The Varna necropolis and the oldest worked gold

Date

c. 4600 – 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 4600–4200 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.

Related social & demographic events

• Uruk becomes the world's first city
  c. 4000–3100 BCE
• Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megaliths
  c. 4000 BCE
• The Cucuteni–Trypillia mega-settlements of Eastern Europe
  c. 4100 – 3600 BCE
• Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa
  c. 300,000 years ago
• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE
• The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
  c. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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