The Old European Script is also known as the Vinca alphabet. Thus the culture represented is called the Vinca-Tordos culture, and the script often called the Vinca-Tordos script; The discovery of the Tartaria tablets is based on both a writing system and it representing an alphabet, syllabary, ideograms earlier even than the writing systems of the Sumerians and Minoans. All of its symbols exist in the Etruscan alphabet and its letters are among Vinca signs, which is derived from the West Greek Alphabet, which in turn is derived from the Phoenician writing system. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, Indo-European peoples arrived in the 4th millennium B.C. across the steppes north of the Black Sea.
The Cucuteni culture, late Neolithic archaeological culture that flourished ca. 4500 B.C. – 3000 B.C. in the area of modern-day Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, in the Dniester-Dnieper region. The pottery is connected to the Linear Pottery culture. The only Indo-Aryan branch through the Iron Age reached the Indus Valley civilization probably around 1600 BC, surviving outside the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas is the Romani language.
One civilization to flourish between empires was the Minoan civilization in Crete. What the Minoans called themselves is unknown, although in Egyptian place names. The three writing systems, hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic: Transliterations are therefore often used to represent Egyptian writing. The oldest signs of inhabitants on Crete in the oldest (Minoan) civilization in Europe are ceramic Neolithic remains that date to approximately 7000 BC. Crete is one of the 13 regions into which Greece is divided. Crete straddles two climatic zones, the Mediterranean and the North African, mainly falling within the former. As such, the climate in Crete is primarily temperate.
Two of the first human civilizations began in the Mediterranean area following the Bronze Age. Civilization first developed in Mesopotamia beginning with Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Soon after, the Nile River valley was unified under the Pharaohs in the 4th millennium BC, and civilization quickly spread through the Fertile Crescent to the east coast of the sea and throughout the Levant, which happens to make the Mediterranean countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Mediterranean region history incorporates the origin and development of the Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Latin, Arab and Persian cultures.
Crete in the Meditteranean was the center of the Minoan civilization (ca. 2600–1400 BCE), the oldest civilization in Europe.
The Srubna culture is succeeded by the Scythians and Sarmatians in the 1st millennium BC, and by Khazars and Kipchaks in the first millennium AD. The Srubna culture occupied the area along and above the north shore of the Black Sea from the Dnieper eastwards along the northern base of the Caucasus to the area abutting the north shore of the Caspian Sea, across the Volga to come up against the domain of the approximately contemporaneous and somewhat related Andronovo culture. The Andronovo culture is a cover term for a group of Bronze Age cultures of southern Siberia and Central Asia, ca. 2300–1000 BCE. On its western fringes, it overlaps with the approximately contemporaneous, but distinct, Srubna culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial.