The Encylopaedia Britannica describes the Kurgan culture as follows: "seminomadic pastoralist culture that spread from the Russian steppes to Danubian Europe c. 3500 B.C. By c 2300 B.C. the Kurgans arrived in th Aegean and Adriatic regions. The Kurgans buried their dead in deep shafts within artificial burial mounds or barrows. The name means 'barrow' or 'artificial mound' in Turkic and Russian."

But more recent sources date Kurgans to 5000 BC.

Kurgan means "Mound builder". In Latvian KURm - means "mound, hill" which corresponds to Sumerian KUR.MA "a star rising", all with the same basic root KUR- "hill, mound" as in KURgan.

Marija Gimbutas writes that the Kurgans (Yamnaya or Pit-Grave culture) ostensibly started their migrations in Southern Russia and the Ukrainian steppes at the Black Sea, reaching Anatolia and Mesopotamia through the Balkans and Greece, across the Caucasus then east to Central Asia and south into Iran. These migrations would account for all the mound-grave cultures we know, even those surfacing in China (through the Tocharians) and in the Indus Valley at around this time.

Did the Kurgans move because of the Flood? Was this 5500 BC ? at the time of the Black Sea Shelf Submergence? Are these the people then known as the Sumerians in Mesopotamia who brought the tumulus mounds south, leading to the building of the ziggurats (i.e. baked earth instead of pure earth mounds) and thereafter the building of the pyramids of stone (where the mound builders perfected their system.

The initial temples of Pharaonic Egypt were made of "mud bricks" (as in Mesopotamia), whereas building in stone came thereafter, "mimicking" the same style of architectural building previously used for building in mud brick. This fact led the Egyptologist Walter Emery to conclude that the Pharaonic Egyptian culture traced its origin back to an immigrant people, perhaps from south Mesopotamia. The Kurgans provide us with an "EARLIER" people who buried their dead in a manner which must be regarded as a technological precursor to the later burial mounds of Babylon and Egypt, a people of Europe.

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