Ancient Egyptian pyramids, tombs of ancient Babylonian rulers, or maybe Assyrian cemeteries? None of these things. The oldest ornaments made of gold were found near a place inseparable from Polish history!
The unusual discovery was made not on the Vistula River itself, but in a very important place for Poles:not far from the Bulgarian Varna on the Black Sea.
The oldest items made of gold known to us. Fragment of the exhibition at the Varna Archaeological Museum.
We associate it mainly with the battle fought with the Turks on November 10, 1444, during which the king of Poland and Hungary, Władysław III, later called the Varnaan, lost his life. Meanwhile, four thousand years BC, this area was flourishing with a culture that left behind beautiful gold ornaments.
What did I find and how much is it worth?
As in the recently published book “Bulgaria. Gold and rakija ”, writes Magdalena Genow, in 1972, during construction works, an excavator operator accidentally stumbled upon the tomb of a previously unknown civilization. Inside, as it turned out later, he found the oldest items made of gold discovered so far. However, he did not immediately realize what fell into his hands:
initially thought it was copper. The shade of the found gold was yellowish pale, and we commonly imagine gold as shiny, amber. The construction worker did not know what to do with the find. He carried them with him every day, asking what they might be worth .
Some of the graves in a prehistoric cemetery near Varna contained real treasures.
As he could not find anyone who could answer this question, he finally decided to call the local museum. The employees of the facility contacted the Varna Archaeological Museum and the police station. After officers confiscated the item, it was established that it was made of pure gold. In this situation, a decision was made to undertake large-scale archaeological excavations.
In the course of them, nearly 300 graves were examined, most of which contained only modest furnishings, consisting mainly of ceramics. However, some of them were real treasures. Interestingly, how we can read in Magdalena Genow's book “Bulgaria. Gold and rakija ”:
to search the mysterious cemetery, ... prisoners from the Varna prison were hired! For many inmates it must have been a true Indiana Jones-style adventure - look for the world's oldest gold in prison . And there is something to study. The oldest artifact found - a beautiful bracelet - is older than the ornaments from Egypt or Sumer.
Six kilograms of prehistoric gold
The end result of the archaeological work carried out until 1976 was stunning. The richest burial, in which the body of a 50-year-old man was buried, contained more than 1000 gold artifacts weighing up to one and a half kilograms ! In total, researchers recovered nearly 3,000 items of yellow metal from all the graves. Their total weight is over six kilograms.
Archaeologists assume that the valuables were made between 4,600 and 4,200 BC. For comparison - as Magdalena Genow emphasizes - "then in Egypt the pharaohs did not rule - the so-called the 0 dynasty that was supposed to unite Egypt, according to historians, began around 3100 B.C. ".
Bibliography:
- A Dictionary of Archeology , eds. Ian Shaw, Robert Jameson, Wiley-Blackwell 2002.
- Magdalena Genow, Bulgaria. Gold and rakija , 2019 Poznań Publishing House.
- Jim Grant, The Archeology Coursebook:An Introduction to Themes, Sites, Methods and Skills , Routledge 2015.