The worlds first gold objects.

LeBrok

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[h=6]World first gold objects were made in Varna Culture, (Bulgaria) over 6,000 years ago.

Varna_gold1.jpg


http://www.anistor.gr/english/enback/o033.htm



World's first gold[/h]Some 4,600 years before the Common Era, a mysterious civilization emerged on the shores of lakes near the Black Sea—not far from the modern-day city of Varna. For its time, this Varna culture was amazingly advanced, both culturally and technologically. The first evidence of its existence was found in lovely ceramics, bone and stone idols and copper tools. Then an astounding chance discovery came to light, making headlines around the world. Just a few kilometres from Varna was a Copper Age necropolis (cemetery) containing the oldest gold objects ever discovered. Between 4600 and 4200 BCE, long before Mesopotamia or the Egypt of the pyramids, goldsmithing first began on the shores of the Black Sea, in the land that is today Bulgaria. Study of the 300 or so graves in the Varna I necropolis showed that there was a highly structured society here in the Copper Age. The richest graves contained gold diadems and sceptres, heavy copper axes and spear points, elegant finery and richly decorated ceramics. A large amount of shell jewellery was evidence of trade with the South, for the molluscs in question were from the Mediterranean.
http://www.pacmusee.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/varna-worlds-first-gold-ancient-secrets
 
That's very impressive work, surprisingly so for a new culture. And I notice that the Varna culture emerged about 1000 years after the Mediterranean flooded over the Bosphorus and greatly increased the size of the Black Sea. I wonder if the Varna culture owes some of its development to an even earlier culture, the evidence for which is at the bottom of the Black Sea?
 
That's very impressive work, surprisingly so for a new culture. And I notice that the Varna culture emerged about 1000 years after the Mediterranean flooded over the Bosphorus and greatly increased the size of the Black Sea. I wonder if the Varna culture owes some of its development to an even earlier culture, the evidence for which is at the bottom of the Black Sea?

I don't believe the Black Sea flooding theory any more.
After the last ice age, when icecaps started to melt, the Caspian Sea was flooded.
It rose till 22 - 25 m above todays sea level, and then discharged its surplus into the Black Sea.
The Black Sea then discharged into the Mediterranean.

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/

All this happened more than 10.000 years ago.

The sea level and the Mediterranean raised further, but when the Mediterranean reached the Black Sea, the level difference must have been minimal.
 
Goldsmithing and silversmithing and copper metallurgy all preceded bronze working, which makes sense since all three metals are malleable and shiny, and would have been sought-after for these properties to make decorative or luxury objects.

Based on the information I have the world's oldest copper artefacts date from 5500 BCE and were found in the Balkans.

The oldest gold objects are also from the Balkans, and could date from as early as 5000 BCE.

Silversmithing started around 4000 BCE in the Aegean.

Until recently the Bronze Age was deemed to have started in the Caucasus with the Maykop and Kura-Araxes cultures, from 3700 BCE and 3500 BCE respectively. But there is now evidence that bronze metallurgy also started in the Balkans circa 4500 BCE, nearly one millennium before the Caucasus region. However it doesn't seem to have caught on, and may even have been abandoned, since no other bronze objects were found in the Balkans until the steppe invasions in the second half of the 4th millennium.

If bronze metallurgy really started that early it is odd that silver metallurgy came later, considering that silver is so much easier to work and is not an alloy. We may still find older evidence of silver working.
 
That's very impressive work, surprisingly so for a new culture. And I notice that the Varna culture emerged about 1000 years after the Mediterranean flooded over the Bosphorus and greatly increased the size of the Black Sea. I wonder if the Varna culture owes some of its development to an even earlier culture, the evidence for which is at the bottom of the Black Sea?
Exactly what I was thinking. The biblical pagan sinners flooded by God.

So much more land flooded from Varna and Cucutini side.
Black-sea-hist.png
 
Goldsmithing and silversmithing and copper metallurgy all preceded bronze working, which makes sense since all three metals are malleable and shiny, and would have been sought-after for these properties to make decorative or luxury objects.

Based on the information I have the world's oldest copper artefacts date from 5500 BCE and were found in the Balkans.

The oldest gold objects are also from the Balkans, and could date from as early as 5000 BCE.

Silversmithing started around 4000 BCE in the Aegean.

