Kings of Bronze Age Europe: The Únětice Culture 

Buy a DNA kit here: bit.ly/DanDavisHistory_DNA Use the coupon code DAVIS for free shipping. As an added bonus, you can start a 30-day free trial of MyHeritage's best subscription for family history research. Thanks for watching! Please smash your bronze axe into the like button. Cheers!

It's a great Sunday morning when Stefan Milo and Dan Davis History synchronize their video drop at the exact same time to the minute.

it's a nice day in 1605 BC and the first thing you hear is that BROPEC will cut down production to keep bronze prices up

that moment when a history youtuber starts talking about a village you lived close to for decades

Bronze Age Europe is so fascinating. I really like the stylistic expression of the period. Really wish I could go back and see what it was like, without dying or being enslaved..

Thank you from Únětice, Czech republic 🇨🇿

Thank you! I live in Germany and visited the places you mentioned. Also Landesmuseum Halle/ Saale, which i can highly recommend. Very interesting and suitable for the whole Family.

Videos like this are why I enjoy Dan’s channel. Not many people cover ancient Europe since they don’t have the well known empires like the Bronze Age Middle East but have such fascinating and advanced cultures. Happy Dan is showing these cultures love.

God bless everyone! Thanks Dan for your hard work! It's really nice to be able to learn about historical eras that are often left out by mainstream history creators.

Greetings from Únětice, Dan :-) great work as always. Keep it coming.

Thanks from Poland👍🇵🇱

Thanks Dan, I was looking forward to this video. The Bohemian massif has always been a strategically important fortress. Even in the last war it was called "the arms factory of Europe".

You always narrate an incredible journey! Thank you, Dan!

You made my Sunday! Like always, brilliant, thank you.

Can imagine, the destruction , visited upon ancient sites by weapons of war in , more recent times. We will never know ,what was lost to us forever,whether by that or all the other ways that time takes its toll. Thank you for your clear and well informed presentation of these ,otherwise unknown people of the past . Keep enlightening us , and bringing all of those who came before back to life ,not to be forgotten.❤as always fascinating !

Thank you for your efforts, really enjoy the vids. Much love from Amsterdam ✌️

Wonderful video! 😁 Not that I can find on your channel, would you be interested in eventually covering the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures during the Copper Age (or even the Copper Age as a whole?)

Absolutely stunning document. I'm history lover from Czech republic and i appreciate that. Thank you! 👏

Really looking forward to this when I have the time later today! Thank you for covering a topic from my homeland. And kudos for a better pronunciation today, I watched the intro and you did a good job! ;)

i never miss your uploads Dan, much love

Thanks a bunch for sharing this with us Big Dog!

I'm noting a pattern with these bronze age cultures. They start nomadic with men freely moving to new regions, then by late bronze age they unify into permanent states with immensely wealthy landlord-kings, then it all terminates with cold and dry conditions

Great presentation of my favourite prehistoric epoch. I was born and raised in the area where this culture thrived (east saxony near the czech border) and I recognised almost all landscape shots. If you're in the area, don't miss out on visiting the Museum of Prehistory in Halle a. d. Saale where the Nebra Skydisk and many of the mentioned hoard finds are displayed. What the author missed to mention was that a major pillar of wealth for the regional powers came from trading with salt. In Halle were natural salt springs where the brine was processed on a early industrial level. It's even in the name of the city Halle where 'Hal' is a indo-germanic word stem meaning salt and also the river Saale is associated with salt with the 'Sal' stem. You find this word roots in other place names like Hallein or Hallstadt all over central Europe where salt was also sourced since the bronze age.

Another great video! Thanks, Dan!

Your vidéos are so good! Please keep them coming sir !

Today is AWESOME! Dan AND Stefan? It’s like a mini intellectual Xmas 😂 Woo!

Excellent! ✨ Thank you for your research and sharing this video. ❤

Fascinating! Thank you for these great videos.

As always Dan, a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears, your videos are just superb! 👏👏👏 appreciate all the hard work you put into them, they really are wonderful 👌

Love your work Mr. Davis! Keep it up!

