In Varna, Bulgaria, on the shores of the Black Sea, a formidable necropolis was discovered in 1972, rich in lessons on the Copper Age in the Balkans. Among the approximately 300 exhumed burials, tomb no. 43 is the most spectacular. It contains the body of a man over 40 years old, quickly nicknamed “the Chief” by archaeologists. The clothes are gone, only bones and gold remain. Lots of gold: 990 objects, plates, bracelets, a ceremonial weapon, and even a very becoming penis sheath. In total, 1.5 kilos of precious metal. “It’s huge: extracting so much gold from a river required a considerable amount of energy”, comments Jean-Paul Demoule, prehistorian.
Special issue “The crazy world of the hyper-rich”
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“The Chief”, who lived around 4500 years before Jesus Christ, is not the oldest of the hyper-rich identified. In Sungir, Russia, a man was found buried twenty-five thousand years ago with numerous bracelets, daggers, spears. And more than 3,500 mammoth ivory beads…
Can we date the birth of wealth? The question divides archaeologists and prehistorians. For a long time the Rousseauist idea of natural evolution dominated. For the author of the “Discourse on the origin and the foundations of inequality among men” (1755), the
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