The Mystery of the Danube Civilisation

The discovery of Europe's oldest civilisation
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-7374-1145-5
Verlag: Marix Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 520 g

Over the last few years, archaeologists have been finding more and more evidence for the existence of a civilisation on the Balkan peninsula which, between the 6th and 4th millennia BCE, was using a writing system long before the Mesopotamians. In this book, Harald Haarmann provides the first comprehensive insight into this enigmatic Old European culture which, until recently, was unknown. He describes trade routes and settlements, arts and crafts, the mythology and writing system of the Danube Civilisation; he traces its origins to the Black Sea area and shows which cultural influences it had on Ancient Greece and the Near East.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haarmann, Harald

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
The puzzle of a 7,000 year-old civilisation
9
1. The transition to the Neolithic in Europe
(ca. 7500–5500 BCE)
13
Early farmers in Southeast Europe 14
The emergence of regional cultures 40
Cultural timeline of Old Europe 48
2. In search of the Old Europeans
51
The genetic footprint 51
Linguistic traces 56
3. Commerce and living space
79
Trade routes and commodities 79
Settlements and architecture 88
Religious sites and graves 99
4. Arts and crafts
109
Weaving and textiles 110
Pottery and firing techniques 114
Metallurgy 118
Art forms and cultural symbols 122
5. Model of an egalitarian society
141
Matriarchal or matrilineal? 144
Families and clans 146
Oecumene and trade 148
6. Religion and mythology
153
The world view of hunter-gatherers and farmers 155
Female deities in Old Europe 156
The bull – Animal symbols as attributes of the goddess 160
Cults and rituals 161
Music and dance 169
7. Counting, measuring, recording
173
Numerical signs and numerology 173
Calendrical notation 175
Weights and measures 180
Potter’s or ownership marks 181
8. The invention of writing
183
Origin and development of the Danube script 184
The spread of writing in Old Europe 190
Writing materials, inscriptions and varieties of text 193
The repertory of Old European signs 196
Written legacy of the Danube Civilisation 200
A script in the service of religion 212
The demise of the use of writing 214
9. The decline and legacy of the Danube Civilisation
(from around 4500 BCE)
217
Political and cultural upheavals 218
The Balkan-Ancient Aegean cultural drift 227
Minoan-Cypriot contacts: How Aegean script was exported 243
Epilogue
249
Bibliography
259
Key to inside cover map
279

Leseproben

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Haarmann, Harald
Harald Haarmann is one of the world’s best-known linguists. He studied general linguistics, various philological disciplines and prehistory at the universities of Hamburg, Bonn, Coimbra and Bangor. He obtained his PhD in Bonn and his Habilitation (qualification at professorship level) in Trier. He taught and researched at a number of German and Japanese universities. Since 2003 he has been Vice-President of the Institute of Archaeomythology (main office in Sebastopol, California, USA) and director of its “European Branch” (located in Luumäki, Finland). Professor Haarmann has authored more than 70 books in German and English, some of which have been translated into over a dozen languages. In addition to this study on the Danube Civilisation, he has produced remarkable insights into the roots of ancient Greek civilisation and the early history of Rome. His work has earned him the Prix logos (1999), awarded by the Association européenne des linguistes et des professeurs de langues (Paris) and the Premio Jean Monnet (Genova, 1999) for essay writing. In 2006 he received the Plato Award (UK). He lives and works in Finland.