The Rest Is History - 280: Serbia: The Birthplace of Civilisation

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

A little known story. Serbia, the home to one of the first great civilisations. They had the first written scripts, they smelted copper before anyone else, lived in urban settlements. But is it true? Join Tom and Dominic as they dive into this mysterious story. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. zdravo and welcome to the rest is history now you may be wondering why i welcomed you in serbian and the answer tom is that we have reached the balkan republic in a survey of the countries that have qualified for this year's World Cup in Qatar. You chose to do Serbia. You were very keen to do it. Yeah, I was.

I would have liked to have done it, but you chose to do it. What would you have chosen to do? Oh. Something involving 20th century coups. I might have chosen the Black Hand, but do you know what, Tom? I'd probably have chosen the Battle of Kosovo-Polye. Okay. The Field of the Blackbirds.

That's probably what I'd have chosen. Okay. You're looking deflated with me saying that. No at all not at all not at all so we we obviously before recording episodes we have discussed haven't we what we're going to do yeah so i think i ended up choosing uh stefan dushan the great 14th century serbian emperor yeah which is what you may be expecting me to do. That is what I'm expecting you to do. I'm not going to. Oh, no. I'm ambushing you. I was really looking forward to that, Tom.

No. I was really looking forward to it. I've got a totally new one. And the thing that will really excite you about this is that it's prehistory. Oh, for Christ's sake. You love a bit of prehistory, don't you? It's not science. It's prehistory.

Oh, for goodness sake. I look at your little face lighting up with joy. But, Dominic. Yeah, I want that. This is actually brilliant yeah this is brilliant i think and i'd be interested to see whether you agree okay because basically where would you say the first script the first written language originated you might say sumeria you might say mesopotamia you might say i'd probably say near niche or novi sad somewhere like that in serbia you'd be right or would you because there is a possibility that the birthplace of written scripts was serbia okay and that serbia was the home of one of the original great civilizations did you

know that no i've never heard that claim made before a place of of urban settlements the first place to develop copper smelting, the first place to develop copper smelting, perhaps the first place to develop a written language. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. It's not the kind of thing that's generally known. Tom, you've got a bit of work to do to convince me, I'll be frank with you. Well, it has to be said that it is much debated. But I think this is a genuinely unexpected... I mean, I hadn't realised this at all. And so I was reading through about Serbian history and came across this and thought,

actually, this is much more interesting. So I had visited a Serbian history podcast, either involving men with revolvers shooting archduchesses or just a lot of scimitars and the Ottomans lurking in the background. But what you didn't expect was Serbia as the birthplace of the first great European civilisation. So Serbian listeners are very strong following in Serbia.

They'll be delighted by this, Tom. By and large, the Serbian take on this is at the stronger end of arguing that this is the birthplace of civilization. The others are more skeptical. However, so this story begins with a guy called Milhe Vasic. And I hope that I've pronounced his name right. He was a very very long-lived bloke he was born in 1869 and he died in 1956 and so he lived through quite a lot of change yeah so he lived through the collapse of the austria-hungarian uh empire first world war

um second world war communist period in in these episodes we've we've touched on characters who might come from tintin books quite a lot haven't we kind of generals who lead coups and that kind of thing people with dark glasses milahay vasich if you imagine professor calculus you would not be far wrong we had a kind of goatee uh he was bald very scholarly and he was serbia's first and greatest archaeologist and this was he was born at a time where there wasn't i think a great tradition of archaeology in serbia and he went to study in germany got his his doctorate there came back to serbia in 1981 and he was both a museum director in belgrade and he ended up professor of archaeology at belgrade university so he's absolutely you know if you want serbian archaeology he is your man and basically he he was so famous and he was he was so

