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« on: March 24, 2018, 09:04:49 PM »
FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
By this time metallurgists, attracted perhaps by the copper lodes of Eastern Bulgaria,1 were actually working in Bulgaria and Wallachia. The double-spiral pins they made show the Anatolian models that inspired these artisans, but they seem to have relied on hammering, presumably through ignorance of casting,2 and not all their products were direct copies of Asiatic forms. A shaft-hole axe and a shaft-hole adze were found together at Gaborevo (Fig. 51). Combined in a single
casting, they would yield an axe-adze, and an actual specimen was found at Vidra. It may mark the starting-point of the Hungarian series of period III.
Nevertheless, the Gumelnrfa economy was never transformed so that metal could take the place of stone. Throughout the period tools were normally made of stone or bone. But in addition to adzes of Boian style, flint adzes were now used; the later specimens have splayed blades or polished faces in imitation of the rare copper adzes. Hammer- axes and even simple battle-axes, all hollow-bored as on the Middle Danube, came into fashion, and antler-axes with square-cut shaft- holes. Arrows were tipped with double-ended bone points, more rarely with triangular flint heads. Even a bowman’s wrist-guard was found at Vidra III. Spheroid mace-heads occur sporadically, but the culture never assumes a bellicose aspect.
The pottery carries on the old traditions. The peg-footed box went out of fashion and was replaced by the foot-base type (Fig. 52, 6), in
1 O. Davis, Man., XXXVI (1936), 119, describes prehistoric mines near Burgas; cf. Gaul, AJA., LXVI, 400.
* PZ., XIX (1928), 131.
Fig. 51. Copper axe and adze from Gaborevo ($).
99 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
which the foot is open to the body but closed below, and a socketed ladle of Danubian II type was introduced by phase I at Vinca. Excised decoration became less popular, but rusticated designs remained current, and graphite painting, now positive, became the prevalent method of decoration. It was rarely supplemented by the use of white
Fig. 52. Gumelni^a pottery: 1, Czernavoda (£); 2, TelMetchkur (J); 3-4, Tel Ratchev (£); 5-6, Kodja Derman ($, £).
paint applied before firing. The impression of a split reed producing the so-called bracket ornament (Fig. 52, 2) was popular south of the Danube.
The relative stagnation in industry is counterbalanced or explained by an extravagant elaboration of magico-religious equipment. From phase I on, female figurines of clay were as carefully modelled as those from the middle strata at Vin&a (Fig. 53). One from Vinfia has shell
100 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
inlays for the eyes, like Early Sumerian statuettes. A vase from Vidra III is a grotesque female figure 42 cm. high; a smaller vase from Gaborevo represents a male personage. Both products belong to the same circle of ideas as the anthropomorphic vases from Vinca. Sitting figures, male or female (Fig. 54, 1), were also made. Flat bone figurines
Fig. 53. Painted clay head, VinSa (•$).
are distinctive in all phases (Fig. 54, 3) (especially II) in Wallachia, and also in Bulgaria, where the form was also reproduced in gold leaf.1 A much more conventional type is a simple bone prism (Fig. 54, 2); at Balbunar in Bulgaria prism figures were found in strata deeper than those containing flat figurines, but at Vidra the order of occurrence was reversed.2 Stone idols rather like the Cycladic, were made of local Bulgarian marbles,3 while a torso from Gumelni^a itself replicates the Thessalian type of Fig. 31, 4, save that the inserted head is of clay, not stone.4 In addition to female personages, males were being modelled in clay from phase II (as in Thessaly C-D), and clay phalli, like the Anatolian and Minoan, were used as fertility symbols (Fig. 54, 4). Other ritual objects are horns of consecration (phase II), model altars and thrones, and by phase III models of houses (Fig. 55), as well as models of animals and doves.
The dead were not objects of any elaborate cult or even tendence. At the base of the tell of Balbunar twenty-two contracted skeletons
1 Izv. Bulg. Arch. Inst., VIII (1934). 2°9-
2 But cf. Milojfiid, Chron., 61-2.
3 Izv. Bulg. Inst., Ill (1925), 91-101; XIX, 1-13. 4 Dacia, VII-VIII, 97.
101 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
(accompanied in two or three cases only by flint adzes) and two trunk- less skulls had been buried under the house floors; four contracted burials more richly furnished were found at Ruse. But unburied skulls and ribs hacked about have been reported from other stations as
Fig. 54. Clay and bone figurines (?£) and clay phallus (i), Bulgaria.
Fig. 55. Models of houses, Denev
evidences of cannibalism. The skulls from Romania were dolichocranial and allegedly Mediterranean, but two from Ruse1 are round.
In addition to the pins already mentioned and bracelets of Sfiondylus shell, ring-pendants of bone or gold (Vidra II) and conventional bulls’ heads of gold leaf adorned with punctuations (Vidra III) were worn as ornaments or charms.
The label "Salcu^a” is applied to the version of the Gumelnij:a culture found in Oltenia (i.e. on the north bank of the Lower Danube between the confluence with the Oltu and the Iron Gates)1 2 and found also in the
1 IzbBAl., II (1924), 187 £f. In IzbBAI., XIX (1952), 182-9, thirty-six further burials —at relatively high levels—are reported.
2 Berciu, Arheologia preistorica a OUeniei (Craiova, 1939, 50-68).
102 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
Sofia basin—above Veselinovo remains1—and in Bubanj II on the Upper Morava.1 2 It is distinguished chiefly by ceramic peculiarities: graphite painting and bracket ornament are relatively rare, narrow flutings and crusting with colours after firing commoner. Among shapes, askoi and handled cups or mugs were particularly popular. The two- handled tankards are reminiscent of the Early Macednic, but some are ridiculously like the Silesian Jordanova type of Fig. 94.3 A distinctive Bulgarian form is a lamp in the shape of a goat.4 Most of the Gumelnita ritual objects, including even prismatic bone figurines, recur in a Salcuta context. Finally, a stone “sceptre head” carved to represent an animal’s snout (Fig. 76)5 6 from Salcuta may be an import from the steppes as another came from an ochre grave (cf. p. 158). So no very sharp frontiers can be drawn between Gumelnita and Salcuta. Even on the slopes of Rhodope, Banyata III might be classed as Salcuta rather than Gumelnita. The Salcuta culture presumably developed on the same Boian basis as Gumelnita, but was more strongly influenced by the Vinca culture and the Early Macednic.
It should be easy to fit Balkan III into the Danubian sequence and assign it an absolute date in virtue of the Danubian and iEgean parallels in Gumelnita and Salcuta assemblages. Clay stamps are proper to Danubian II, but battle-axes and axe-adzes belong there to period III. The double-spiral pins, the askoi, and the Salcuta mugs are Early JSgean types, but of course none are actual imports. If taken as denoting synchronisms, they should date the third phase of Gumel- nija and Salcuta not later than 2000 b.c.
In that case we should have painfully little archaeological material to fill the next thousand years. The Lower Danube and Eastern Thrace were incorporated, no more than the Western Balkans, in either the Danubian or the iEgean commercial system. The bronze types defining Danubian IV and V are, if possible, even worse represented here than on the Morava and the Bosna. Half a dozen local copies of Late Minoan I homed rapiers have turned up in Bulgaria, but all are strays. Apart from urnfields of period VI along the Lower Danube, Bronze Age graves are lacking in Bulgaria. The funerary record begins, richly, with the Early Iron Age. Material from domestic sites is scarce and poor, compared with the rich deposits of Gumelnita and earlier cultures from so many sites, and it still looks “neolithic”.
1 E.g. at Krivodol, Raz. i Pro. (1948), 26-57.
a MPK. (1940), IV B, 1-2.
3 Raz. i Pro. (1948), fig. 43.
4 At Yasatepe, Plovdiv (God. Plovdiv, I (1948), 4-11, fig. 12), and Banyata III (ibid.,
II (1950), fig. 30).
6 Dacia, VII-VIII, go ff.; St. s. Qerc., V (1954), 540-8.
103 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Above the Gumelnita levels at Vidra is a thin deposit of the Glina culture, the product of a less sedentary, more pastoral and warlike society. Though copper or bronze was worked, metal did not replace stone in industry or armament. Painted pottery and female figurines have alike disappeared. Homotaxial assemblages are rather more substantial in Bulgaria. At Yunatsite,1 in the middle (II) levels above a Gumelnita layer (I), Vesilnovo handled vases with pillar handles are said to be associated with askoi that would have been expected in the lower, Gumelnita, level. Higher up in Yunatsite III, immediately below a Thracian settlement of the seventh century B.C., occur cups and tankards with pointed bases. These are found also in late houses at Razkopanitsa2 on the Struma, in Karanovo V, Veselinovo and a few other Bulgarian sites, and in Oltenia3 and in the Nis basin of the Morava.4 Jugs and cups with oblique mouths, presumably descended from Anatolian beaked jugs, are found in Karanovo V, Banyata IV, the earlier houses at Razkopanitsa, the highest levels at Ruse.5 All this pottery, self-coloured and rarely decorated, looks at least as Anatolian as the Veselinovo ware from Karanovo II. It might be derived therefrom if a long Gumelnita occupation did not intervene (cf. p. 95).
Hence if we placed even the first two phases of Gumelnita in the third millennium, we should get the impression that the large sedentary population, attested by the numerous Gumelnita tells, was either decimated or relapsed into shifting cultivation. Be that as it may, one conclusion can be drawn. Neolithic societies in the Balkans quite quickly adapted the South-West Asiatic rural economy to their inter- mediate environment and elaborated or adopted a similar ideology appropriate to settled village life. They did not take the next step towards civilization—to adjust their economy to support a bronze industry—nor, as far as our evidence goes, did they help to transmit northward the technical skills of their neighbours round the iEgean. The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Lower Danube and the Balkans were based entirely on Central European traditions to which Greek contributions were superadded only subsequently.
