Kurgan
The Kurgan peoples received their name from archeologists who defined and identified them by the type of burial mounds found in their cultures.  These mounds were called ÎkurgsÌ.  The reason why they play an important role in the history of the dance (and in the inner wisdom experienced within and carried through the dance) is because they were the first cultures identified as being fundamentally, per se, patriarchal.  By this we mean that they were patrifocal, that they identified the primary as being male deity and that there was a certain type of hierarchy present.  There also appears to have been more individuation in these cultures than in the matriarchal and matrifocal societies of the lands they swept into and inhabited. 

As they swept into and replace the older Neolithic cultures, much of the art and ways of direst knowledge was either lost or altered greatly. The basic myths of the Crones were transformed under the social paradigm changes so that  goddesses like the wise Medusa became horrid monsters to the new Kurgan peoples.  By understanding this essential change, many of the myths handed to us from the first and second millennia BC can easily be broken through to a new depth. 

It is probably true that we can also call these people the original Indo - Europeans.  They originated somewhere north of the Caspian and Black seas.  They swept eastward into India (the Baghadvadgita probably in part being an account of the overthrow of the matrifocal Neolithic native inhabitants of this subcontinent by the male deity worshipping Kurgans).  They swept southward around the seas into the Neolithic native cultures inhabiting Persia and then Babylon and Egypt.  They swept westward into Old Europe, using especially the Danube river basin as a conduit.  Part of these westward sweeps also traveling southward and, under the name of one culture or another as the millennia passed, entered and inhabited Greece and, in turn Anatolia and all of Turkey, only to meet with and battle with their distant relatives by then inhabiting Persia.
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The Kurgans were the first to tame the horse.  It was this new ally of humankind which they turned to using as a tool of war which allowed them to sweet across much of the earth and to replace to older cultures.  It is interesting to note that, until the Kurgan cultures drew near an area, none of the thousands of images on shards and remnants of Neolithic pottery depicts either slavery or war or walled cities (from the works of Maris Gimbutas).  After them depictions of slavery and of war and the phenomena of walled cities was common.
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The primary and increasingly deeper and larger sweeps occurred somewhere around the years 4500 BC, 3500 BC and 2300 BC.  Crete, in 1350 BC, was the last major matriarchal culture on earth to fall to them.
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