much the big man in serbian archaeology that in various ways he was in post until he was 86 and he's and he just kept surviving all these regime changes yeah so it didn't matter you know who was in charge. He was the guy who would be going off and doing his excavations. And he is most famous for excavations at a particular village called Vinca, which is just outside Belgrade. And it's now been basically swallowed up by Belgrade. So it's a kind of suburb now and the focus of his excavations was um a great mound about 12 meters high uh called bello brudo again i hope my

pronunciation is right dominic you could help me on that is that is that right uh is that is that i think you just have to say it and yeah i think you know i don't i don't know anything tom i mean i'm just pretending but well you you would know you'd recognize that that is in English, the White Hill. Yeah. And on the surface, there were remnants of kind of a medieval settlement. So he knew that it was a medieval settlement. But he also suspected that it was a tell. And a tell, it's a word that comes from Near Eastern archaeology.

And basically, it's a description of a hill that is just nonstop human settlement. So basically, you dig down and down and down and the whole way through, it's just kind of human rubbish. And so he wanted to know, well, you know, how far can I get down through all this kind of, you know, this layer after layer of cultural debris? And he begins work in 1908, and it gets obviously interrupted by the First World War. So that's bad. And then after the war, the government of Yugoslavia emerges, and it's too skint to basically fund his excavations. He has a brief spell in 1924.

But then, because word is getting out internationally that the finds that he's making as he goes further and 1929 through to 1931, and the excavations there continue to this day. And what has provoked the interest of these businessmen in Britain is the fact that he has discovered traces of an incredibly sophisticated civilization right at the bottom of this huge great mound. And what he's found so he's found all kinds of fascinating things he's found ceramics with very complex decorations kind of swirls and whirls and little symbols so we'll come back to them yeah he's found a lot of sculptural art including over 2000 kind of figurative representations so little figurines and i was looking i was reading a book about about this and in the index uh it's a book on the subject in the index enlisted bears birds death symbol birds ducks frogs gorgons hedgehogs rams the snake goddess

spirals stream motifs and vulvas so there there are little kind of clay images of all those things. Okay. I'm not going to dwell on some of those. I'm not a massive prehistory person, but that is an extraordinary collection of finding. Absolutely. I'm glad you agree. And once this has been found, people start looking elsewhere and they find kind of, you know, at this layer, similar trace elements elsewhere and they find kind of you know at this layer similar trace elements and they find for instance evidence of copper smelting and they find houses some of which contain two or three rooms and streets and all these settlements are that they're centered on serbia that the ark of them reaches northwards of serbia and southwards down to the aegean um they're all by rivers they're generally 20 or so acres and the largest have populations up to about 4 000 so you know

pretty substantial pretty substantial i mean that is substantial yeah that's a that's a town i mean that's a sizable town but well i don't know what time period we're talking well so that's the question that is the exactly the question so when um vask is excavating in the 20s and the 30s, this is before carbon dating has been developed. So there's no way of precisely dating them. The only way you can do it is through stratigraphy. So that's the key thing about these mounds with the different layers. You can kind of work it out from that way. So you dig through the medieval layers, the classical layers, and then you're going down. But it's an open question really when these are. And essentially the best way to do it is to work out, well, are there, you know, say the pottery, do they resemble pots that you might find elsewhere that are more conclusively dated? So Vasek, when he is, you know, he's chiefly got British backers. So he writes an article in 1930 in the Illustrated London News, and he claims that what he has found is a center of Aegean civilization in the second millennium BC.

And he points out as evidence for this, that the ceramic ware that he has found in his site in Vinca bears similarities to ceramic ware in the earliest layers of Troy. So he's saying kind of, you know, 1500 BC. And his assumption is that this is an Anatolian settlement, that the people who were responsible for building Troy, that they've kind of spread westwards and colonized Serbia and built these settlements. And this is what it's evidence for. Over the course of his life, he changes his mind about this because he is unsettled by the

sophistication of what he's found. And he ends up thinking that actually this is a Greek colony, 7th or 6th century BC. And one of the reasons why he comes to this conclusion is that the people who are making these figurines are absolutely obsessed by masks. So again and again, you get these kind of portraits of humans, but they're obviously wearing masks. And the effect is very, very unsettling. So you might have a head with an obviously female hairdo, but a male face. And that's because she is wearing a mask. There are masks that look very, very like the kind of aliens that you get at Roswell. So if you think of the kind of things in the X-Files or whatever, they look very, very similar.

