One thing I'll add to this is the idea of non Greek Europe being primitive before the roman empire is somewhat of a fantasy. The reason we call different historical periods after metals like the copper age or the bronze age or the iron age. Is that ultimately what made civilization possible is the usage of metal tools and weapons. Europe has always had some of the most advanced metallurgy in the world. From the appreance of widespread copper mellaturgy in Europe around the 5th millennium b.c . There's a bunch of evidence of violent conquest and kingdom building in Europe.
This dude is one of several burials in this necroplis filled with treasure.
Pretty much all of what you're referencing, walaal, was in
the Balkans which is essentially Greek and Anatolia adjacent. The people there were pretty much Anatolian-Farmer transplants ancestrally and culturally. Their
impressiveness is also overdone by people on sites like Wikipedia. Pretty much everything impressive about them was done earlier in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent as well:
- Large Proto-towns: Çatalhöyük (Anatolia, ~7400–6000 BCE): thousands of people, mural art, obsidian trade. Jarmo, Çayönü, Hassuna/Halaf (Iraq/Türkiye, 8th–6th millennia BCE).
- Copper use: Çayönü Tepesi (SE Türkiye, ~8800–6500 BCE), Jarmo (NE Iraq, ~7000–6000 BCE), N. Mesopotamia, ~6200–5300 / 6000–5300 BCE
- Proto-writing (Vinca symbols?): Near Eastern clay tokens & bullae used for accounting from ~8000 BCE onward (Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s work), Dispilio tablet (Greece, ~5200 BCE)
Pretty much everything they did was done much earlier in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Levant and such. The only thing they seemingly had first was large scale gold use in the Varna culture which is in Bulgaria which is like right next to Greece and Anatolia:
en.wikipedia.org
That's what you referenced with that guy covered in gold implements and it's the one thing they can be said to have perhaps done first. One can also argue they practiced copper extraction/smelting before even their Anatolian and Fertile Crescent cousins but that's about it. Otherwise, even the settlement you said was ~30k strong is exaggerated upon proper inspection. Population claims of 30,000 are contested; many archaeologists prefer
5–15k and stress that these were low-density, ring-plan settlements without strong evidence for public buildings, markets, or administration; so “city” is debated. Nothing like the sophistication of settlements you see in the Fertile Crescent later or even contemporaneously:
- Tell Brak (Northern Mesopotamia): already sprawling by ~3900–3600 BCE; estimates often 15–30k, with urban-style nucleation and public architecture.
- Uruk (Southern Mesopotamia): expanding rapidly in the Uruk period (~4000–3100 BCE); by ~3500–3300 BCE many estimates place it >30–40k (later rising much higher), with temples, administration, and the earliest writing soon after.
- Hierakonpolis/Naqada (Predynastic Egypt): ~3600–3200 BCE, several thousand to perhaps 10k+, showing elite/public architecture—smaller than Uruk but clearly complex.
- Çatalhöyük (Anatolia): ~7400–6000 BCE, dense town ~3–8k.
With all that aside, it's nonsensical to use the prehistoric--basically Anatolian Farmer--Balkans as an example of "pre-Greek Europe".
Once you leave the Balkans and look at what Romans came upon--
Anatolian Farmer + WHG + Yamnaya mixes with an Indo-European linguistic character--you do essentially get a people who would, in the eyes of a 19th century European colonialist, not seem so different from Early Modern to Late Medieval Tropical West-Africans. Impressive metalworking skills but no cities remotely comparable to what you would find in the Med and MENA world, no advanced stone architecture, largely vernacular (
hut-type) architecture and
towns, no indigenous writing systems and leaps and bounds less "sophisticated" than whatever was going on in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, Anatolia, Greece and even the Maghreb.
It is not at all a meme for the Romans, Greeks and MENAs to have seen much of Europe outside of some parts of Iberia and Gallia as a "backwater" in their day. It definitely was when compared in terms of the elements of "civilization" to themselves. In fact, it can be argued that some Early-Modern West-African cities rivaled or exceeded the largest towns north of the Alps in size.
Though I think the essence of your reply to
@Xareen which was that the Anatolian Farmers weren't doing nothing with Europe's quality lands, like in parts of the Balkans, once they got there holds true.