1 GodiSnih Plovdiv (1940), 55-70; Miloj£ic, Chvon., 50-2.
2 IzvBAJ, XVII (1950), 171-87, with list of other sites on 187.
8 Bercin, Arheol. preistoricd a Olteniei, figs. 136-8.
4 MilojSid, Chron., 55, and fig. 2. fi IzvBAI., XIX (1952), 121-8.
IO4 CHAPTER VII
DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION PERIOD I
Immediately north of the Serbian Danube and the Save begin loss- clad plains and slopes which extend, not without formidable interrup- tions, right up to the edge of the moraines in Poland, Germany, and Belgium. These Central European loss lands had been frequented in Aurignacian and Solutrean times by mammoth- and reindeer-hunters, but mesolithic successors of such food-gatherers survived only on isolated patches of sandy soil and among the post-glacial forests on the northern and western fringes. To food-producers, the loss lands, naturally drained, not too heavily wooded and easy to till, offered a domain where they could practise the simplest conceivable sort of farming. With unstinted water supplies and seemingly boundless territories the peasant was free to shift his hut and break fresh ground as soon as his former fields showed signs of exhaustion. And in fact we find prevailing throughout Central Europe a system of nomadic culti- vation that does look really primitive—such as the earliest food- producers, undisciplined by environmental limitations, might be expected to invent.
The cultures1 based upon this economy exhibit considerable uni- formity throughout the loss lands. Though the temporary nature of the settlements excludes tell formation and the stratigraphical chron- ology derived therefrom, the cultural sequence is well established. Throughout the area three main periods can be recognized before the Early Bronze Age, which coincides with period IV. In period I we can distinguish three main groups: the Koros culture, already described under Starcevo in Chapter VI, the Biikk culture in North-Eastern Hungary and Slovakia, and the Danubian I extending from Western Hungary to the northern confines of the loss.
Danubian I Culture
The loss lands west and north of the Danube were first occupied by a neolithic population whose whole culture down to the finest details
For points not otherwise documented see Childe, Danube.
105 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
remains identical from the Drave to the Baltic and from the Dniester to the Meuse.1 This is the best known culture in Central Europe and perhaps the most classically neolithic in the ancient world. Hence the term Danubian I may be legitimately applied to it in preference to the clumsy and inaccurate terms “linear pottery" or “spiral-maeander” culture.
The Danubian I economy was based on the cultivation of barley, one-corn, and perhaps also emmer1 2 wheats, beans, peas, lentils, and flax, in small plots tilled with stone hoes. Only small herds of stock were kept; bones of sheep, Bezoar goats, oxen, and pigs turn up in settle- ments, but animal dung was never incorporated in hut walls, as is usual where the farmyards are well stocked. To hunting the Danubians made no resort. Danubian I settlement sites are dotted very densely all over the loss lands, but none shows evidence of prolonged occupa- tion. That is a result of the Danubians’ crude agricultural technique, one still illustrated by some hoe-cultivators in Africa to-day. They cultivated a plot till it would bear no more and then another, and so on until they had used up all the land round the hamlet; thereupon they shifted bag and baggage to a new site on fresh virgin soil.
Yet these shifting cultivators lived in commodious and substantial rectangular houses3 from io to 40 m. in length and 6 to 7*5 m. wide; five rows of posts supported a gabled roof and walls of wattle and daub or split saplings (Fig. 56). Four hearths in a row were identified on the floor of a house, 33*5 m. long, at Postoloprty in Bohemia,4 but at other sites remains of fireplaces or ovens are curiously missing. Outside the long houses irregular pits, once termed pit-dwellings, had been dug to get clay and subsequently used as rubbish-pits, silos, pig-sties, or working-places. Intersections of house plans at many sites prove intermittent return to settlements that, nevertheless, did not grow into stratified tells. On the assumption that all contemporary houses were exactly parallel, Sangmeister infers5 that Koln-Lindental,® the best explored Danubian village, had been occupied seven times and at its largest comprised twenty-one households. But of course the
1 For the distribution in Hungary, BRGK., XXIV-XXV, 30-2; AE.t XLIV, 30 ft.; in Poland and East Germany, Przeg A., VIII (1949), 315-17; for the rest of Germany, Buttler, Donau; for Bohemia, Stocky, Boh. Prdh.; for Belgium, Marien, Oud-Belgie, 13-47; for Austria, Pittioni, Osterreich, 125-40.
2 Emmer is reported only from the Rhineland and Belgium, bread wheat from Poland alone; both might have been borrowed from other populations. Cf. BRGK., XX (1930), 30.
3 BRGK., XXXIII (1943-50). 66-82; AR., II (1950), 208; VII (1955), 5-10.
* PA., XLV (1954). 81-5.
8 BRGK., XXXIII, 90-109.
* Buttler and Habery, Das bandkeramische Dorf Koln-Lindenthal (Romisch-Germani- sche Forschungen 11) (Berlin, 1936).
I06 DANUBIAN CIVILIZATION
“household” must have been more like a clan than a pairing family. In its latest phase Koln-Lindental was surrounded with a trench and palisade. Sangmeister suggests that each occupation might last ten
« • H
§
9
*
Fig. 56. Small Danubian I house from Saxony; the walls marked by a double row of
posts, After Sangmeister.
years and postulates abandonment for regeneration of scrub for fifty years.
The rest of the Danubians’ equipment was equally home-made.
I V* I
Fig. 57. "Shoe-last celts.” After Seger (J).
Shoe-last celts of stone (Fig. 57) served, if mounted on knee-shafts, as hoe-blades and adzes, or, if perforated, as axes and hammers. Knives, sickles, and scrapers were made on flint blades. No whorls nor loom-
107
737
« on: March 24, 2018, 09:04:17 PM »
91 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
about throughout the Vinca province, all presumably imports from beyond the Danube. At Kladova on the Save1 a typical Hungarian axe-adze was found with thirty-nine long flint blades such as are proper to the Bodrogkeresztur culture of Danubian III.
Such imports establish good synchronisms with the Danubian sequence: Vinca I overlaps with the Koros phase of Starcevo, but its later subdivisions (Milojcid’ B and C) are frankly contemporary with the Tisza culture. The latter should be Danubian II though direct links with the Lengyel culture, typical of that period, are lacking at Vinca.1 2 The succeeding Vinca II phase is in turn contemporary with, or replaced locally by, the Baden and Bodrogkeresztur cultures of Danubian III. Correlations with the East Balkan sequence are equally explicit. On the Romanian bank of the Lower Danube, Vinca I remains at Verbi- coara are stratified below those of the Salcuta culture while Boian pottery is found at Tordos,3 presumably with the Vinca I material from the site. Conversely the Vinca II relics from the upper Morava valley are hardly distinguishable from those proper to the Salcuta culture. In other words, Vin£a I and II are respectively homotaxial with Boian and Salcuta.4
Chronological relations with the iEgean are much harder to deter- mine. Relations are plain enough, but not in the form of direct imports across the Balkans or local reproductions of ephemeral types. The Vinca I culture on the Danube is so nearly identical with that of Late Neolithic Servia in Macedonia that we may say that this culture, like that of Starcevo, crossed the frontier between the Mediterranean and the Temperate zones intact. Most Vinca I pot-fabrics and forms recur also in Late Neolithic Central Greece, some even at Kum Tepe in the Troad. All that does not prove contemporaneity. Indeed, the priority of one region over the other would decide several crucial issues in Euro- pean and Indo-European prehistory. Now Milojcid5 has indeed claimed a pedestalled pyxis from his Vinca B2 as an Early Cycladic import, and it might well be a copy of an imported marble vase. An unstratified fragment from Vinca may again imitate an Early Helladic askoid jug,6 while a vase from Bubanj II (i.e. Vinca II) may imitate a meta
1 Arh. Vest., Ljubljana, V (1954), 229-32.
2 The few sherds of crusted ware reported from Vin£a (Vassits, PV., II, p. 134) come mostly from late Vin£a II levels.
3 Roska, Torma-Sammlung, pi. CXV, 12-21; cf. St. s. Qerc., V (1954), 61, pi. V.
4 Milojfiid, Chron., p. 64, writing before the Romanian data were available, equated Gumelnija as well as Boian with Vinfca I.
5 Chron., 77.
8 Fragmentary “Minyan” and "Early Helladic” vases from Humska Cuka, quoted by Garaganin (Arch. Iugoslav., I (1954), 19 f.) and Miloj£i<5 (Chron., 55-6), are not really much help. Their .Egean provenance is not at all likely and their relation to the Vinda sequence debated.
92 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
sauce-boat like those from Troy and the Peloponnese. The Vinca II handled jugs and tankards from the Morava sites must be related to the corresponding Early iEgean forms, but might be earlier as well as later.
Yugoslavian prehistorians are agreed that the Vinca culture did not develop out of the local Starcevo culture, but must be attributed to fresh colonists from the south-east. It would be these, then, who introduced into temperate Europe the form of sedentary village life, the rural economy that supported it, and the ideology that held society together as they had been developed in South-Western Asia. On the other hand, as pointed out on p. 66, there may be archaeological and other grounds for believing that the Late Neolithic culture of Western Macedonia and Central Greece, now identified as the Vinca I culture, was introduced by an incursion from beyond the Balkans. If no development of the Starcevo culture in that direction can be observed on the Morava, it may conceivably be traceable on the Maritza when the varied material from Karanovo I and Banyata I have been exhaustively studied and published.
During phase I, the Vinca culture exhibited remarkable uniformity from Servia on the Haliakmon, or at least from Pavlovce on the Vardar- Morava divide, to Tordos on the Maros, from Ostrul Corbului below the Iron Gates westward to Sarvas on the Drave. In phase II this unity dissolved, as had that of the Starcevo.