Until recently the Bronze Age was deemed to have started in the Caucasus with the Maykop and Kura-Araxes cultures, from 3700 BCE and 3500 BCE respectively. But there is now evidence that bronze metallurgy also started in the Balkans circa 4500 BCE, nearly one millennium before the Caucasus region. However it doesn't seem to have caught on, and may even have been abandoned, since no other bronze objects were found in the Balkans until the steppe invasions in the second half of the 4th millennium.

If bronze metallurgy really started that early it is odd that silver metallurgy came later, considering that silver is so much easier to work and is not an alloy. We may still find older evidence of silver working.
Something terrible had to happen in Balkans. Judging by technological progress, we should have expected to sea first cities and city states. Instead they happened in Near East with pretty much continues civilization. In Balkans things quieted down till Bronze Age, and first real civilization till Iron Age.
Unless they've built their big cities out of wood only (preferred building material of the wooded area) and they are impossible to find after 6ky?
 
Something terrible had to happen in Balkans. Judging by technological progress, we should have expected to sea first cities and city states. Instead they happened in Near East with pretty much continues civilization. In Balkans things quieted down till Bronze Age, and first real civilization till Iron Age.
Unless they've built their big cities out of wood only (preferred building material of the wooded area) and they are impossible to find after 6ky?

that is correct, houses were made of wooden beams
at the end the villages had also wooden pallisades
for their metallurgy they needed charcoal
building and metallurgy caused deforestation
 
that is correct, houses were made of wooden beams
at the end the villages had also wooden pallisades
for their metallurgy they needed charcoal
building and metallurgy caused deforestation
If they caused deforestation, which I think in this area and for their population density was unlikely, they should have started building with stone and mud bricks like they did in Mesopotamia, where lack of forests didn't stop their civilization. Likewise, being richest tribes around, they could have paid for transported lambert from North, where it was always abandoned.
I'm thinking that something terrible happened to them or whole Balkans to regress or stop developing their civilization for next 2ky. Otherwise we would have seen steady growth and progress, (even with wooden structures), same as we see in Near East.
 
Exactly what I was thinking. The biblical pagan sinners flooded by God.

So much more land flooded from Varna and Cucutini side.
Black-sea-hist.png

This could be the key to understand the development of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age societies in the Circumpontic region. Since humans like to build settlements near water, and above all where a river meets the sea, there are good chances that several early settlements are now under water. Hopefully it will be possible one day to explore the bottom of the Black Sea coastal area. Modern/future technologies could allow to spot stone walls and metal objects buried under the earth below the sea, so that archaeologists know exactly where to dig with submarines (or aquatic robots).

I wouldn't be surprised if find some of the oldest copper or bronze artefacts in submerged sites.

In fact the same could be true for the Aegean and southern Anatolian coasts. I am convinced that we still have to find traces of Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic human settlements linking the Levant to the Balkans. Mountainous Inner Anatolia seems to have been sparsely inhabited back then, although it becomes increasingly evident that Y-haplogroup E-V13 and J2b and mt-haplogroups J1c, J2b1 and T2 (and probably some H subclades) entered the Balkans before the Neolithic, but only spread beyond the Balkans during or after the Neolithic. In such a scenario, Neolithic agriculturalists from the Fertile Crescent would have belonged to G2a, E-M123, T and perhaps also J1 and mt-haplogroups such as HV, H5, K1a, N1a, U3 and X2.
 
LOL............looks like everyone watched last year's
http://www.alexanderslostworld.com/

where floods along the oxus river , flooded the Aral sea, then Caspian sea, then Black sea and flowed into the med.

see the series and you can get something out of it
 
Something terrible had to happen in Balkans. Judging by technological progress, we should have expected to sea first cities and city states. Instead they happened in Near East with pretty much continues civilization. In Balkans things quieted down till Bronze Age, and first real civilization till Iron Age.
Unless they've built their big cities out of wood only (preferred building material of the wooded area) and they are impossible to find after 6ky?

Plenty of wooden villages have been found. Cucuteni-Trypolye had large towns of several thousand inhabitants, exceeding the size and population of Uruk cities in Mesopotamia. If archaeologists could find these I doubt that they wouldn't have found actual cities.

