marija Gimbutas finds in the etchings performed onto terracotta objects and sculptures during the Neolithic era a form of script – a script that precedes cuneiform writing, and that was developed by a non-migratory, matricentric civilization based on agriculture, probably peaceful and devoted to the cult of the goddess, which got wiped out by the coming of Indo-European civilizations.

The remaining signs, which other archeologists interpreted as ornamental motifs, are angular shapes that look like the letters V, M, and W – or zigzags. They were etched onto terracotta surfaces, such as vases and plates, and sometimes overwrote the bodies of votive statuettes dedicated to goddesses and female ancestors. These weren’t symbols, but signs: in fact, each time the graphemes formed linear structures in a different way.
Ivana Spinelli thought that this script – that got lost, as everything else from Ancient Europe’s pre-Indo-European culture – needed to be learned again. Of course we don’t know what those signs meant exactly, but mostly they were associated to goddesses, animal shapes and cosmic formations – to the feminine that brought life and regeneration, which was powerful and sometimes terrible, and stood at the