North of the Danube the permanent villages of Vinca type give place to more temporary hamlets, probably based on shifting culti- vation. In the Balkans, however, many tells were still occupied and the ideology appropriate to settled agriculture everywhere continued to find expression in the production of female figurines. But in the Nis basin on the upper Morava the culture of Bubanj II is a sort of hybrid between Vinca and Salcuta. About the same time arose on the Bosna the remarkable Butmir1 culture. At the eponymous site, a low tell, adzes, figurines, and much of the pottery carry on the Vinca tradition. But the exuberant development of spiral ribbons and mouldings, sometimes forming a net pattern as on Early Cycladic vases, and the multiplication of tanged flint arrow-heads is quite novel. Finally, at Vinca itself the old culture persists. But in the levels between 4-5 and 2-5 below Vassits’ datum obsidian is rare, and Milojcic sees Baden influence in the pottery. Between the last two occupation levels were found vases belonging to the Middle Bronze Age of the Lower Maros, assignable to period V of the Danubian sequence. So unless an inter-
1 Benac, A., Prehistorijsko naselje Nebo i problem Butmirske Kulture (Univerzav Ljubljana), 1952.
93 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
ruption of habitation has produced an hiatus, Danubian III, IV, and V should be contemporary with later phases of the Vinca culture!
It seems as if, having established a workable adjustment to the local environment, the self-sufficing Balkan villagers made no effort— or at least failed—to obtain regular supplies of metal. The widespread bronze types that define periods IV and V in the Danubian province are missing in the Balkans; a formally neolithic culture persisted.
The Veselinovo Culture of Southern Thrace
According to the latest reports of Mikov and Detev, the Starcevo culture at Karanovo,1 Banyata,2 and Ginova mogila near Celopec3 in the Maritza valley was immediately succeeded by one of very different aspect that may be named after another tell, Veselinovo.4
The permanent villages were composed of spacious houses comprising several rooms. The frame was constructed of upright wooden posts, but the walls consisted of clay mixed with straw. Their inhabitants were settled farmers who now cultivated emmer in addition to one- corn wheat. Perhaps, too, they bred, or at least hunted, horses whose bones are reported from Veselinovo.5 Huntsmen still relied mainly on slings, but stone battle-axes may have been made for war. The pottery, even more than the architecture, reveals a thorough mastery of wood- work. For this adzes were still preferred, but axe-heads were made and perforated for mounting. The pottery marks a complete break with the Starcevo traditions. The normal ware is self-coloured, usually black and sometimes burnished. Ornament, employed so profusely before, has been abandoned save for applied strips that may terminate in spirals. During building some pots were stood on rush mats, the impres- sions of which are common on bases. Pithoi, over 50 cm. high, were manufactured, but the most distinctive form is a straight-sided or pear-shaped mug (Fig. 49) provided with a stout handle prolonged upwards to a little pillar. The form is obviously inspired by a wooden model. So are bowls or lamps on four stout round legs and triangular ones on short flat legs. The latter are often decorated with excised chequer patterns, inspired by chip-carving (Fig. 49), and recur, similarly decorated, in the homotaxial Boian culture farther north and in the Chalcolithic of Alisar in Central Anatolia. Lop-sided bottles
1 Information from the excavator.
2 Godtinik Plovdiv, II (1950), 4-30.
3 God. Plovdiv, I (1948), 160-4; RazkopM i Proucvaniya (Sofia, Naroden Muzei, 1948). 75-8i.
4 IzbBAI., XIII (1939).
s The stratigraphical position of the horses' bones—and of the battle-axes—is still uncertain. Neither have been yet found in situ at Karanovo.
94 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
for carrying on the back were made in the Veselinovo level at Banyata as at Vinca (p. 90).
A few very conventional figurines come from Karanovo II, but in general the Veselinovo levels are conspicuously poor in those ritual objects of clay that illustrate the ideology of the Sesklo culture in Greece and of later Balkan cultures. Indeed, the Veselinovo culture seems to interrupt the Balkan tradition and can hardly be regarded as an autochthonous development of the Starcevo complex. Its plain
Fig. 49. Mug, tripod bowl, and “altar" decorated by excision, Banyata II.
self-coloured pots with thrust handles in particular look Anatolian. If Mikhalic (p. 66) really be parallel to Macedonian Late Neolithic and belong to Balkan period II, the Veselinovo culture could be regarded as a result of the same movement, more closely adapted to the Balkan environment. But none of the distinctive Troadic forms, so conspicuous at Mikhalic, has yet been found in situ in a Veselinovo layer. There are indeed analogies to Veselinovo handles and to the “chip-carved" lamps in Anatolia, but these are confined to Alaca Hoyuk, Biiyiik Giillucek,1 and Ali^ar,2 all on the plateau. Moreover, these are imitations of wooden models such as are common all along the southern slopes of the Balkans and the Alps, even to Italy and South France.
Now, at the eponymous site Mikov traced the development of the Veselinovo culture into one of Bronze Age type characterized by a copper shaft-hole axe, stone battle-axes, bowls with short trumpet lugs growing from the inturned rims, side-spouted bowls and jugs, and even something like a Minoan teapot. Similar material comes from Razkopanitsa,8 Ezero, and Yunatsite,4 where it certainly overlies Gumelnij:a deposits and so belongs to Balkan IV. Of course, the strati- fication at Banyata and Karanovo may have been misinterpreted, and
1 Betteten, XII (1948), 475 ff.
2 von der Osten, Alishar Hiiyiik, 1930-32, OIP., XXIX, fig. 93, 2393.
3 IsvBAI., XVII (1950), 171 ft.
4 Godi&nik Plovdiv, 1927-9 (1940), 55 ff.
95 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Veselinovo there may have followed Gumelnita, as Mikov reported in 1939. Alternatively it could be assumed that the Veselinovo culture, like the Macednic Bronze Age cultures, developed at some sites parallel to, but unaffected by, the intrusive Gumelnita settlements, and that then in Balkan IV the Veselinovo tradition triumphed over the intru- sions from the north. In either case some ceramic forms of the developed Veselinovo culture from Ezero—trumpet lugs and cord- ornament, though belonging to Balkan IV—are more reminiscent of Mikhahc than anything yet observed in Karanovo II!
The Boian Culture
North of the main Balkan range, on both sides of the Lower Danube and in Transylvania on the Upper Olt, Balkan period II is occupied by an assemblage termed, after an island in the Danube, the Boian culture.1 Comsa2 has recently claimed to distinguish two preparatory phases during which settlements were not yet quite stable villages, when only one-corn wheat and millet were cultivated, when arrows were armed with trapezes and lunates, and when pottery was tempered with chaff and decorated only with channelled or incised lines that might form spirals and mseanders. His stages, if reliable, would give hints at the acculturation of mesolithic survivors, already postulated (p. 88), or at their absorption by immigrant farmers.
But, as found at the base of the tells of Vidra3 and Tangaru,4 and at the eponymous site, Boian denotes a regular village culture based on the cultivation of one-corn and emmer wheats and millet combined with stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing. The villages were made up of substantial rectangular houses, walled with split tree-trunks and wattle and daub and equipped with central fire-places and a very shallow porch, thus approximating to the megaron plan.5 These are said to have been preceded by less substantial huts at Tangaru. Weaving is attested by clay loom-weights and cruciform whorls, like those used on the Koros. The carpenter used adzes of shoe-last form or bevelled as in the Sesklo culture of Thessaly. But they might be mounted in perforated antler sleeves as at Maglemose.
The home-made pots are obviously influenced both in form and decoration by wooden models. Characteristic are cylindrical peg-footed boxes (Fig. 50), big biconical jars, two-storeyed urns, ladles with solid
1 Gaul. ASPRB., XVI (1948). s.v.
2 St. s. Qerc., V (1954). 395 #?
3 Rosetti, Publicat. Muzeului Munirip. Bucuresti, I (1934).
4 Berciu, Bui. Muzeului Judet. Vlasca T. Antonescu, I (Bucurest, 1935).
5 Bui. Muzeu, Jud. Vlasca T. Antonescu, II (1937), fig. 3.
96 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
handles, and tiny vases with pointed bases that stood in pairs on cubical supports. Exceptional are pedestailed bowls of Danubian II form and others on human feet. For decorating these products the potter employed the wood-carver’s technique of excision, but also incision, fluting, rustication, and, exceptionally, negative painting in graphite, and crusting with colours after the firing; spirals, mseanders,
=“=a==as==:^ ^ ==:=======aa=^
Fig. 50. Peg-footed vase. Denev (£).
and cognate repetition patterns form the basis for a rich all-over decoration.
The Boian farmers were acquainted with copper, but used it only for small ornaments and made no attempt to organize regular supplies for industrial use. The only other indication of rudimentary trade is provided by bracelets of Spondylus shell which were as popular on the Lower Danube as in Thessaly and Central Europe. And as there, triangular and quadrangular altars were made for domestic cult, but figurines, later so common, were very rarely modelled in clay.
The Boian culture, as thus defined, eventually spread south across the Balkans to the Maritsa valley, but has not been isolated sharply enough there to be attributed to Balkan II rather than Balkan III. Northward, characteristic pottery is found as far as the mouth of the Danube and the upper valley of the Oltu, while unmistakable sherds are included in the collection from Tordos on the Maros. Here its position in the Balkan sequence is well established. Boian underlies Gumelnita in the tells of Tangaru and Vidra. Near Le|i, on the Upper Oltu, early Boian pottery is stratified above Starcevo ware but below Tripolye Bj pottery of the Ariusd style, while the Boian sherds from Tordos should denote a synchronism with Vinca I.
The neolithic elements, save perhaps the emmer wheat, can simply G 97 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
be derived from the antecedent Starcevo culture. The antler work and the carpentry might be a legacy from surviving mesolithic hunter- fishers, represented by geometric microliths collected on some Romanian sites. These too might have transmitted the overall system of decora- tion using the maeander as a repetition pattern; for it was so used in late pleistocene times by the mammoth-hunters of Mezin on the loss lands of South Russia.