You get animal masks with horns, with kind of ears ears or whatever a lot of them imitate birds so they're very very very weird and i think that vasich is intrigued with the parallels of the masks that you find on minoan creed yeah and then of course you get masks in thethenian tragedy and so he's thinking these are hellenic probably can i Can I jump in, Tom? Yeah. So he published that article in the Illustrated London News in 1930. Yeah. And that's a point where, just think about the political context for his research. Serbia is the dominant partner in the new, what becomes the Yugoslav kingdom, kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as it becomes. I mean, famously, like all these states in the debris

of the ottoman australian empires very very nationalistic but you could see why it would play well in britain because of course britain had been serbia's ally in world war one so something that bigs up serbia would it would have a kind of sentimental appeal but then he has the argument first of all this anatolian and then later. And that sort of – that surprises me because I would have thought he would say, oh, this is some sort of indigenous Serbian tradition to which we are really the heirs. So he's a scholar with an international reputation. Yeah. And he is doing best practice.

So he's not saying we found this in Serbia, therefore it must be Serbian. I think he's alert to the intellectual trends of the age. And this is very much a period, you know, I mean, it's an assumption that is basically true that a lot of culture, including most obviously agriculture, has come from settlers moving out of the near east through anatolia into europe um and so he's you know this is kind of standard explanation at the time yeah and i think that you know he's he's going with with the greek thing is just because he's you know he's recognizing that there are possible links to Greek culture. And so this seems the obvious explanation. Okay. All right.

I mean, he's not an overtly nationalist scholar. I mean, he's a proud Serbian, but he's happy to go with what he sees as the evidence. Yeah. But then the radiocarbon dating comes in, and the radiocarbon dating reveals something amazing, which is that this staff is 7,000 years old. What a twist.

That I did not expect. So the Vinca culture, as it comes to be called, named after this village that he's excavated, but which covers quite a broad spread of Serbia and beyond into Romania and Bulgaria as well. These settlements can be dated from 5,700 to 4,200 BC. So that's a millennium and a half of increasingly sophisticated culture. And the implication of that is astounding, basically, in the context of the age, because this implies that this is earlier than, say, Troy. It's earlier than- Earlier than the Greeks.

Definitely earlier than the Greeks. Earlier, definitely earlier than the Greeks, way, way earlier than the Greeks, but also earlier than the heyday of the Sumerian civilization, much earlier than the emergence of Pharaonic civilization in Egypt. So really, really unexpected. And the elements are definitely those of a kind of proto-civilization, of the kind that define the riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia or Egypt, say. So you have very, very intensive agriculture and all these settlements, they're on the edge of rivers. They seem to have been settled there, not so much because there's good game. These are not kind of wandering hunter-gatherers. These are people who are settling in places that are agriculturally rich. So because of that, no plough has ever been found, but it is all pretty universally accepted that they must have had ploughs. parley they they introduce wheat they're planting flax which they are using to manufacture uh

clothing and this in turn the you know as will happen later in mesopotamia and egypt this generates agricultural surplus which in turn seems to have enabled these really quite large settlements to grow markets and towns and presumably then if you've got towns and you've got markets you must have some sort of authority, kings? We'll come to that. We will come to that. You also have, in certain settlements, have been built close to seams of copper ore. So evidence for industry. So there's a place called Plochnik in northern Serbia, which was actually first discovered in 1927 when they're developing a railway. But it's only excavated serious excavations in 1996.

