The Vin a symbols, sometimes called the Vin a script or Old European script (also Vin a signs, Vin a-Turda script, etc.) are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennia BCE) artifacts from the Vin a culture of southeastern Europe. The symbols are mostly considered as constituting an instance of "proto-writing"; that is, they probably conveyed a message but did not encode language, predating the development of writing proper by more than a millennium.