Plomin tablet

The sign whose function is questioned by Fučić[1] has been inscribed with significantly deeper furrows and is four times larger than the average size of Glagolitic letters, and for that reason alone one can ask whether it's an indispensable ingredient of the Glagolitic inscription itself, has it been written by the hand of the same scribe and has it been inscribed at the same times as other text.

Since Old Croatian verb pisati meant both "to write" and "to paint", it is uncertain whether this verb was used to denote also a sculptural work and concordantly, if Plomin tablet inscription is a signature of the sculptor, or the Glagolitic text some secondarily written graffiti, written by some scribe.

Finally, there is a peculiar letter E (2, 3) occurring twice in this inscription and in both attestations demonstrates the same type with two horizontal lines intersecting the vertical hasta.

With the letter E on the Plomin tablet, this development on Croatian Glagolitic areal can be connected with oldest preserved Glagolitic monuments at all: the Kiev Folios, Prague Fragments, and with Macedonian monuments: Codex Assemanius, Ohrid Folios, Euchologium Sinaiticum.

The relief shows a beardless male figure, clad in short tunic by his knees, tightened at the hips.

Frontal setting of the character with his left arm bended at the elbow in front of the chest, holding some kind of an object, reminding of the pose and the typical gesture of male portraits of Late Antique Roman gravestones stelae, makes the connection of continuity or imitation of this primitive relief to the Late Antique gravestone plastics unambiguous.

Between that large range—from Late Antique to Early Romanesque—it is less probable that this work would have come into existence in the centuries from the 8th to the first half of the 11th century, because in that period the sculptural works used wattle ornaments, a stylistically marked type of creation, a tradition which rules out naturalistic conceptions of human figure.

[6] Reflecting on Fučić's alternative interpretation, academician Ljubo Karaman has laid his arguments, deciding for a medieval origin of the relief.

By comparing the Plomin tablet figure with the remains of fresco from the ruinous church of Saint George near Vrbnik on the island of Krk, where this saint is portrayed not with one vegetational attribute but with two (holding one in each hand), Fučić has interpreted this unusual, exceptional iconography as a contamination of the perception of Saint George the martyr (holding a palm in his hand) with a perception of Croatian folk "green George" (Croatian: zeleni Juraj) which carries spring greenery in his hand.