The Gumelnija and Salcuja Cultures
The Boian culture seems to have developed, though not without enrichment from Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Middle Danube, into what Romanian prehistorians term the Gumelnita culture.1 This is represented at a larger number of sites in Wallachia and Bulgaria than the Boian culture owing to the foundation of new villages by an expanding population. And it endured a long time; at least three phases can be distinguished stratigraphically at Vidra and Tangaru, but the Wallachian divisions are inapplicable in Bulgaria.
The basis of life remained unchanged save that antler harpoons, like those of the Vinca and Tisza sites, were now employed for spearing fish. But from the first a tendency to industrial specialization was manifested; in several settlements hoards of flint blades and bone tools, all fresh as if designed for barter, were uncovered. Later, in phase III, metal must have been worked by craftsmen in some sites.
Trade was also organized to some extent. In phase I at Vidra the material for stone implements was brought from Bulgaria and the Dobrudja, later from Transylvania and the Banat. Commerce brought actual manufactures, new ideas and eventually new technical processes. A binocular vase of the Tripolye A style from Moldavia or farther north and a vessel ornamented with punctured ribbons, as at Tordos and Vinca, were brought to Vidra in phase I. From the same horizon and from several Bulgarian sites come clay stamps2 imitating Asiatic seals though decorated always with spirals. By phase II, ring-pendants, as at Troy, Dimini, and Tordos, were being manufactured in bone, and bone copies of double-spiral headed pins. Actual pins, like Fig. 27, save that the spirals are ribbons, not wiry, were found in level III at Vidra, as at many sites and Gaborevo in Bulgaria.3 Finally, even the Macedonian-Helladic askoi were copied locally in Vidra III and other Wallachian and Thracian sites.
1 Gaul, BASPR., XVI (1948).
2 One from Qunesti, Moldavia, Dacia, V-VI (1938), 117.
3 BRGK., XXII, Taf. 7. Maps in Gaul, loc. cit.
? 98
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In the peninsula and along the Lower Danube a mesolithic popula- tion, allied to the Northern Forest-folk, might be postulated to explain peculiarities in the local neolithic culture, but is not documented by any certified finds. In the caves so far explored no occupation layers intervene between strata containing Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian) implements and a pleistocene fauna and those yielding remains of developed neolithic cultures. The continuous record recommences with farmers whose cultures in general for all their local divergences are not only based on the same cereals and domestic stock as those of peninsular Greece and Hither Asia, but also reproduce the latters’ rural economy and ideology expressed in female figurines and even their preferences for adzes and slings.
1 Godolnik Plovdiv, II (1950), 4-20.
2 SA., XXIV. (1955). 125; cf. IzbBAI., XVII (1950). 210-12.
3 Jhrb. d. Inst., LVIII, A A. (1943), 74-92.
4 IzbBAI., XIII (1939), 195-227.
5 Antiquity, XIII (1939), 345-9; Gaul, BASPR., XVI {1948), 43-5.
6 Preistorijskaya Vinca (Belgrad, 1930-36), 4 volumes, cited P.F.
7 WPZ., XXVI (1939), 1 ff.
8 Chronologie, 71-81; BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-82.
9 Hronologija Vinlanshe Gruppe (Ljubliana, 1951).
84 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
The Starcevo-Koros Culture1
Throughout the Balkan peninsula and on both sides of the Carpathians, north of the Danube, the continuous record of food-production begins in settlements of the Starcevo culture. This assemblage, only in the last ten years clearly distinguished from its successors, extends from the iEgean coasts in Thessaly and Gallipoli across the main Balkan range and the Danube to the Koros and the headwaters of the Pruth (Map I, crosses). In such a vast and diversified region the material remains of the culture are surprisingly uniform, though local divergences are of course recognizable, especially in pottery; we could easily distinguish a Maritza or Thracian, a Drave-Morava, and a Maros-Koros aspect.
Though occurring at the base of several tells both in Bulgaria and in Yugoslavia, the Starcevo layers seem to represent rather temporary settlements, and similar material has been collected from caves and from unstratified camp sites along streams and lake shores. On the Maros and Koros the latter consisted of groups of trapeze-shaped huts of wattle-and-daub with lean-to walls that formed also the roof,1 2 but on the Maritza more commodious houses were built in the later phase of the culture. In the economy, hunting played a prominent role; bones of game animals are common in all settlements. But the hunters did not use flint-tipped arrows, but relied on traps and slings.3 Fishing may be deduced from the location of the encampments along the banks of streams and lakes and from clay net-sinkers which in the Koros aspect assume the ornate form of Fig. 45. But Starcevo folk were always farmers even though their rural economy may have been incompatible with durable settlement in one place.
Actual cereals—so far only one-corn wheat in Bulgaria; millet in Yugoslavia!—have been identified; they were stored in clay-lined pits; sickle flints were found mounted in a curved horn-handle at Karanovo4; saddle querns and rubbers are found everywhere. Beside the querns in Bulgaria are regularly found bone spatulse (Fig. 45) that must have been used to scoop up the flour. Such spatulse recur on practically every Starcevo site throughout the province, but in no other context, so that they can be used as a diagnostic type of the culture as confidently as pots. Bread was probably already baked in low clay ovens. Finally, cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs were bred for food. But in general the
1 Kutzian, I., The Koros Culture (Dissertationes Pannoniccs, s. II, no. 23) (Buda-Pest,
1944-47); Garasanin, Arandeljovic-, Starceva6ka Kultura (Univerz v. Ljubljani, 1954); Gaul, “West Bulgarian Painted”, ASPRB., XVI (1948); “Banyata”, God. Plov., II (1950), 4-12; St. s. Qerc., II (1951), 57-64. 2 Banner, TMK., 17; Dolg., IX-X, 75.
3 Gara§anin, StarcevaL Kult., 134. 4 Antiquity, XIII, 345.
85 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
rural economy must have been one of shifting agriculture and pastoral- ism combined with hunting and collecting. That will account for the relatively rapid spread of such a homogeneous culture over so vast a province.
In industry carpenters used exclusively adzes (like Fig. 29, B and D) and chisels mounted in antler sleeves. In the Koros aspect at least celts were sometimes drilled with a hollow-borer and antler beams were perforated—and sometimes armed with stone blades—to serve as adzes or mattocks. Textiles may be inferred from spindle-whorls, spools, and loom-weights of baked clay.
Fig. 45. Clay loom-weights or net-sinkers (£) and bone spatula of Stardevo Koros culture, (?£).
The potters, though not full-time specialists, had complete mastery over their material. The universal and perhaps earliest Starcevo ware is indeed coarse and chaff-tempered. But the shapes are highly sophisti- cated. The vases, some 21 inches high, are all provided with flat bases or even stand-rings though not with true handles. North of the Balkan range the stand-rings may be quatrefoil or cruciform (Fig. 46) or replaced by four nipples that farther south have grown into four solid legs. These vessels were elaborately decorated by rustication (often called barbotine), which in the Koros aspect is combined with con- ventional figures of goats, stags, or men in relief. This coarse ware, save perhaps in the Koros aspect, was generally accompanied by finer fabrics, also chaff-tempered, with a well-smoothed or even burnished surface, grey, buff, or red in colour. The fine grey wares may be decor- ated with narrow flutings or channellings that both at Starcevo and on the Maritza may form spiraliform patterns. Finally, small vases, especially goblets on a low foot, may be painted in white or black on a red ground or—in Yugoslavia—in dark brown on buff, in fact just like
86 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
Dimini ware (p. 64). The lines of paint form simple designs among which spirals occur only rarely and, according to Milojcic, late. Neither the rusticated nor the painted designs were blended into harmonious compositions as in Thessaly. At Karanovo fluted ware seems to appear later than painted; both appear later than rusticated ware at Starcevo according to Fewkes,1 Milojcic,1 2 and Mrs Garasanin,3 but Ehrich4 denies
Fig. 46. Cruciform-footed bowl in fine Starcevo ware and jar of rusticated Koros
style (XV).
this. Both Milojcic and Mrs Garasanin agree that the rusticated Koros ware represents a still later phase of the culture.
Trade brought obsidian to the encampments on the Pruth and along the Tisza and Koros, and Spondylus shells to the latter region from the Mediterranean.
Clay stamps, as in neolithic Byblos, are common on the Koros sites, at Starcevo itself and along the Pruth, but have not yet been reported south of the Balkans. Similarly figurines, well-modelled and markedly steatopygous, are common in the Kor5s group but rare and rude at Starcevo and on the Maritza. Burials were unceremonious, being represented by skeletons without grave goods, interred contracted in pits in the encampments. The expansion of the Starcevo culture must have occupied a considerable time, and in each area, though not at any single site, its life may well have been long. Earlier and later phases
1 Fewkes, ASPRB., IX (1933), 44-6.
2 BSA., XLIV (1949), 261-6.
3 Starcevadka Kultura (Ljubljana, 1954), 62-80, 134.
4 Relative Chronologies in Old World Archceology (Chicago, 1954), 112.
87 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
should then be distinguishable. Now in Thessaly Starcevo rusticated ware is Early Neolithic, being stratified below Sesklo wares (p. 58). In Macedonia, on the contrary, the painted pottery of Olynthus is indistinguishable from painted Starcevo ware.1 but is Late Neolithic. On the Pruth in Northern Romania Starcevo wares (painted and rusti- cated) are stratified below Danubian I. At Vinca too Starcevo culture appears pure in the deepest level, though Koros sherds at least are mixed in the immediately overlying deposit of the Vinca culture. But north of the Danube the Koros culture is said, sometimes at least, to be later than the Vinca culture.2 So the clay stamps that are com- monest on Koros sites are Danubian II on the Middle and Upper Danube. Hence the Koros aspect is probably a late phase of the Starcevo culture as Garasanin and Milojcic contend, and painting may be a secondary feature in the pottery.