So these are quite recent and ongoing. And in 2008, they discover a copper axe, which is dated to 5,500 BC. And there's a site, Belovode, in the Rodnik Mountain, which apparently is in central Serbia. I'm not sufficiently familiar with Serbian geography. You're carrying it off with great aplomb, I have to say. And what they find there is the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper smelting. Wow.

So this is a Neolithic civilization that is entering the copper age. And it seems, as far as we can tell from the archaeological evidence, to be the first culture anywhere that does this. So this is entering the age of metal and it's happening in Serbia. So that's spectacular enough. Yeah. But the most dramatic possibility of all is that the Vinca culture, this unexpected civilization civilization that it might have developed writing. Because lots of these sites, I mentioned that Vinca itself has the ceramics, the figurines, they're decorated with all kinds of symbols. But these start to be found in sites across Serbia and beyond.

And lots of them seem to be pictograms of animals so um you know rather in the way that say chinese script or hieroglyphs or indeed actually the alphabet that we use you can trace them back to um you know portraits of ox's heads or whatever so there's that uh there are swastikas there are crosses there are chevrons and in all there are about five and a half thousand of these different symbols and so people started wondering what do they represent? And that question is turbocharged by a find that is made in 1961 in a village called Tataria, which I'm afraid for Serbian listeners isn't actually in Serbia, it's in Romania, but very amazing find. And it's three small tablets, which are just covered with these kind of venture symbols.

We'll call them the venture symbols. And they seem to be arrayed in what looks like a form of writing. And two of these tablets are rectangular. One is round. Oh, my God, Tom. I've just Googled them. They're amazing. They are amazing, aren't they?

So you can see. So one of the rectangular ones, the round one has holes drilled through it. The one that doesn't have has holes drilled through it. The one that doesn't have a hole drilled through it has an illustration of a horned animal. Now, when they're found, they're unbaked. And so what the guy who does it orders is that they should be baked to preserve them. The problem with that is that this process prevents carbon dating. So they can't be carbon dated. But the stratigraphy of it is pretty clear. They have been found at a layer that points to a date of about 5,500 BC.

So around the same time as this copper axe is being manufactured. And these predate Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs by about 2 000 years so again i mean this is stupefying yeah however a lot of controversy surrounds them oh and i think that we should probably take a break at this point so when i come back i will discuss the controversies i have the nasty feeling tom this is one of those podcasts that you do sometimes where you talk for 20 minutes and it's very exciting then we take a break and you come back and you say but well no no they are genuinely mysterious and there is there is a lot of debate around them well come back after the break and see if tom does do one of his butts or whether it's still as there is a but there is a

but i think it's not an absolutely conclusive but. OK, excellent. Come back after the break for a not absolutely conclusive but. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment dot com that's the rest is entertainment dot com welcome back to the rest is history tom has been guiding us through this extraordinarily mysterious story of the Vinca culture in Serbia, found by the archaeologist Miloje Vazic. And Tom, you left us sort of hanging at the end of the first half, talking about the discovery of these tablets, the sense that this is writing, this is civilization that predates the Sumerian culture or Egyptian, and it all kicked off in Serbia. And then you sort of ended with talk of a however.

So what's going on? Yes. So focus specifically on these tablets from the village of Tartaria, where these symbols, they seem to be forming a kind of writing. So there is controversy around the tablets. I mentioned in the first half that these got baked supposedly to preserve them. And the effect of that is that you can't carbon date it. And people have argued that this is suspicious. I mean, the carbon dating, it's so important to carbon date them. And it's possible that there's a problem with that.

