Marked Varna Necropolis, Bulgaria

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Varna and the first gold

A cemetery found by chance near Varna, Bulgaria, held the oldest worked gold in the world. One man was buried with more gold than all the other graves of his time put together.

Date
About 4600 to 4200 BCIII · Farming and the New Stone Age
Place
Varna Necropolis, BulgariaEurope
Laid out as
A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons
4 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IA digger’s lucky find
  2. IIGrave 43
  3. IIIGold and power
  4. IVCopper and the Copper Age

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Ivan Ivanov

Objects

  • The grave 43 gold
  • Copper axes

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

4600 BC to 4200 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?