Six and a half thousand years ago, a man was buried with more gold than anyone else on Earth. He had no kingdom, no army, no palace. He lived in a small farming village on the Black Sea coast, in a world without writing or cities. He was dead two thousand years before the pyramids were built. And yet someone - his family, his community, his followers - covered his body in gold and put him in the ground with nearly a thousand precious objects, while most of his neighbours were buried with nothing.

The Varna cemetery in Bulgaria holds the oldest worked gold ever found and the earliest known evidence of extreme wealth inequality.

This book tells the story of the community that produced it - how they lived, what they made, how they organised themselves, and why their world collapsed. It asks a question the gold itself cannot answer: when did some people start having so much more than others, and why has that pattern never gone away?