Posted on 11/30/2009 8:48:53 PM PST by Borges
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’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.
New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I can’t access the article. It this about Thrace?
Thrace isn’t mentioned in the article.
Interesting, thanks for posting this.
Ping.
“was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world” and was developing “many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”
And then they probably got a shiny new charismatic leader who promised a lot of hopey changey stuff
I wonder what archaeologists some thousands of years from now will wonder about us?
This is all impossible. That renowned historian Al Sharpton has said that all the Europeans’ ancestors were living in caves at the time of ancient Egypt.
Romania and Bulgaria.
Obviously these primitive Native Europeans were wiped out by imperialist oppressors from Africa and the Middle East.
I really should put a sarcasm tag on that one. :)
Aren’t the ancient Egyptians considered white?
Hmmm. I wonder if they spoke an Indo-European language and were part of the spread of agriculture, which the article places at around 6,500 BC in Europe.
Ancient grooviness.
Not by Sharpton and other racial revisionists. But I think they were darker skinned Caucasians, as most North Africans and Middle Easterners were.
Thanks for the info. I thought it was about Thrace, present-day Bulgaria, because that’s where one of the largest ancient gold treasures was found.
There have been many archeological excavations in that area, and they are still ongoing. One of the most interesting finds is a well preserved chariot. Fascinating stuff.
Truly fascinating.
A number of year ago I saw a National Geographic article about excavations in Bulgaria. It might have been shortly after the 1972 date mentioned for major discoveries in the article. At any rate I was impressed with the colorfulness and beauty of the pottery items. These items were excavated from a 50 foot high settlement mound that had been built up over thousands of years of building and rebuilding. The date mentioned for these colorful objects was more than 5,000 BC.
The article showed later objects from the same mound dated around 3,000 BC. While well formed, they were dark and depressing in style. It seemed as though something had taken the joy away from these people. Since I am into catastrophe, I checked my volcano directory and found that Mt. Mazama (also known as Crater Lake) in our own US made it’s might explosion leaving a 6 mile diameter crater. This was around 7,000 years ago. Since Mt. Pinitubo left a 3 mile diameter crater, then the volume of ejecta from Mazam would have been 8 times that of Pinitubo. Perhaps you remember the 500 year flood of the Mississippi, or the deadly ice storms in the Appalacians after Pinitubo.
I am guessing that Mazama must have had a significant worldwide impact. Then again, there may be other equally or even greater volcanic events separating the happy culture from the morose culture. Anyone have a candidate?
My mother was born in that part of the world — Thrace, present-day Bulgaria. It’s called the Valley of the Roses. The roses grown there are used as the basis of many perfumes. I was told that most if them are exported to France.
I went there when I was a kid and have many fond memories. I remember seeing so many mounds throughout the country. Some were being excavated, but we weren’t allowed to get close to the digs.
As for a catastrophic event as you say, when did the volcano in Santorini explode? Maybe that was the cause of it.
The ancient Egyptians were a mixed race cosmopolitan society. They conquered Cush (modern-day Sudan), and were sometimes conquered by them. There were Cushite pharaohs. There are ancient Egyptian busts that have Negroid features. I used to have a book with photos of such. I lent it out and it never returned.
Santorini exploded about 1500 B.C. That prompted the invasion of the eastern Mediterranean by the Sea Peoples. These were the survivors of Knossos. They knew how to smelt iron. Among them were the Philistines. They first tried to conquer Egypt. They failed and settled near Gaza. There is no mention of the Philistines in the Bible at the time of the Patriarchs, but the Philistines are in the land at the time of the Exodus in the 1400s B.C.
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Thanks ConservativeMind, El Sordo, and gleeaikin. |
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