Prehistory of Southeast Europe

The prehistory of Southeast Europe, defined roughly as the territory of the wider Southeast Europe (including the territories of the modern countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and European Turkey) covers the period from the Upper Paleolithic, beginning with the presence of Homo sapiens in the area some 44,000 years ago, until the appearance of the first written records in Classical Antiquity, in Greece.

The first written script of Greece was Linear A, an undeciphered script used for writing the Minoan language of Crete, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. After Linear A came Linear B, a syllabic script used for writing Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of the Greek language. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, but disappeared with the fall of the Mycenaean civilisation in the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Human prehistory in Southeast Europe is conventionally divided into periods including the Upper Paleolithic, Holocene Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic, Neolithic Revolution, expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans, and a period of Protohistory. The changes between these are gradual. For example, depending on interpretation, protohistory may or may not include Bronze Age Greece (c. 3000–1200 BC), Minoan, Mycenaean, Thracian and Venetic cultures. By one interpretation of the historiography criterion, Southeast Europe enters protohistory only with Homer (See also Historicity of the Iliad, and Geography of the Odyssey). Nevertheless, prehistory ends before Herodotus in the 5th century BC.