If this be correct, antler sleeves and mattocks and the spiral motive may be accretions developed or borrowed by Starcevo farmers from hypothetical hunter-fishers of Forest traditions along the Danube. Similarly vase painting, the manufacture of the more realistic figurines and of the stamps, that look most like Asiatic seals, and perhaps the improvement in rural economy, suggested by the more permanent settlements on the Maritsa, may be additions to the original culture inspired by fresh immigrants from Hither Asia. The hypothetical “pure Starcevo culture”, left by the abstraction of the foregoing accretions, could quite well have arisen in the Balkans, since the only directly attested cereals cultivated and animals3 bred may be native there. It may, on the other hand, be due to immigrants from South-Western Asia related to the farmers who made unpainted pots in North Syria and Cilicia, or, if rusticated Starcevo ware seems too unlike the recog- nized incised fabrics of the area, to farmers who made no pots at all.4
The relatively homogeneous Starcevo culture was in the sequel replaced by—or by divergent adjustments to the environment grew into—distinct local cultures in the several natural subdivisions of the province. Divergent development would be quite natural if a sparse population of herdsmen and shifting cultivators that had maintained communication between dispersed bands as a consequence of trans- humance, hunting expeditions, and the search for fresh soil to till, settled down in permanent villages; for owing to their neolithic self- sufficiency these could remain isolated.
1 Heurtley, PM., 116.
2 AE. (n.s.), VII-IX (1946-48), 19-41.
3 But probably no sheep or goats, BRGK., XXXVI (1955), 21-5.
4 The "unfired pottery” reported by Grbic from Subotica is really the clay lining to bottle-shaped silos on a sandy site. Normal StarSevo pottery was found in the silos. FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
The Vardar-Morava or Vinca Culture
In Western Macedonia, along the Vardar and Morava, on the Danube above the Iron Gates, and thence across the Banat and up the Maros, permanent villages growing into tells begin with the Vinca culture.
In the great tell of Vinca itself above the Starcevo levels appear fabrics and ceramic forms that are not found in pure sites of the Starcevo culture but do occur at sites where Starcevo types are totally absent. These ceramic features Milojcic1 and Garasanin2 have isolated from the Starcevo assemblage and used to define a distinct Vinca culture to which other traits may be attributed by association. As thus defined, the culture is represented at a series of sites from the Vardar- Morava watershed down the latter river, along the Save3 and the Danube, and then beyond that river4 as far as Tordos on the Maros5 in Transylvania. The stratification at Vinca allows of the definition of phases in the development of those data susceptible of statistical treatment, but not of the determination of the relative age of isolated objects. Milojcic distinguishes five main phases, but Garasanin can recognize only two. He will be followed here.
The basis of life was still mixed farming combined with hunting, fishing, and collecting. But the rural economy had been adjusted to
Fig. 47. Bone combs and ring-pendant, Tordos, and "harpoon”, Vinca (f).
maintain permanent villages on one site. To catch the large fish of the Danube, the Tisza, and the Maros, antler harpoons or leister-prongs (Fig. 47) were employed as well as nets and hoolc-and-line (by Vinca II the hooks were barbed). Flint arrow-heads were only exceptionally used, but no clay sling-bolts have been found either. The houses of wattle and daub were rectilinear but rather irregular in plan, divided into two or three rooms and furnished with low-vaulted ovens. Adzes
1 BSA., XLIV (1949), 258-306.
2 Hronologia Vincanska Gruppe (1951).
3 Starinar (n.s.), III-IV (1953), 107-26.
4 AE., VII-IX, 19-41.
6 Roska, M., Die Sammlung Zsofia Torma (Cluj-Koloszvar, 1941).
89 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
were still preferred to axes. Perforated stone hammer-axes appeared first in Vinca II, but antlers were perforated for mattocks as in the Starcevo culture.
The pottery was of high quality. The commonest fabric at all levels and sites was black burnished ware. A red-surfaced version (erroneously termed "red-slipped”) was also made. Black and red part-coloured vases, as described on p. 65, are confined to the first phase. To the same phase belongs what Milojcid calls urfirms and compares to the Late Neolithic ware of Greece (p. 65). Vases were flat-based. Handles were foreign to the pure Vinca tradition, but at Plocnik1 and other late sites in the Morava valley appear handled tankards and mugs resembling
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 t 9 10
1 --1---1____L.__1____L__J____I____L___L___1 cm.
Fig. 48. "Face urn" lid from Vinca. After Vassits.
the Early Macednic. Instead, vases were provided with lugs that even in phase I may be hornlike and are provided with button-like pro- jections in phase II. Tubular spouts may go back to phase I, but are commoner in II. Carinated bowls and dishes with flaring or vertical rims were popular throughout. Chalices on tall solid feet occur already in the first phase, tripod vases only in the second. Curious bottles, designed for carrying on the back, flat on one side and provided with looped lugs on the other, are assigned to Vinca I. The same type occurs in the Koros and Romanian variants of the Starcevo culture, but in Bulgaria is also post-Starcevo. Distinctive of both phases of the Vinca culture and found equally on the Save, the Morava, and the Maros are anthropomorphic lids (Fig. 48), traditionally compared to Trojan
1 Grbic, Plocnik (Beograd, Narodni Muzeum, 1929).
90 FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
face-urns and really like some from Troy III. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vases were likewise manufactured, presumably for ritual use.
Decoration was effected by stroke-burnishing, narrow flutings or corrugations, and incisions combined with punctuations; rouletting was introduced in phase II. White, red, or yellow colours were applied after firing to decorate altars and figurines in phase I, but crusted on the vase surface mainly in phase II. The motives in phase I include triangles, filled with punctuations, and punctured ribbons or corrugations, form- ing simple rectilinear patterns. Mseanders, spirals, and repetition patterns, derived therefrom, are reputedly confined to phase II.
In addition to pots, white limestone dishes were used at VinSa. Toilet articles include a comb from Tordos (Fig. 47), resembling that from Late Neolithic Macedonia, and ring pendants.
Ritual equipment was as rich in the Vinca culture as in other Balkan, Greek, and South-West Asiatic cultures and implies a similar ideology. The earliest figurines are more schematic than those from Koros sites, but some were already seated on thrones. Later details of the visage were more carefully modelled; the face became pentagonal instead of triangular, the hands rest on the stomach, clasp the breasts or carry a suckling, but the legs fuse into pedestals. Mortuary ceremonial, on the other hand, is not well attested and must have played a minor part in ideological activity. Some dubious cases of cremation have indeed been mentioned, and at Vinca1 nine skeletons were buried in a “pit cave” cut in the loss, but at Vucedol similar “chamber tombs” contained Slavonian pottery.
The site of Vinca, close to the junction of the Morava with the Danube above the perilous rapids of the Iron Gates, was well-adapted for trade. Indeed, Vassits attributed the settlement to a colony of iEgean merchants whom he eventually identified as Ionians of the seventh century. Actually the adjacent cinnabar deposits of Suplja Stena were exploited by Vinca people. Unambiguous imports are Spondylus bracelets, found at all levels, and obsidian commonest in Milojcid, phase B. The volcanic glass presumably came from North- East Hungary down the Tisza. With it came pots such as were being made along that river, first Koros types of Starcevo pottery, then numerous complete Tisza vases. Small scraps of copper are reported from all levels at Vinca, but the abundance of stone adzes and other tools at all levels and all sites implies that no regular supplies were organized. But at Plocnik in phase II was found a hoard of thirteen copper adzes and a hammer-axe like Fig. 64,1, together with five stone adzes. Many similar Hungarian-Transylvanian types are scattered
1 Vassits, PV., II, 9, pis. 8-17.
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The intrusive culture typified by grey Minyan ware is found all over Greece to the Ionian Islands, Levkas, Thessaly, and even Chalcidice. Only in inland Macedonia did the native culture persist quite unaffected by it. Now most authorities agree that the Minyan invaders were the first Greek speakers in the peninsula. From them should have sprung the new dynasty that began to write Indo-European Greek at Knossos in L.M.II (p. 27). If so, the origin of the invaders becomes a major issue for European prehistory. In 1914 Forsdyke suggested a Troadic origin for the invaders.3 But, though Minyan ware was the normal pottery of Troy VI, it did not begin demonstrably earlier there than in Greece. Burial among the houses contrasts as much with Troadic as with Minoan and Early Helladic practice, but was normal in Central Anatolia and farther east. Now grey vases, technically allied to Minyan and including pedestalled goblets, are characteristic of Hissar II in North-Eastern Iran and allied sites in Turkmenia,4 where again the dead were buried among the houses. On the other hand, Persson insists on Northern features in the intrusive culture.5 None is really convincing, and the most significant can already be found south of the Balkans in Thrace and Macedonia in Early iEgean times. If fresh "Northern” elements entered peninsular Greece and the Troad at the beginning of Middle Helladic there is no evidence for bringing them from beyond the Balkans.
Mycenaean Civilization
The martial prowess of the Minyan invaders eventually allowed them to win by force of arms a share in the wealth accumulated in Minoan and Oriental cities while their war-chiefs, becoming kings, concen- trated some of it for use as capital in the development of a Mainland civilization. The Icings attracted or compelled Minoan craftsmen to settle at their courts while merchants brought regular supplies of raw materials and luxury goods. By Late Helladic times the Middle Helladic townships had grown into little cities.
1 Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 21; xxv, 160. 3 JHS. (1955), Suppl., p. 11.