People have argued that if they are authentic, if they do come from 5,500 BC, then perhaps they bear the stamp of Sumerian proto-cuneiform. Because this is around 5500 bc these sorts of symbols are being developed in mesopotamia so perhaps there are links people have argued that perhaps it got jumbled up in the excavations and actually it comes from a higher layer so okay yeah perhaps it got confused and there are people who argue that they're straight forgeries so there's no there's no consensus on that really forgeries done by but they were from romania not serbia so they wouldn't have been forged by serbian nationalists or something but they might be forged by romanian

nationalists or whatever i right i think i think the it's very much kind of open question on that but even you see even if even if we put them to one side and say it's not conclusively proven and lots and lots of archaeologists and scholars do accept that they're authentic there are lots who accept that they're authentic are they writing so there's a whole range of things that they could be because they give people a sense they are I mean you were talking about them before there's one circular two rectangular they are kind of there's a picture of what looks like a goat there's a couple of pictures of frankly what look like stools or toilets there are swastikas there are crosses there are kind of they are kind of quite obvious symbols

yeah but the problem is is we just don't have the context that would enable scholars to evaluate them and come to a conclusive conclusion. So we don't have the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone, obviously, because these are earlier by about 2000 years ahead of any distinguishable writing system. So they could be, you know, decorations, they could be ownership markings, or they could be some form of early proto-writing. And part of the problem is that the idea that they might be proto-writing generates incredibly intense passions on both sides. So by and large, Serbian nationalists are very, very keen on this idea that Serbia is indeed the birthplace of the earliest form of writing. And there have been kind of on the absolute wacko fringe, there are people who have kind of faked scholarly identities, put out bogus scholarly articles, all kinds of things, arguing that not only is it a form of writing, but it is actually a form of proto-Serbian.

Serbian? The Slavic language? Absolutely. The Slavs weren't even in the Balkans at this point. So there's a professor whose entire career seems to have been invented. Right. And he argues that not only is this script found on the Tartarian tablets, proto-Serbian, that Etruscan also is a form of Serbian. And so he wrote this article in which he claimed the Etruscan word roots are Slovene and the archaeological documentation for this is so obvious that it cannot be overlooked. And the whole story is very, very Umberto Eco. I mean, it's a great story. It

seems improbable. But there are absolutely, you know, there are very, very distinguished linguists who take it highly seriously. So there's an article online by a guy called Toby Griffin, who is a professor at Southern Illinois University, a linguist. And he extrapolates from it, from these symbols, words for bird, for goddess, and for bear. Words? I mean, I'm looking at these symbols and thinking. Well, they're symbols. Who knows what the actual word is? Yeah. their symbols who knows what the actual word is yeah but but but you can using the symbols you

can work he says you can work out what what well they would denote what these denote and so he has this extraordinary sentence where he says the oldest known sentence in human language states do you want to know the oldest known sentence in human language i'd love to tom the bear goddess and the bird goddess are the bear goddess indeed. It's disappointing, isn't it? Well, you may say disappointing, but I think Professor Toby Griffin would beg to disagree because he... I'm not shooting. He's just the messenger, Tom. I'm not shooting the messenger. You are shooting him down. This is his great insight. He's got the oldest known sentence

in human language and you're sneering at it. Which stone is this of the three stones I'm looking at? Can't remember. I don't't remember i don't know you don't know that's disappointing i can't remember i think it's two lines it's two lines with it's two lines with a squiggle and it's three lines with a squiggle yeah but he his argument and you may remember that uh that milahave basich ends up arguing that the the vinci culture came from greece that it was a greek colony yeah and again uh professor griffin is seizing on the parallels with greece that it was a greek colony yeah and again uh professor griffin is seizing on the parallels with greece because he's saying okay well what's a a bear goddess and a bit and a bird goddess and he the figure that he fixes on is the figure of artemis

who um has bears she associates with bears she's the mistress of the beasts and his argument is that this sentence is looking forward to millennia and millennia of mythological tradition that will culminate in the figure of Artemis. This is thousands of years before Artemis though, isn't it, Tom? It is thousands and thousands of years before. Yeah. I mean, that seems a massive stretch to me. I mean, even bigger stretch than the stuff about the bird well you may you may think so but it it is an argument that has been advanced by a very eminent and very celebrated archaeologist and anthropologist called maria gimbutas have you have you heard of

