The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Old Europe, by her estimation, endured from roughly 7000 BC to 3500 BC – which is, again, quite a respectable period of time. She believed these societies to be essentially peaceful, and argued that they shared a common pantheon under the tutelage of a supreme goddess, whose cult is attested in many hundreds of female figurines – some depicted with masks – found in Neolithic settlements, from the Middle East to the Balkans.7 According to Gimbutas, ‘Old Europe’ came to a catastrophic end in the third millennium BC, when the Balkans were overrun by a migration of cattle-keeping peoples – the so-called ‘kurgan ’ folk – originating on the Pontic steppe, north of the Black Sea. Kurgan refers to the most archaeologically recognizable feature of these groups: earthen tumuli heaped over the graves of (typically male) warriors, buried with weapons and ornaments of gold, and with extravagant sacrifices of animals and occasionally also human ‘retainers’. All these features attested values antithetical to the communitarian ethos of Old Europe.