Love it man. Another great dive into Historical Knowledge. 👏

Thank you, My Heritage, for sponsoring the video!!

Amazing work as usual

Cheers Dan, another great video

Another great video! I actually got a tattoo of the Nebra Sky Disc on my back a couple of years ago to represent my love all all things history and archaeology!

Another great explanation and treatment of an important culture of the ancient world. Thanks Dan!

I love all your videos, Dan.

You ask for comments on the Nebra disk. This comment is about the social nature of ritual of the period, practices that actually had Neolithic origins, but carried over to the Bronze Age due to the nature of the transition, with Neolithic holy sites remaining holy for some centuries in many cases. Ritual sites seem to have been places where people gathered from vast distances, for events taking place at the solstices, and the winter solstice in particular, in spite of the difficulty of winter travel. Travel was by water when possible. A gathering was not always the assemblage of some existing entity such as the land of a high king; rather it was the gathering of many clans or regions (perhaps each clan had a region: Scottish clans did, Scythian clans did not). They participated in the gathering by region, with each region (or clan) having a designated segment of the site. There may have been a high king in some cases, but the clans (or regions) remained important. A holy gathering place was not primarily a residential site, although a few people lived there year round. It was not the high king's great hall. It was not primarily a cemetery. Participants built boothies for the winter gathering. The main ritual activity was a procession. An important person, priest or king or priest-king, arrived (often by water) and went up a processional avenue to a circular site, and then went around it. So outside the outermost ring of posts was the processional circle, and outside that, a barrier between the ritual space and the ordinary space beyond. The ordinary space was divided like the segments of an orange, with each segment belonging to one clan or region. Work to build or improve the site was organized by clan, with each clan being responsible for a section; the splendor of the work was the clan's honor. The processional way came to the circle from the direction of a solstice sunrise or sunset, and the king or priest arrived just as the setting or rising solstice sun shone on his face. On the cart he rode, was a disk, bright on one side and dull on the other, and at the climax the disk was turned around, or they used two disks, for day and night. The Nebra disk is the night disk. The point of all this calendar sky-watching was to determine, or set, on which day of the lunar month did the winter solstice occur. This number was carried back home by the participants, and was necessary for the practical functions of a calendar, that is to make appointments and have people show up on the right day. Without a calendar you can't have scheduled markets or religious festivals, and you don't even know whether the coming year will have 12 lunar months, or 13. Determining the date of the solstice is difficult, and if two places both try, they will often set different dates. A single central site must set the date of the solstice, but only a single number, the day of the lunar month that it fell on, needs to be carried back home by each party, for the whole region to enjoy the benefit of everyone using the same calendar.

Great video! I've been down an early Bronze Age rabbit hole lately and this is just the sort of presentation I'm always looking for.

Just giving you a heads up, I have bell notifications on, and was not made aware of this video by RU-vid.

Thank you Dan! I just love these videos!

As soon as I heard your description of the men's houses, I immediately thought of Beowulf.

A fantastic adventure is always narrated by you!

Fantastic! Thank you so much for your entertaining and very informative video!

I really like this video. The use of period documents and lots of maps and photos was great. The artwork was amazing and i prefer all of this relevant material to random stock footage. What a fascinating culture!

Thank you. I had so many dna matches from this area and time, that I wondered what on earth was going on. Now I know more.

Thank you!!

my man Dan and his amazing mini documentaries

Yo Dan, your vids are awesome. So glad I found your channel

Hi Dan, thank you very much and kudos to your next fragment of restoration of the early European archaeological history! Please please please keep them coming! I'm only a common man interested in archaeology. I'm working at the intersection of linguistics, brain science, and computer wicca. I naturally took up historical linguistics but used to be sort of dismissive of the link between languages and cultures (Latin all over Europe or Normann French in England as a societal stratum are counterexamples showing that language ≠ culture). There is a correlation on the whole, but what language which culture spoke is more often is a conundrum than not. I was surprised to learn that Anthony's “The Horse, the Wheel and the Language” has received so much critique, entirely undeservedly if you ask me, from both the linguistics and archeology communities. This at times rose to a grotty level: the burials at Sintasha/Arkhanar(sp?) and smaller surrounding settlement so precisely match the funeral ritual in Rig Veda that it at the least should have been at the least interesting to the archeologists... IMO, the studies combining historic linguistics and archaeology are sorely wanting. 1) A question: were the Únětice culture PIE-speaking? The kurgan burials seem to suggest so, if what you're describing are in fact classified as kurgans. 2) A note: It's been known that the trade around the Mediterranean has not developed money at all, all the way until the 12c. collapse. It's so surprising that a culture of a smaller scale had possibly invented _fiat(!)_ money (there's no intrinsic value in these globular clay tokens) centuries earlier, if it's reasonably confirmed. If so, that attests to the great power of the chiefs, as fiat money are trusted only as much as their guarantor.

