The Varna necropolis and the oldest worked gold
- Date
- c. 4600 to 4200 BCE
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
At a cemetery on the Black Sea coast near Varna in Bulgaria, accidentally discovered in 1972, archaeologists uncovered the oldest large assemblage of worked gold known anywhere, dated to roughly 4600 to 4200 BCE.
Across some 300 Chalcolithic graves they found around 3,000 gold objects weighing about six kilograms in total, together with copper tools, fine pottery and exotic ornaments. The distribution was strikingly unequal: a handful of burials, above all the famous Grave 43 of an adult man laid out with a sceptre and gold-sheathed regalia, contained more gold than has been found in the entire rest of the contemporary world, while many graves had little or none. Some lavishly furnished graves were even symbolic, containing no body at all. Varna is therefore landmark evidence that pronounced social ranking, concentrated wealth and probably hereditary status had emerged in southeastern Europe well before the first city-states of Mesopotamia, challenging the assumption that such inequality required cities, writing or kings.
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Related social & demographic events
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000 to 3100 BCE
- Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megalithsc. 4000 BCE
- The Cucuteni-Trypillia mega-settlements of Eastern Europec. 4100 to 3600 BCE
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 to 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000 to 9500 BCE)
Essential reading
- Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisationc. 2600 BCE
- Standardised Binary Weights System of the Indusc. 2600 BCE
- Rise of Kerma as an Urban Centre in Nubiac. 2500 BCE
- Decline and De-urbanisation of the Indus Civilisationc. 1900 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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