3 JHS., XXXIV, 126. 4 Arne, Excavations at Shah-Upe; cf.
8 Frodin and Persson, Asine, 433. p. 20, n. x.
77 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
The urban revolution was apparently first consummated at Mycenae, a citadel that commands a main artery of communications between the south-east and the north-west. The old settlement, founded in Early Helladic times, became the capital of a potent dynasty. The kings with their families were buried with regal wealth in two Shaft Grave cemeteries, each enclosed by a circle of upright slabs. Schliemann discovered a circle of six tombs, numbered I to VI, that had subse- quently been incorporated in the walls of the Late Mycenaean citadel. A second circle comprising 14 shaft graves (designated by Greek letters) farther out and disturbed by the erection of the “Treasury of Clytemnsestra", came to light in 1951.1 In both, the shafts, cut 10 to 15 feet into the rock and provided with a ledge 4 or 3 feet above the floor to support a wooden roof, normally contained several skeletons lying on their backs with the legs extended or drawn up; one skull had been trepanned. These may have been buried in wooden coffins, but at the bottom of the latest and largest shaft in the new circle had been built a stone mortuary house, divided into chamber and ante- chamber and roofed with a corbelled barrel vault. Stelae, carved in low relief with spiral patterns framing scenes of war and of the chase, once marked each grave. Now they provide the earliest evidence for the use of horse-drawn war-chariots in the iEgean. A little imported M.M.IIIb pottery together with native matt-painted and Minyan vases suggest that the earliest interments in some graves go back into the sixteenth century; the latest dateable sherds from any shaft grave are L.M.II. The Shaft Grave period covered roughly the century 1600 to 1450 B.C.
The equipment acquired by the Shaft Grave kings is largely of Minoan inspiration. Their palace was equipped with a light-well, like those of Knossos, and decorated with frescoes in Minoan technique. Most vessels and ornaments are evidently products of Minoan crafts- men. On figured documents men wear the Minoan drawers and women the flounced skirt of the island. Minoan signets were adopted for official business. The cult of the Mother Goddess, associated, as in Crete, with the symbols of the dove, the double-axe, the sacred pillar and horns of consecration, was practised with Minoan rites at Mycenae, and draughts were played as in Crete. No one denies that craftsmen trained in Cretan schools produced the objects in question though many must have been executed at Mycenae itself to the order of the local king. An immigration of Cretan potters seems to have initiated the local manufacture of Mycenaean vases, decorated with shiny paint in the best Minoan tradition. It no longer seems likely, as it did thirty years
1 G. Mylonas, Ancient Mycence, the Capital of Agamemnon (Princeton, 1956).
78 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
ago, that Mycenaean civilization was founded by Minoan princes carving out for themselves kingdoms on the Greek Mainland. The martial character of Early Mycenaean culture, as revealed in the forti- fication of the citadel, the abundance of weapons, and the popularity of battle scenes in art, is quite foreign to the Minoan spirit. The kings of Mycenae wore beards; the Minoans generally shaved their faces. In their tombs native Minyan and matt-painted vases are juxtaposed to vessels painted in Cretan style and technique. An arrow-shaft- straightener in Shaft Grave VI and a Mainland spear-head like Fig. 39,1 (Grave IV), occur side by side with arms in Minoan tradition. Though the terrible rapiers, nearly a metre long, like Fig. 14,1, may be Middle Minoan types, the flange-hilted variant of Fig. 14, 2, is Mainland rather than Cretan. A round-heeled dagger from Shaft Grave VI would seem more at home in Central and Western Europe1 than round the iEgean. Mycenaean warriors wore helmets plated with boars’ tusk laminae, but so did Minoans (p. 30). Amber for beads found in several shaft graves must have been imported from the Baltic, a newly found crescentic necklace with pattern-bored spacers2 (Fig. 43) of that material is likely to be of English manufacture.
Finally, the horse-drawn war-chariots, at once the symbols and the decisive instruments of Mycenaean kingship, are certainly not Minoan.
The horses that drew them point north of the TEgean basin. That is not to say that Minyan invaders had brought chariots and horses with them into Greece in the eighteenth century. A small group of charioteers could easily seize power and maintain authority with this new and potent weapon. Structurally the Mycenaean shaft graves agree closely with the ‘ ‘yamno” graves of the Pontic steppes, which do contain wheeled ox-carts and hammer pins (p. 151). Whatever the ancestry of the Shaft Grave rulers, by concentrating wealth, won by pillage, mercenary service in Egypt3 or more peaceful trade, and so attracting or compelling expert craftsmen to settle on the Mainland, they prepared the way for an urban civilization.
Between 1500 and 1400 b.c. the same process of acculturation was accomplished at other sites which had remained rural townships during
1 The identification of another blade from this grave as a halberd is incorrect, Blegen, in 'E7HrtinBiap X. Tcrowras (Athens, 1951), 423 ff; cf. PPS., XIX, 231.
8 Germania, XXXIII (1955), 316-18.
* Schachermeyr, Archiv Orientalni, XVII (Praha, 1949), 331-50, suggests that the Mycenseans learned to build and use chariots while helping Ahmose to expel the Hyksos!
79
n
Fig. 43. Terminal and pattern-bored spacer- bead from amber neck- lace. Shaft Grave at Mycenae (£). DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
the Early Mycenaean Shaft Grave epoch. Here again the change coin- cided with the rise in the townships of chieftains, concentrating the local wealth for expenditure on the products of secondary industry and trade. These celebrated their elevation by erecting stately beehive tombs or tholoi. Such tombs are significantly located near the heads of southward-facing gulfs and along natural trade-routes by sea or land. On the east coast these Middle Mycenaean tholoi extend as far north as the Gulf of Volo, on the west to Cakovatos in Elis. At Mycenae itself, rulers, perhaps of a new dynasty, erected a series of tholoi in which Wace traced the typological development from earlier and ruder vaults to the celebrated “Treasuries” of “Clytemnaestra” and “Atreus”, built in ashlar masonry and provided with richly sculptured portals.1
The oldest dated tholos, one at Navarino,2 contained only matt- painted and (a minority of) Cretanizing L.H.I vases, so should have been built in the sixteenth century. Kakovatos3 and a few other tholoi yielded good L.H.I pottery pointing to a foundation before 1450 b.c., a larger number are L.H.II, the rest, including the finest “treasuries” at Mycenae, were Late Mycenaean. A very rich tholos, found intact at Dendra,4 contained no pottery earlier than L.H.III, but the gold and silver vessels are L.M.I in style and illustrate a survival of heirlooms for half a century at least!
Mycenaean tholoi are corbelled chambers entered by a long unroofed passage or dromos. Many were erected in an excavation in a natural hillside, but others stood on level ground or on a hilltop and were covered by an artificial mound or cairn5 (Fig. 44).
Much of the grave goods from the Middle Mycenaean tholoi are either imports from Crete or products of craftsmen trained in the Minoan schools. So too the contemporary palaces at Tiryns and Thebes, neither a megaron, were decorated with frescoes in Minoan technique.
But the idea of the tholos tomb can hardly have been introduced from Crete; in that island no tholoi are known to bridge the five centuries between the building of the Early Minoan ossuaries and the erection of the Mainland vaults. On the other hand, the architectural similarities between the Mycenaean tholoi and the corbelled passage graves of Southern Spain and Portugal are familiar, and there typo- logical series can be produced to illustrate the development of the
1 Wace, BSA., XXV, 387; the contrary theory of Evans, making “Atreus” the oldest tholos {PM., IV, 236 f.), has been refuted by the discovery of the new grave circle.
2 Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 158-62.
2 AM., XXXIV, 255; Fiiriimark, Chronology of the Mycencean Pottery (1941), 4.
4 Persson, The Royal Tombs at Dendra (Lund, 1931).
5 So at Kakovatos, Bodia (Messenia), etc.; Corolla Archceologica Gustavo Adolpho dedicata (Lund, 1932), 217 if.
80 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
tholos from simpler forms.1 So if the idea of the tholos were introduced into Greece, it may have come from the Iberian Peninsula.
In any case connections with the West are conspicuous in Mycenaean culture. L.M.I (or L.H.I) pots were exported to the iEolian islands, L.H.I metal-types were copied in Sicily (p. 238). The colonization of Kakovatos and the wealth of its ruler must be connected with the amber trade. His treasures included a crescentic amber necklace with pattern-bored spacer plates (Fig. 43), reputedly made in England.
Burial in a tholos must have been the prerogative of kings and their families. But even in the fifteenth century some of their urban subjects began to prepare for themselves family vaults. Villagers, however,
Fig. 44. Mycenaean tholos tomb on Euboea. After Papavasileiou.
were still buried singly in cists or pithoi. Similarly throughout L.H.II native potters continued to turn out Minyan and hand-made matt- painted vases.
But by 1400 b.c. the Mainland had thoroughly mastered Minoan techniques and assimilated the Cretan industrial system. Native workers, having been apprenticed to Minoan craftsmen, could turn out en masse rather shoddy articles that satisfied the less refined tastes of the Mainlanders and gradually ousted the products of household industry. Thus equipped, the Mainland took over from Crete the political and economic hegemony in the iEgean. Knossos was sacked; the Conti- nental megaron replaced the iEgean palaces at Phsestos and Phylakopi. The Mycenaean cities were more numerous and perhaps more populous than the Cretan; the acropolis of Mycenae alone, not to mention un- walled suburbs, covered about ix acres, that of Asine nearly 9, Gla 1 Cf. Piggott in Antiquity, XXVII (1953), I4I“3*
8l
F DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
in L. Copa'is no less than 24 acres. The immense cemeteries of rock- cut chamber tombs adjacent to each city are even more convincing than the areas. Each tomb, an irregular chamber entered by a narrow passage or dromos, was a family vault. Some contain as many as twenty- seven corpses. Though carefully sealed up after each interment, such tombs were in fact reopened periodically and used over several genera- tions; vases of L.H.II, L.H.IIIa, and L.H.IIIb styles were found in one and the same tomb at Mycenae, showing its use for burial for at least two centuries (1450-1250 b.c.).1 And a family likeness could be detected on the skeletons from the same tomb. This collective burial practice, though deeply rooted in the Aegean and still current in Crete in Middle Minoan times, is in sharp contrast to the "Minyan” usage and looks like a reversion to Early Helladic customs or an imitation of the royal practice.
The populous cities sought an outlet for their goods and overflowing population in trade and colonization. Mycenaean pottery and other products were exported in quantities to Troy, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Sicily, rapiers to Bulgaria and perhaps the Caucasus. The Aegean and Ionian islands and even the coastal tracts of Macedonia received contingents of Mycenaean traders, potters, and metal-workers and were incorporated in the Mycenaean economic system. Mycenaean colonies denoted by tholos tombs were planted even on the coasts of Asia Minor and Syria.1 2 In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries a complete cultural uniformity prevailed over the whole iEgean world—a uni- formity that embraced the political diversity reflected in the Iliad.
