Harald Haarmann - The Mystery of the Danube Civilisation. The Discovery of Europe_s Oldest Civilisation [Retail].pdf

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HARALD HAARMANN
THE MYSTERY OF THE DANUBE
CIVILISATION
THE DISCOVERY OF EUROPE’S OLDEST CIVILISATION
CONTENTS
The puzzle of a 7,000 year-old civilisation
1. The transition to the Neolithic in Europe (ca. 7500–5500 BCE)
Early farmers in Southeast Europe
The emergence of regional cultures
Cultural timeline of Old Europe
2. In search of the Old Europeans
The genetic footprint
Linguistic traces
3. Commerce and living space
Trade routes and commodities
Settlements and architecture
Religious sites and graves
4. Arts and crafts
Weaving and textiles
Pottery and firing techniques
Metallurgy
Art forms and cultural symbols
5. Model of an egalitarian society
Matriarchal or matrilineal?
Families and clans
Oecumene and trade
6. Religion and mythology
The world view of hunter-gatherers and farmers
Female deities in Old Europe
The bull – Animal symbols as attributes of the goddess
Cults and rituals
Music and dance
7. Counting, measuring, recording
Numerical signs and numerology
Calendrical notation
Weights and measures
Potter’s or ownership marks
8. The invention of writing
Origin and development of the Danube script
The spread of writing in Old Europe
Writing materials, inscriptions and varieties of text
The repertory of Old European signs
Written legacy of the Danube Civilisation
A script in the service of religion
The demise of the use of writing
9. The decline and legacy of the Danube Civilisation (from around 4500 BCE)
Political and cultural upheavals
The Balkan-Ancient Aegean cultural drift
Minoan-Cypriot contacts: How Aegean script was exported
Epilogue
Bibliography
Key to inside cover map
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.
The beginnings of the cultural upswing in Old Europe can be traced back to a period of
ecological upheaval. The hypothesis of a Great Flood, in which the waters of the
Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus land bridge that had existed until then, is now
well established. It can be assumed that people from Anatolia, who were already familiar
with arable and livestock farming, were able to migrate westwards via this land link. Around
6700 BCE, as a result of the flood, the Black Sea was formed and the coastal regions
underwent a lasting transformation. This drastic change in living conditions set in motion a
process during which the indigenous (Old European) population became acculturated to an
agricultural lifestyle, local-scale internal migrations, socio-economic advances and
technological innovations. This was the transition process from the Mesolithic to the

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