A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

[Kosmo]

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

 

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture

[Callaecus]

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

I always found funny this teleological view of history in which things happen in an already pre-determined way, in this case, an "inevitable" march from "savagery" to "civilization", being the historian's work to find in which part of the line each human culture fits.

Edited December 1, 2009 by Callaecus

[Andreas]

Great read!

 

Thanks!