Regarding the longhouse with the axeheads buried infront of them: I imagine in times of peace the men were living with their families, in their own houses and farmsteads. Then when war came they met and slept in the longhouse together, to form a bond among the warband and then they'd collectively dig up their weapons, go to fight whichever enemy and then when war was over they'd bury the axes, daggers and their "military insignia" again, thereby ritualistically and also psychologically laying the trauma and violence to rest. When there was a decision to go to war again, they'd repeat the process etc. And when these cultures slowly transformed or people left their settlements to start a new life elsewhere, this practice was forgotten and so we still can find their war stashes today in some cases.

great video

Well done once again.

Just found your channel, very fascinating. Great to watch on a cold Saturday here in New Zealand 🙂

It was an informative and wonderful historical coverage video about pioneer unetic culture civilization in the Central Europe area ,early settlement of corded ware & bell beaker culture...,shared by an amazing ( Dan Davis history) channel ...thanks for sharing

Awesome.

This channel deserves an Oscar!

Can you do a video on the Natufians?

Absolutely adore your content and your novels! Any idea when we might get more audio books?

Just finished up at the gym. Perfect time for a Dan Davis video

Thanks for covering these ancient civilizations who never made it into written history. I am German, and I have visited these sites. The Nebra disc is fascinating and beautiful. t's very interesting that it has been altered, and it's original purpose may have been forgotten by it's later owners for whom it might've become a prestige object! I took a DNA test a couple of years ago, and the result was totally unexpected. I actually know a lot about my ancestors, and the ancestors from my father's side were French huguenots who had left France because they had become the target of violent religious prosecutions. Many huguenot families settled in Kassel since they had been invited to stay by the local rulers. My father's family had lived in Kassel for several hundred years, and their surnames reflect their French roots. I had therefore expected to have a generous amount of West and Middle European genes because that's the area were all of my known ancestors had lived. However, the test revealed that l have no genes at all which would connect me with these areas. I have neither "German" nor "French" genes. 80% of my genes are Scandinavian and the remaining 20% are Slavic and from the Iberian peninsula. This was a great surprise because none of my known ancestors lived in those areas. Some friends jokingly said that my mother might've had an affair with a very attractive young Scandinavian sailor, while my parents were living in Hamburg, which has an important international port, and my father was away on frequent business trips. But since I and also my eldest son are the spitting image of my paternal greatgrandmother, this possibility can be safely excluded 😊 Someone else suggested that a gene cocktail of Scandinavian, Iberian and Slavic genes matches the raiding routes of the Vikings, who went deeply into East European territory with their longboats, and they also surrounded the Iberian peninsula 😊 Who knows? But the Middle European territory which is Germany today, was crisscrossed by many different populations since ancient prehistoric times, and while the routes of these people have never been written down, they left archeological records and they are preserved in our genes. It's a fascinating subject. It also shows how silly Adolf Hitler's idea of pure blooded Germans was!

Great job 👍🏽

Dear Dan Thank you to exist😊

Amazing video

Fascinating! Still enjoy your videos a LOT 👍 Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱, TW.

Love your videos. Thank you for continuing to use “BC” and “AD”.

Fascinating.

One of the best documentaries you've done yet. I have no theory of my own on the burial of the Nebra Sky Disk but the theory put forward here sounds very plausible. It's tantalising when you have evidence for ancient life but knowing you'll never have definitive proof (unless a time machine is built).

