The Culture That Built Gigantic “Cities” 7000 Years Ago and Then Burned Them Down
The rise and fall of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture
In 331 BC, Alexander the Great’s armies conquer Babylon, proclaiming themselves liberators. After many years, they freed Babylon from the control of the Persian empire.
The Macedonians marched into a city they called Orcha. We know the city by its more common name, Uruk. It is one of the earliest cities in human history.
3000 years before Alexander, Uruk was the largest city in the world.
But there was a “city” in Ukraine a few centuries before Uruk that was bigger and had more people. Talianky was the name of this mega-human colony.
At its height in 3600 BC, Talianky covered 450 hectares and was home to 21,000 people, making it the largest human settlement in the world.
Talianky belonged to the Trypillia culture (4800 BC to 3000 BC), which was named after the hamlet of Trypillia near Kyiv, where the civilization was discovered in 1897.
Thirteen years earlier, in 1884, Romanian archaeologist Teodor Burada found a similar site in the village of Cucuteni, Romania. Romanians named the civilization the Cucuteni culture.