her yeah i'm very familiar with her work so no i I haven't told her. So she is famous. And she's famous as probably the most famous feminist archaeologist of the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. Okay. So she escaped the Russian occupation after the war, ended up in Berkeley in California. And she was a great enthusiast for the idea that the original peoples of what she calls Old Europe. And so this is the civilization based in Serbia that they had worshipped a mother goddess. And she argues that this culture of Old Europe, that it extended as far as the Aegean. So the islands in the Aegean extended as far as Crete, extended as far as Sicily, and that it was essentially peaceful. So you're asking what kind of culture did it have?

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of warfare. There's no weapons. No, that it was egalitarian, that it was goddess-centered, and that it was matriarchal. So hold on, she's a feminist 70s archaeologist. She is. And she's found something that, you know, a 70s feminist archaeologist would want to find. Yes.

Yeah. And so she wrote that the inhabitants of Southeastern Europe 7,000 years ago were not the primitive villages of the incipient Neolithic. Instead, they involved a unique cultural pattern, contemporary with similar developments in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. But her argument is that more than any of those other proto-civilizations that will go on to become the great motors of civilization, that the Vinci civilization,

the civilization of old Europe, as she calls it, that was the civilization that was most like a feminist hippie in california yeah in the 70s and 80s yeah how unusual for an academic to find in the past what they would like to see in the present so and the obvious question is well you know she talks about civilizations of mesopotamia or egypt they go on to become famous centers of civilization. So what happens to the Vinca culture? Why does it collapse? Why has no one heard of it? What happened to it? And her argument is that it gets destroyed by the Indo-Europeans. So the Indo-Europeans are the people who linguists have worked out are the people who spread the languages that become the languages of northern india and europe so it would include sanskrit would include ancient greek

would include latin and into the contemporary it would include hindi it would include italian and it would include english right and big mystery where you know where did the india europeans come she argues that the india europeans come from basically the region of Ukraine, actually, around Ukraine. And she argues that they're violent, they're patriarchal, they don't worship mother goddesses, they worship sky gods. So Jupiter, Zeus, Pater, the father's use, the father of, you know, these domineering sky gods. Rough men. Absolute boohis.

Yeah. Boohis. So you have this peaceful, matriarchal civilization with their language and their beautiful pots and all that kind of stuff. And then these Indo-Europeans in there with their horses turn up and destroy everything. Tom, I don't want to lapse into total self-parody. I mean, frankly, that ship has probably sailed many podcasts ago. And nor do I want to appear like I'm just a miserable skeptic who doesn't know anything about prehistoric history and just pouring score on everything.

But that sounds like total tosh to me. It just sounds like complete wish fulfillment. I don't think it's total tosh, but I think that it is a kind of Rorschach test. Yeah. And I think that just as with, you know, forgeries, it takes maybe a few decades before you can recognise the period

where the forgery is painted. So, you know, if you have a Renaissance painting that's forged in the 1920s, you know, it could take you 50 years before you look at it and say, that was clearly painted in the 1920s. I think in a similar way, perhaps with academic fashion, particularly when it's something like prehistory, where the evidence is so sparse. And it can take time, perhaps, for you to see that academic fashions are absolutely reflective of broader cultural and social trends. For the last five minutes, I felt like I'm trapped in a California seminar room in 1974. Well, so today, the consensus among archaeologists about this is what happened to the venture civilization is that they weren't overthrown by a violent invasion. That the Indo-Europeans, when they came,

that it was a much more peaceful process of integration. That's all the rage now with academics. Yeah. And also that the civilisation were destroyed by basically environmental degradation. I was just about to say. They exhausted the soils and they wiped out wildlife. Do you know, before you started that sentence,

