Panchronia

The gold of Varna

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c. 4500 BC · Varna, Bulgaria · Europe · Culture

The world's oldest worked gold, and its first rich men

The gold of Varna
Yelkrokoyade · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

A Black Sea necropolis yielded some 3,000 gold objects about 6,500 years old, more than in the rest of the world from that time. Almost all of it lay in a few rich graves, making it one of the earliest signs of power and inequality of wealth.