Alan Ereira
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Alan Ereira’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, it's wonderful to be here, it really is.
Yes, it has. And it's very extraordinary because gold is itself a very weird substance. The behavior when people discovered gold is extremely weird as well.
The first thing when they discovered the oldest gold known in the world, which turns out to have been in Bulgaria on the shores of the Black Sea at a holiday resort called Varna, probably wasn't a holiday resort in 4700 BC, but it's quite a while back. That's part of the point. Troy seems, the story of the Trojan War seems a long time ago to us.
Well, to people living through the Trojan War, this story is as far back again. We are talking about a very, very distant history, pre-history, when it was inconceivable that people were doing metalwork in 4700. And then this turns up, this cemetery, containing hundreds of graves, a fair number of which, over 60, have got gold in them, worked gold.
And the graves are very strange and tell you something but it requires quite a lot of interpretation to figure out what it's telling you. There's only one grave which has a human body with a substantial quantity of gold. A third of all the gold that's in this graveyard is on one body. And that one body is quite a tall man compared to the others. He had a gold headdress.
He had a gold scepter in his right hand. And he had a big gold disc. Now, this is where the story begins. And what you're looking at is the coronation regalia that was being used in Westminster Abbey last year.
Nearly 7,000 years old, we don't know that the man was a king, except the stuff he's carrying is what we associate with a royal regalia. Why? Where does this idea come from? It comes out of nowhere. There isn't a predecessor to this. And this is where the story of gold actually begins. Now, that cemetery is really a culture we know nothing about. It disappeared from the face of the earth.
Six of the graves contain not just no human being, but no human being and quite a lot of gold. Three of them contain scepters with no bones in there. Three of them, and they're associated also with weaponry, and the one that I call the Lord of Varna. has got weaponry, and his weaponry is amazing. He has got a flint sword, 35 centimetres long. A flint sword? Flint, yes. Wow.
And it comes from Switzerland. I mean, this is a very, very long journey. He's got material from the Alps, the Italian Alps. So there are huge journeys being undertaken. There are very long connections with people very far away at this period when the rest of the Balkans is hunter-gatherers. This is associated with a small group of the earliest agricultural settlements there.
Well, you say a status symbol. I think it's something different from that. Okay. I think it's a direct connection with eternity. That is part of the status, of course. You have to be entitled. But the thing that makes gold so strange... is that it is incorruptible. So it doesn't belong in the mortal world.
So you have people who've discovered this substance, which is unlike anything else in that it's absolutely malleable, absolutely ductile. You can change it in any way you like without altering it, because you can put it back together again after you finish working it, and it turns back into what it was.
You can bury it in the ground for lifetimes, and when you dig it up again, it'll look exactly as it did when you buried it. There's nothing else like that on Earth.
It is material that is somehow in the changing world, but not of the changing world. So it has a connection, obviously an obvious connection, to the sun, to the heavens, to eternity. And so there is an association with something that we could interpret as divine power, or the authority of the heavens is being granted by something here on earth to people. But
because I would distinguish between money and being used for exchange. Money is something with defined value, and it's being used for exchange long before it has a defined value. And the problem for them is people have to work out how to use it for exchange. But it acquires this exchange identity because of its connection to eternity.
I mean, even in the modern world, people regard gold as something which contains intrinsic value. That if you have a piece of gold, somehow that is more secure as a store of value. than anything else you could have. This is, of course, entirely potty. It's a psychological thing. It has no other kind of reality. But that's how we think.
And I would also just quickly like to point out that a very similar burial to the Varna burial that I just mentioned turned up in northern Peru at a place called Sipan, dated about 300 AD, where there is a figure who's referred to now as the Lord of Sipan, who has a gold headdress, a gold wrap scepter, and a big gold disc. Now, I don't think this is cultural transmission.
I don't think anybody in the world remembered what had been done in Varna, and they certainly didn't get to Peru 5,000 years later and show everybody what a king looked like. These are ideas which formed independently. This is what gold inspired. I talk to people who work with gold, and they say that they have the feeling that gold talks to them and tells them what they can do with it.
Very odd substance. You first see that happening, I think, in the second millennium BC, where the first sign, I think, of what we're talking about is Hammurabi. King Hammurabi holds a ceremony. He has had soldiers...
coming from Mari, which is a town in Syria, a very special town, first purpose built town, which was built on a circular plan as a trading center, crossroads, and also manufacturing center, making bronze. And the soldiers who come from Mari, he holds a palace reception for them. And it's well-recorded.
And at this palace reception, he gives out what he calls sun discs, golden discs that are somehow connected to the sun, and they are given to the soldiers. You could see that as the first gold payment to mercenaries. I don't think they saw it quite that way, but it's kind of the origin. And one of the features of it is that these sun discs have got a specified value stated on them.
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