Epochal changes in the first
millennium BC radically marked both the territory of Slovenia and the wider
European arena. At the beginning of this period, state social forms were
limited to the eastern outskirts of the Mediterranean, where they also attained
great technological and artistic advances. This is the time into which the Iron
Age Stories from the Crossroads, the latest part of the permanent exhibition at
the National Museum of Slovenia, take us.
The exceptional archaeological
material from Slovenia presents the setting, alongside which most of these
phenomena – from the demanding metallurgical technologies and complex artistic
figurality, through to the autochthonous beginnings of the monetary economy and
the development of local scripts – were introduced to and developed
spontaneously on the territory of Slovenia.