The world's oldest gold treasure is nearly 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramid.
The Varna jewellery from Bulgaria dates to about 4500 BC — as ancient to the pyramid builders as the time of Christ is to us.
The events
- The gold of Varnac. 4500 BC · Varna, Bulgaria. 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.
- Great Pyramid of Gizac. 2560 BC · Giza. The Great Pyramid, built for Pharaoh Khufu at Giza, rose about 146 metres high. It remained the tallest human-made structure for nearly four millennia and is the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World.
More amazing facts
- 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
- 4700 BC · 2670 BC Popcorn is about 6,700 years old. The earliest popping-corn cobs, from around 4700 BC, were found on the northern coast of Peru, two thousand years before Egypt's first pyramid.
- 4600 BC · 3000 BC Australia's Aboriginal eel traps are older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.
- 4100 BC · 2560 BC The oldest known winery is some 1,500 years older than the Great Pyramid.
- 3807 BC · 2560 BC A wooden causeway in England has been dated to the very year: 3807 or 3806 BC. Tree rings show the Sweet Track across a marsh was laid 1,250 years before the Great Pyramid, and was used for only about ten years.
- 3600 BC · 2670 BC Malta's Ġgantija temples are older than Egypt's pyramids, and locals said a giantess built them.