The zenith of Late Mycenaean civilization, as fixed by Mycenaean imports in Egypt and Syria and Egyptian imports in Greece, was reached in the fourteenth century. After 1300 b.c. trade with Egypt declined, wealth diminished, art decayed as piracy and militarism took the place of peaceful commerce. Only the armament industry expanded; commerce with the barbarous West alone was intensified.
The fortifications of Mycenas, Tiryns, and Athens were extended.3 Greaves4 and probably corselets were worn as well as helmets. A new type of flange-hilted sword was introduced in which the flange is carried right round the pommel5 (Fig. 15). Swordsmen were mounted on horseback to become the first cavalrymen of antiquity.6 The sup-
1 Arch., LXXXII (1932).
2 AJA., LII (1948), 145 fL; Schaeffer, Stratigraphie, 9-12; Stubbings, Mycentsan Pottery from the Levant (Cambridge, 1951).
3 AJA., LII (1948), X09-14.
4 Found in a tomb near Patras, A JA., LVIII (1954), 2351 cf. Lorimer, Homer and
fhfi Ji/fP'Yitx
6 Evans, Arch., LIX (1905), 501; cf. Benton, PPS., XVIII (1952), 237.
* Hood, BSA., XLVIII (1953), 85.
82 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
plies of amber, copper, and tin from the north and west were main- tained. As a consequence, a flange-hilted sword of the new type was exported to Cornwall,1 there to be buried with the chief of a tribe that controlled access to the tin lodes (p. 336). Relations with the West were more intimate than a mere interchange of goods. An Italian smith came to the court of Mycenae and there cast in a stone mould2 Continental winged axes like Fig. 119, 2. Peschiera daggers (like Fig. 119, 4), cut-and-thrust swords,3 and fibulae (both like Fig. 122, and with flattened leaf-shaped bow)4 appear in such numbers as to imply changes in ways of fighting and in fashions of dress, if not in population. They herald the cataclysm that submerged the Mycenaean civilization —the “Dorian Invasion” dated by Classical tradition about 1100 b.c.
1 Childe, PPS., XIV (1948), 185 f.
3 BSA., XLVIII, 15; the actual mould was found.
3 Schaeffer, Enhomi-Alasia, I (Paris, 1952), 237-42.
1 Blinkenberg, Fibules grecques et myceniennes (Lindiaha V), (Copenhagen, 1926).
83 CHAPTER VI
FARMING VILLAGES IN THE BALKANS
The rugged peninsula between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, despite the severity of the winters and the retardation of spring, enjoys, owing to its latitude and the prolongation of autumnal warmth, a climate intermediate between the Mediterranean and the Temperate. So the adaptation of an Asiatic rural economy would be less difficult there than in the rest of the European woodland zone. And incidentally the ancestors of one-corn wheat (Triticum monococcum) and several fruit- trees grew wild there. So the fertile valleys intersecting the Balkan ranges are, like Thessaly and South-West Asia, studded with tells representing the sites of permanent, though formally neolithic, villages. Their stratification should provide a reliable record of the process of adaptation. But in Bulgaria the latest accounts of the culture-sequence at Banyata1 and Karanovo2 are in flat contradiction with earlier accounts of the succession at Kyrollovo,3 Veselinovo,4 and Karanovo itself.5 So too at Vinca on the Middle Danube the divisions of the material excavated by Vassits6 from the 10 m. deep deposit proposed respectively by Holste,7 Milojcic,8and Garasanin9are equally discrepant.
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The townsmen lived in long two-roomed houses, closely grouped along narrow lanes, as at Troy and Thermi. But in the more rustic villages houses were oval or apsidal and more scattered. At Tiryns and Orchomenos monumental circular structures were built, probably to serve as granaries.3 By E.H.III tiles were already used for roofing. Finally, by that phase the town of Lema4 at least comprised a regular palace of several rooms grouped about a spacious court or hall and roofed with tiles and slates. So in at least one Mainland centre the
1 Fr6din and Persson, Asine, 204.
2 Heurtley, BSA., XXXV (1934-35), 39-
8 Marinatos, BCH., LXX (1946), 337 fi.
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Hesperia, XXIII (1954), 21-4- DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
social surplus was being concentrated and communal activity directed by a chief as at Troy.
Stone was still employed for axes, adzes, and knives even in the Peloponnese, and so extensively farther north that Thessalian and Thracian villages look positively neolithic. Obsidian was used for knives, sickle teeth, and hollow-based arrow-heads; for the bow is now attested for the first time, without, however, ousting the sling. In Thrace and Macedonia, but not in pensinsular Greece, stone battle- axes were now being made as in the Troad; one from H. Mamas in Macedonia (Fig. 35), though in course of local manufacture, repro-
Fig. 35. Axe and battle-axes from H. Mamas. After Heurtley, BSA., XXIX (§).
duces a South Russian type. At Mikhalic in Thrace miniature battle- axes were modelled in clay as toys or votives.
But copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold were everywhere imported or distributed and worked. Close to the shore at Rafina in Attica, a convenient port for Cycladic or Cypriote ores, were found two large furnaces for smelting copper surrounded by quantities of slag and broken moulds. At Cirrha on the Gulf of Corinth, Davies1 reported a crucible with tin oxide adhering to it in an open working from which all ore had been extracted, but tin ore in this context is almost incon- ceivable. Even in Macedonia2 gold slag and a crucible have been described.
At least south of Thessaly the distribution of metal was so well organized that copper could be freely used for craftsmen’s tools. Though most have been melted down in prehistoric times, an axe- adze and a flame-shaped knife like Fig. 20, 1, survived in the E.H.II level at Eutresis.3
1 JHS., XLIX (1929), 93-4. 8 Vardaroftsa and Saratse, Heurtley, PM,
3 Two copper battle-axes found stray in peninsular Greece and now at the British School in Athens may well be Early Helladic.
68 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
Whether or no the techniques of metallurgy were implanted by immigrant prospectors or itinerant artificers from Asia, the capital for industrial development was secured in the last resort by supplying the demand of cities on the Nile and the Euphrates. As in Crete and the Cyclades, the coastal populations of peninsular Greece had now turned to trading. Perhaps they colonized the Ionian Islands and the west coasts to extend their commerce as the Dorians colonized Corfu in historical times.
The importance and wide ramifications of Early Helladic commerce are illustrated not only by the materials used but by actual foreign manufactures imported or copied locally: leg amulets as in Crete and Egypt (Zygouries,1 Hagios Kosmas2), Cycladic bone tubes (Hagios Kosmas and Levkas), frying-pans (Hagios Kosmas, Eutresis,8 Asine), marble idols and palettes (Hagios Kosmas), and a double-spiral pin like Fig. 27, 9 (Zygouries). From Asia came an arm-cylinder of twisted silver wire (like a gold one from Troy II) found in a grave on Levkas. In the E.H.III level at Asine lumps of clay stamped with E.M.III- M.M.I seal-impressions must have sealed bales of merchandise or jars of oil brought from Crete. And the Early Helladic merchants themselves felt the need of seals; seals, probably imported, have been found at Hagios Kosmas, Asine, and other sites. One from Asine is almost identical with a Sixth Dynasty Egyptian seal. The counterbalancing exports may possibly have included tin from Cirrha. Early Helladic vases were certainly exported to Troy from peninsular Greece (p. 37). A depas found near Mikhalic in Thrace, and another from Orchomenos as well as some other vases from that site and Eutresis may well be Troadic imports.
The ceramic industry was not industrialized, since Early Helladic vases are all hand-made. The fabrics that appear first (from E.H.I onwards) are dark and self-coloured, burnished and decorated with incised and excised patterns. In a later phase (E.H.II) begins in penin- sular Greece a buff ware which is covered with a dark glaze paint to reproduce the effects of the old burnished fabric. It is generally known as Urftrnis and probably denotes Cretan influence4 though red wares had been coated with a rather similar “glaze” in Late Neolithic times. In E.H.III the glaze paint is used as the medium for producing dark geometric patterns on a light ground—chiefly in the Peloponnese—or as a ground on which similar patterns are drawn in white—in Central Greece. The rectilinear light-on-dark designs recall Cretan
1 Blegen, Zygouries (Cambridge, Mass., 1928).
* AJA., XXXVIII (1934). 259 ff-
3 Goldman, Excavations at Eutresis in Bceotia (1931).
4 Frodin and Persson, Asine, 433.
69 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
E.M.II-III patterns, but are also foreshadowed on the black neolithic B vases of the Mainland. Distinctive Early Helladic II-III shapes are sauce-boats (also manufactured in gold1), hour-glass tankards, askoi and globular water-jars, at first with ring-handles,2 later with flat vertically pierced lugs, on the belly (Fig. 36).
North of Othrys in Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace, Early iEgean
3 4
Fig. 36. Early Helladic sauce-boat (1), askos (2), tankard (3), and jar (4) (£).
potters did not use a kiln that would produce clear ware and so did not manufacture Urfirnis ware. Its place was taken by self-coloured wares as in Early Helladic I and Early Troadic. Save for "sauce-boats’', most of the forms popular in peninsular Greece were reproduced in local variations looking rather more Troadic than the latter (Fig. 37, 1, 2, 6). Even horned handles had been current at Troy, but in Mace- donia a distinctive development was the wish-bone handle (Fig. 37,
1 JHS., XLIV (1924), 163.
2 This form resembles the Corded Ware amphora, Fig. 84 (cf. Fuchs, Die griechische Fundgruppen der friihen Bronzezeit, 1937), but also good Anatolian forms (Germania, XXIII, 62).