Good video

It would be so fascinating to use a time machine to go back and study these people. Their cultures are so alien to us, yet so very human. Excellent video as always!

Very detailed

Excellent

Great video thanks interesting wise video info you are amazing story teller and I think everyone agrees and I love science cheers

My father side of the family comes from the area in the centre of the Únětice culture according to this map and a good chunk of my mothers side actually comes from the eastern edges according to the map shown in the video. It’s pretty cool that for once I’m feeling a real connection to a historical topic.

Thank you

At 21:50, my theory as to why there were these hoards of weapons in this locations is that these men were disarming as either the losers of a conflict with another nearby group, or as a peace gesture to give up weapons for peace.

Awesome as aways.

This is a quality video.

A note of contribution to the sun disk burial with the pairs of objects within in, from a weapons collector. It may not mean much in context of the burial, but a common thing about weapon enthusiasts is owning multiples of certain weapons they really like. The addage typically being "Two is one, one is none." Basically if your primary pistol or rifle gets broke, you have a backup of the exact type. Or maybe you can lend one to a friend if they need one. Or sometimes it's just youre a fan of that weapons system so you just want another just like it. It's a common thing I see among other weapons collectors. Maybe the person who did that burial sacrifice with the sun disk wanted the burial to be significant, so he gave up both of his daggers. And maybe this was common among most other warriors of his time as well, the one spare dagger usually being the one they'll give for a burial.

Had a DNA test done recently and, despite my family being in America for around 500 years, I'm still 60% English, 20% Scottish, with the rest split between Germanic, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Highly recommend getting this done by a reputable organization, as mentioned by Mr. Davis...and no, I had mine done by a different site, so I'm not trolling. 😊

Hi from Germany and thank you for the great video. Once I visited Poemmelte when they were excavating the site.

I love you dan, youre videos are so well made. I would read transcripts of your vides to my girlfriend when she couldnt sleep, it was so wholesome.

I ❤ all Your content

Another excellent video, Dan. As I'm watching these I always experience a peculiar feeling of past recognition--- I have no idea what it is. Like during the video you may say, "well, it could be this or it could be that for the reason why this was done"... and I always have an idea in my head that firmly sides with one of the theories.

Couldn’t have thought of anything better to turn on while making breakfast.

very enjoyable, I enjoy the genetic testing and science, my own Y haplogroup descends from the early Neolithic Farmer peoples of the G2a type, I would enjoy a program on the LBK culture as well, the one on the Vinca Culture was quite good.

Interesting to show that the advent of bronze and Unetice go hand in hand, it explains why it is around Bohemia that the culture developed, where copper was easily mined.

Brilliant: lots of maps!

I have been to Helmsdeep virtually.

Thank you for using BC

19:00 - Nicely braided wall texture by the artist.

Damn, I was not even recommended your latest banger :/. Superb video as per usual though

I want that guys tunic 😍

I'm just starting Godborn 2 from my amazon account. I'm excited.

I’m so grateful to Dan Davis for teaching us about these great ancient European civilizations. I hope some day the history books will start teaching about Bronze Age Europeans the way that Dan does, rather than just treating them as decentralized barbarians who only existed for the purpose of getting the Eastern Mediterranean “real civilizations” their amber and tin

Could you do a companion documentaries to this talking about the Tumulus, Urnfield, and Hallstatt cultures?

I'm not very into astronomy, but the aesthetic of the disk has always interested me

I just seen my last name on the part where you showed the various surnames. Pearson. Trippy how that shit works.

Hi Dan. After the Peninsula Campaing in 1814, a lot of british soldiers opted to stay in Portugal. Thats one of my familly origens due to a Brandon surname of one branch. Maybe that also explains those 21% of your Iberian heritage.

Great video, as always. I will say, at 11:30 - the press' idea that Stonehenge is a rare example of a solstice aligned enclosure is always silly to me. Henges, in general, have their openings facing the southeast / northwest, or flipped. The many big stone circles of Cumbria, Oxfordshire, Wales, and Ireland, often have openings facing that direction. Essentially, it's the predominant alignment of mid-to-late Neolithic ritual enclosures, observable far more obviously outside the Stonehenge landscape. Not unusual.