The dichotomy between the Balkans and the Near East did not arise so early. Apart from Mesopotamia, cities did not develop in the Near East until the 4th millennium, where is when the culture of 'Old Europe' in the Balkans were destroyed by the Indo-Europeans. Even in Egypt the first cities, Memphis and Thebes only date from c. 3000 BCE (Thebes was settled since 3200 BCE but was only a village or town at first), which in Europe corresponds to the middle of the Indo-European Coțofeni and Ezero cultures in the Balkans, and almost to the start of the Corded Ware culture in Central Europe and Scandinavia.

The question is why did the first true cities, with a centralised administration, temples, etc., develop first in Sumer and not anywhere else in the Near East or the Balkans ?

The world's first city was apparently Eridu, the southernmost Sumerian city. According to Gwendolyn Leick in her book Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Eridu was founded through the fusion of three separate cultures: that of peasant Ubaidian farmers, living in mud-brick huts and practising irrigation; that of mobile nomadic Semitic pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats; and that of fisher folk, living in reed huts in the marshlands, who may have been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Incidentally, in haplogroup terms, this could represent the fusion of G2a, E-M123, J1 and T people.

Such a fusion of ethnic group would almost inevitably have led to one group dominating the others and securing power for themselves. This may simply be why the civil administration centred around the temple emerged. Early Sumerian cities were administered from the temple (and later from the palace and temple). Religion therefore served as a way for the elite minority to justify their authority. Most of the ordinary folk were peasant farmers and fishermen, who from now on had to pay offerings (taxes) to the city god (Enki, in Eridu's case), which in turn allowed the temple priests to live comfortably and decide of the legislation. An intermediary middle class worked as craftsmen, scribes and other temple/palace dependants in the city.

So what happened in Sumer was essentially a foreign invasion in which the invaders used religion to establish their political authority. The exact same thing happened in the Indian subcontinent from 1800 BCE with the Indo-Aryan invasions and the creation of the caste system through Hinduism. The Arabs repeated the process with the expansion of Islam, and particularly the Shia Muslims, who conferred special religious authority to Muhammad's family, the Ahl al-Bayt, and their descendants.

That would explain why cities did not develop first in the Balkans. No foreign invader came claiming that they knew better the ways of the gods and as such were the rightful rulers of society. Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies in the Balkans and Carpathians were originally very egalitarian, and remained it quite late with the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. Varna was a real exception, and perhaps marked the first arrival of foreigners, if not from the steppe then from Anatolia.
 
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LOL............looks like everyone watched last year's
http://www.alexanderslostworld.com/

where floods along the oxus river , flooded the Aral sea, then Caspian sea, then Black sea and flowed into the med.

see the series and you can get something out of it

I first wrote about the Black Sea deluge theory on this forum in 2010. Th flood hypothesis was originally proposed by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in 1997, so it's not new.

The deluge might have been caused by a prolonged warmer period that accelerated the melting the mountain glaciers (in Anatolia and the Caucasus) and ice caps (in Russia) left over from the last glaciation. Rivers would have flowed faster and ultimately caused the Caspian and Black Sea levels to rise.

The Euphrates and Tigris were apparently affected too since Sumerian mythology has its own deluge story. The myth says that five cities were founded prior to the deluge. The five oldest Sumerian cities chronologically are Eridu (founded c. 5400 BCE), Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar, and Shuruppak. Thanks to this chronology from the Sumerian King' list, the flood can be dated to c. 2900 BCE. The first king of Eridu (Alulim) ruled from c. 3150 BCE, i.e. just after the collapse of the Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE). Technically Uruk and Nippur were also founded before the flood, but were not included in the King list as they didn't serve as royal capital before the flood. Immediately after the deluge, Sumerian society enters the Early Dynastic Period.


The Black Sea deluge and the Sumerian flood were probably two completely separate events, the former resulting from the melting of Russian ice caps, whereas the latter would have been caused by the melting of eastern Anatolian glaciers feeding the Tigris and Euphrates.
 
I know that some folks have questioned whether the IE body of languages could have developed all around the Black Sea before the deluge. However, linguists seem to be quite certain that the original proto-Indo-European language isn't that old, and that it had to have developed initially in a more limited area (e.g. the steppe region or forest-steppe region of southern Russia), so that the speakers of proto-Indo-European could have been in constant contact with one another in order to develop their intial proto-language .
 