I thought to myself, I'll jump in and I'll say, I bet academics now think it was climate change. And of course they do. So the argument is that now that it's climate change or it's environmental degradation, and that there was no violent invasion by immigrants, but that they were peacefully integrated. Kindly multiculturalism. So I'm, who knows? Again, I just don't think that probably that the evidence is there. But again, I suspect that perhaps in 50 years, people will look back and say, well, of course, people in 2020, that's very reflective of, of broader intellectual and cultural opinions. So the great thing about the venture culture then, Tom, is that it's actually a window into changing. Yeah. It's as interesting about, about academia in the 20th and 21st century as it is

about, I mean, actually, you know, it's an amazing civilization. I mean, it is incredible. These settlements do exist. The copper smelting did happen. These weird squiggles, you know, it doesn't matter if they're a language or not. I mean, I will put up images from it. It is there, but I just don't think that it would seem that we know enough to arrive at a conclusive opinion either way. We should sort of end the podcast not by talking about academic fashion, but by talking about the civilization itself. So, of course, you're not a sort of card-carrying, massively specialized expert on this. No, I literally found out about it a week ago. Well, that's all you need. I mean, that's all you need. Come on.

But what do you think? Because you know a lot about sort of Neolithic stuff and all that. I know that I don't know. I know that I don't know. But what I would say is that... The dates are right. I was really astounded. Yeah.

I had not expected that. And what also surprises me is that it's not better known. Well, that's astounding, aren't they? I was really astounded. Yeah. I had not expected that. And what also surprises me is that it's not better known. Well, that's astounding, isn't it? That it's not better known. Because this really isn't kind of on the radar. But that's because it's in Serbia, right? So if it was in Britain, in Germany, in France, it'd be a big tourist destination. There'd be a huge visitor centre.

Well, I think there'd probably be a kind of slightly nationalist strain. Of course there would. Kids would do it in primary school, wouldn't they absolutely would people dress up as members of the vinture yes matrix yeah yes that's the problem you have to it's it's very difficult to extrapolate from the found you know from the remains to being found any sense of what how these function and what happened to them yeah and that's why I think they're vulnerable to kind of trends. But there's also that extraordinary mystery about the disappearance. Because, I mean, for such a civilization so far ahead of its time

to have flourished and then vanished. Okay, so that's one final thing, is that the two leading figures in the study of this, so Milajevasic and Maria Gimbatas, these are the two top names in the field. Both of them are absolutely alert to a feeling that something about this culture ends up being expressed in Minoan and they wipe the floor with the Vinci culture and it all gets obliterated. Her argument is that traces of this survive on islands in the Aegean. So in El Crete, in the Cyclades in the Aegean. And there do seem to be, to the untrained eye, to my untrained eye, there do seem to be similarities.

And obviously, these two great figures involved in the study of this culture sense that as well yeah you know and they spent a lifetime studying it so not a week who am i to sneer at it uh yeah so i think there is something mysterious there god what a fascinating story you know if there are scholars listening to this who are specialists in it let us know what you think i told my i sincerely hope there haven't been scholars specialists in it um one specialist in it. Can you visit it? Can you go and see? Is there a museum in Serbia?

Yeah, there are. Yeah. Gosh, we should do a Rest is History Serbian tour. I'm so thrilled that you finally got interested in history. My heart sank. It plummeted like a stone when it turned out you weren't going to do Stefan Dusan. And actually, this was brilliant. I really enjoyed this.

Oh, thanks, Dom. I learned a lot. And I love it when we end a podcast by just basically saying we don't know and we'll probably never know. And that sense of the mystery of the past, I think, is really important. And when we're claiming to, as we often do on this podcast, to know everything, we don't really. So it's great to end in the sort of the mists of time. Known unknowns. Yes, known unknowns.

There you go. I'm all about the mist of time. Tom is all about Donald Rumsfeld. That's the dynamic that has made this podcast beloved by both its listeners. And we'll be back, won't we, Tom, with more World Cup known unknowns next time and that's a known known we'll see you tomorrow bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.