Beschreibung
The puzzle of a 7,000 year-old civilisation To this day, there is still a widespread belief that it was the Greeks who built the first European civilisation, illuminating a shining light to dispel the darkness of prehistory. For this reason, most of us feel indebted to the Greeks for laying the foundations of our modern world. And it is not often that anyone asks if the Greek civilisation really was as original as our school books suggest. The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to another European civilisation, one that is much older than Ancient Greece, and research over the last twenty years has enabled its contours to become ever clearer: The achievements of the Danube Civilisation, whose beginnings lie in the Neolithic (Younger Stone Age) and which experienced its heyday in the Chalcolithic (Copper Age), created the conditions that enabled the rapid rise of Greek culture in the first millennium BCE. "In the 5th and early 4th millennia B.C., (.), Old Europeans had towns with a considerable concentration of population, temples several stories high, a sacred script, spacious houses of four or five rooms, professional ceramicists, weavers, copper and gold metallurgists, and other artisans producing a range of sophisticated goods" (Gimbutas 1991: viii). Twenty years ago, the term "Old Europe" tended to be familiar only among experts, and knowledge of the advanced culture of this pre-Greek population was somewhat sketchy. Much of what the American- Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994) had reconstructed for her mosaic of Old Europe was hypothetical. But a lot has happened since then. The political turnaround in Eastern and Southeast Europe after 1989 has led to an upturn in research and cultural activity in the newly independent states and, as a result, to an intensification of excavation activities, both in Southeast Europe and in the Ukraine, where important Old European sites are located. Since the end of the 20th century, the amount of material evidence has grown considerably, and recent findings leave no doubt that the cultural level of this pre-Greek society can only be described as a civilisation. "At its peak, about 5000-3500 BCE, Old Europe was developing many of the political, technological, and ideological signs of 'civilisation'" (Anthony 2009 a: 29). What we considered to be part of prehistory until just yesterday actually belongs to the historical period.