I first wrote about the Black Sea deluge theory on this forum in 2010. Th flood hypothesis was originally proposed by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in 1997, so it's not new.

The deluge might have been caused by a prolonged warmer period that accelerated the melting the mountain glaciers (in Anatolia and the Caucasus) and ice caps (in Russia) left over from the last glaciation. Rivers would have flowed faster and ultimately caused the Caspian and Black Sea levels to rise.

The Euphrates and Tigris were apparently affected too since Sumerian mythology has its own deluge story. The myth says that five cities were founded prior to the deluge. The five oldest Sumerian cities chronologically are Eridu (founded c. 5400 BCE), Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar, and Shuruppak. Thanks to this chronology from the Sumerian King' list, the flood can be dated to c. 2900 BCE. The first king of Eridu (Alulim) ruled from c. 3150 BCE, i.e. just after the collapse of the Uruk period (ca. 4000 to 3100 BCE). Technically Uruk and Nippur were also founded before the flood, but were not included in the King list as they didn't serve as royal capital before the flood. Immediately after the deluge, Sumerian society enters the Early Dynastic Period.


The Black Sea deluge and the Sumerian flood were probably two completely separate events, the former resulting from the melting of Russian ice caps, whereas the latter would have been caused by the melting of eastern Anatolian glaciers feeding the Tigris and Euphrates.

Ok, but the program I saw was that the flooding occurred north of the aral sea and moved south causing mass migrations.

in regards to finds in the black sea..Mr. Ballard has found interesting stuff since 2010, including a lost city on the romanian coast
 
The deluge might have been caused by a prolonged warmer period that accelerated the melting the mountain glaciers (in Anatolia and the Caucasus) and ice caps (in Russia) left over from the last glaciation. Rivers would have flowed faster and ultimately caused the Caspian and Black Sea levels to rise.

all of this did happen, but in the periode 10-18000 years ago
during the intermediate youngest dryas (12800 - 11600 years ago) the icecaps even started growing again

all this was long before farming and towns
it was the time R1 made his way from Southern Siberia / Central Asia to the Pontic steppe / Nw Iran

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/
 
All these flooding hints, make me think that Atlantis is somewhere in the Black Sea. After all, Anatolia is known for heavy earthquakes to this day.
 
all of this did happen, but in the periode 10-18000 years ago
during the intermediate youngest dryas (12800 - 11600 years ago) the icecaps even started growing again

all this was long before farming and towns
it was the time R1 made his way from Southern Siberia / Central Asia to the Pontic steppe / Nw Iran

http://ubuntuone.com/p/19zG/

What makes you think that the melting of the icecaps was complete by then ? There could have been some left - perhaps the new ones that grew during the youngest dryas.

Icecaps would have melted faster in Western Europe than in Russia because of the Gulf Stream.

As far as Anatolian and Caucasian glaciers are concerned, they haven't melted completed even today (ditto for the Alps), so who can know for sure how much was left 5000 to 7000 years ago ?
 
Sorry, it didn't post properly. I'll try again.
 
Something terrible had to happen in Balkans. Judging by technological progress, we should have expected to sea first cities and city states. Instead they happened in Near East with pretty much continues civilization.

Something 'terrible' did happen;

David W. Anthony - The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2010) [Princeton Uni.]
Between about 4200 and 3900 BCE more than six hundred tell settlements of the Gumelnita, Karanovo VI and varna cultures were burned and abandoned in the lower danube valley and eastern Bulgaria. Some of their residents dispersed temporarily into smaller villages like the Gumelnita B1 hamlet of Jilava, southwest of Bucharest, with just five to six houses and a single-level cultural deposit....Metal objects now were made using new arsenical bronze alloys, and were of new types, including new weapons, daggers being the most important "We are faced with the complete replacement of a culture" the foremost expert on Eneolithic metallurgy E. N. Chernykh said. It was "a catastrophe of colossal scope...a complete cultural caesura" according to the Bulgarian archaeologist H. Todorova

British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara - Ancient Anatolia (1998)
increasing evidence for disastrous happenings in Romania and Bulgaria as barbarous, almost certainly Indo-European, peoples moved west massacring and causing panic. The Gumelnitsa-Karanovo VI culture was destroyed.
 

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