70 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
3, 5), analogies to which have met us in neolithic Crete. In Thrace the vases from Mikhalic, where askoi are missing, look more Troadic still. But here, as in Chalcidice, trumpet lugs grow out of the inverted rims of bowls. Now in Lesbos this type of lug appeared first in Thermi III, having grown up out of the simpler tubular lugs of Thermi I (Fig. 17). For once pottery discloses an irreversible relation. Finally, a few sherds
Fig. 37. Early Macednic pot-forms. After Heurtley, BSA., XXVIII.
from Mikhalic in Thrace, from H. Mamas in Macedonia, and from E.H.III levels at Eutresis and H. Marina in Central Greece are decor- ated with cord imprints. This “corded ware” has usually been con- nected with the battle-axes and horses’ bones from the Thracic and Macednic sites as evidence for an invasion from Saxo-Thuringia1 or at least from somewhere north of the Balkans. The forms of most vases have however nothing in common with Saxo-Thuringian corded ware,2 while the similarities of the amphorae are due at most to a common pre-ceramic prototype (p. 173).
Imported marble figurines of Cycladic type may have been used in domestic fertility rites, but clay figurines do not seem to have been manufactured unless the “anchor ornaments” (Fig.
38) be really ultra-conventionalized versions of such.
They constitute one of the most distinctive type fossils of the Early Aegean Bronze Age, being found—in E.H.II-III layers—from Asea in Arcadia to Servia in Macedonia and Mikhalic in Thrace, and from Rafina and Asine on the east to Levkas and Ithaka on the west.3 Really they are no more likely to be ritual than the clay hooks common to Early Thracic, Macednic, and Troadic. Clay horns of consecration from Asine on the other hand point to rites like the Minoan and Anatolian. But the principal super- stitious impulse to accumulation of wealth was supplied by the desire for a good burial. In the Peloponnese and Attica the dead were buried
1 So Fuchs, Die griechische Fundgntppender friihen Bronzezeit (1937).
3 MilojCid, Germania, XXXIII (1955), 151-4.
3 Listed by Weinberg, A JA., LI, p. 168, n. 26; add Mikhalic and Rafina,
7*
Fig. 38. E. H. An- chor Ornament, Kritsana (£). DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
in family vaults outside the settlements. At Zygouries the tombs were pit-caves or shafts cut in the rock, one of which contained fourteen skeletons. At Hagios Kosmas in Attica, the earlier ossuaries were cists with a false door facing the township. The cists were later replaced by built ossuaries like Fig. 25, 1, but still used as collective tombs; in each case the bodies, in the contracted attitude, had been introduced through the roof. Such cemeteries of family vaults show that in peninsular Greece quite a number of lineages or clans lived together in a single township. Out of six skulls measured from H. Kosmas three were long-headed, but two round-headed.1
In the north-west quite different burial practices prevailed. On Levkas Dorpfeld described a so-called royal cemetery of thirty-three round tombs. Each "tomb” was a circular platform of stones defined by a built wall and suggesting a denuded cairn, in or on which were burial pithoi, cists, or shaft-graves—each containing a single corpse (allegedly roasted)—and the ashes of a "pyre”. Among these lay burnt human and animal bones and remains of metal ornaments and weapons. The pottery from the graves is typically Early Helladic, but the metal gear from the "pyres” includes besides good Early iEgean types a couple of rapiers and gold hilt mounts2 that elsewhere would be Mycenaean or at least M.M.III. The cemetery must be a whole period, perhaps four centuries, later than that of H. Kosmas in Attica. The burial rites are equally abnormal. Cremation in situ must have taken place on the pyres, a rite otherwise unknown in Bronze Age Greece. The platforms sound like cairns, and in 1955 a cairn with pithos burials very like our round tombs was found in Messenia, but was M.H. in date. So the warriors and rich women buried on Levkas did not possess the standard Early Helladic culture though they used Early Helladic pots and Early J2gean weapons and ornaments.
The standard Early Helladic burial practices are in sharp contrast to the Troadic, but conform rather to Cycladic, Minoan, Cypriote and Levantine traditions. They cannot have been introduced from the Troad. But no Early iEgean burials have been recognized where Troadic parallels are clearest—north of Attica and Euboea or in Mace- donia and Thrace.
In peninsular Greece, Early Helladic societies had created a polity and an economy under which some at least of the peasant’s younger sons might find a livelihood in industry or commerce, but only in reliance on Oriental markets opened up by maritime transport. Remote from access thereto, the contemporary inhabitants of Macedonia had
1 Coon, Races, 144.
2 Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, 229 (R. 7), 237 (R. 17), 241 (R. 24).
72 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
no alternative but to occupy fresh land. So they filtered southward into Thessaly. The culture that used to be attributed to Neolithic III and IV there was in fact basically Early Macednic.1 But local Late Neolithic traditions were blended with the Anatolian. So clay figurines were still manufactured, but now male as well as female. At Rakhmani in Eastern Thessaly spiral patterns were applied in crusted technique.
Middle Helladic
The Middle Helladic period is ushered in by the violent destruction of Orchomenos and other sites. Many were reoccupied. But abrupt changes in architecture, pottery, burial rites, and general economy indicate the dominance of new and warlike settlers. The latter can be most easily recognized by their pottery—the reduced grey ware
Fig. 39. Spear-head, knives, and dagger from M.H. graves in Thessaly.
After Tsountas ($).
described on p. 46 and unhappily termed Minyan by archaeologists— and by the practice of burying the dead contracted in small cists or in jars among the houses. The martial character of the invaders is dis- closed by the deposition in the graves of metal weapons (Fig. 39)— knives, ogival daggers, and spear-heads with a socket, cast like a shoe on one or both faces of the blade (Sesklo, Levkas, Mycenae). Hollow- 1 BSA., XXVIII (1926-27), 180-94.
73 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
based obsidian arrow-heads were still used, but now the archer used also grooved stone arrow-straighteners like Fig. 113 (Asine, Levkas, Mycenae). Perforated stone axes appear for the first time at Eutresis and Asine and antler axes and sleeves at Asine. On the other hand, such craft tools as saws and gouges are first found in a Middle Helladic grave (on Levkas).
The Minyan invaders did not exterminate the older inhabitants or
Fig. 40. Minyan pottery from Thessaly (£), and imitations from Thermon,
iEtolia (TV).
destroy their economy, but added to the population and accelerated the accumulation of wealth. Malthi now attained its maximum popu- lation; the walls comprised, within an area of 3f acres, 305 rooms, while the citadel was supplied with spring water by an aqueduct. The houses are more often agglomerations of rooms than long rectangular halls.1 Tin-bronze was now worked by the smiths, and stone moulds for casting spear-heads like Fig. 39,1, and Minoan double-axes were found even at Dimini in Thessaly.
The potters’ craft was soon industrialized. The grey-ware vases were fired in a closed kiln and either formed in a mould or thrown on the
2
4
1 AJA., XLVIII (1944), 342.
74 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
wheel. A family of Minoan potters settled on TEgina, bringing with them their clay wheel as used in Crete.1 Perhaps such immigrant craftsmen were responsible for introducing the wheel from Crete every- where, but there is nothing Minoan about their products. The favourite “Minyan" forms are ring-stemmed goblets, high-handled cups (Fig. 40), craters, and amphorae. Both in hue and form such Minyan vases imitate silver models. Indeed, in one Late Helladic grave the silver originals
Fig. 41. Matt-painted bowl and pithos, iEgina (TV); and Middle Cycladic jugs from Marseilles harbour and Phylakopi (A).
were actually found together with the clay skeuomorphs.2 On the other hand, the influence of woodwork is patent—notably in the homed handles from JEtolia (Fig. 40, 3), which are repeated in good Minyan ware at Troy but have a long Balkan ancestry. But grey Minyan vases had to compete with hand-made vessels of the same shapes in polished brown or black and vitreous red wares.
Perhaps later, pithoi, bowls, and other shapes were built up by hand in clear wares and decorated with geometric patterns in matt paint (Fig. 41). In form and decoration these matt-painted vessels agree precisely
1 Jhb. d. Inst., LII, A A. (1937). 20-5.
2 Persson, New Tombs at Dendra (Lund, 1942), 87.
75 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
with Middle Cycladic pots from Melos and show the same Central Anatolian affinities (p. 56). A M.H.III beaked jug from Asine1 looks like an imported “Early Hittite” manufacture. On the other hand, at Liano- kladhi in the Spercheios valley the Macedonians, who had occupied the site in Early iEgean times, now learned to make in matt-painted ware jars, tankards, and bowls with wish-bone handles of good Macednic or Early Helladic shape, and decorate them with Macednic patterns, including pot-hook spirals, in Middle Helladic technique (Fig. 42). A
Fig. 42. Matt-painted jar, Lianokladhi III. After Wace and Thompson (£).
similar fabric appears at Thermon in iEtolia together with “imitation Minyan’’ vases, but not before L.H.II (fifteenth century) and also in Levkas. This Lianokladhi painted ware thus illustrates people of Macednic-Middle Helladic traditions surviving into Late Helladic times whom Heurtley plausibly identifies with the Dorians’ ancestors.2
In peninsular Greece trade with Crete was at first interrupted by the invasion, but obsidian was still secured from Melos and the metal trade was unimpaired. Soon Middle Minoan II polychrome pottery was being imported into iEgina and imitated at Eutresis. A bossed
1 Frodin and Persson, Asine, 286; cf. van der Osten, AHshar, 1928-Q, OIP., XIX, pi. IV, b 1671.
2 BSA„ XXVIII (1926-27), 179 ff.
76 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
bone plaque like Fig. 115 and a hammer pin,1 from M.H. layers at Lerna, illustrate connections at once with Anatolia and with Sicily.
The dead were generally interred in cists or jars under or between the houses within the settlements. But on Levkas ten or twelve such burials might be grouped together in rectangular or circular "platforms” (cf. p. 72). In Messenia2 Middle Helladic pithos burials lay on the periphery of a regular cairn 14 m. in diameter.
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Fig. 30. Pottery of Sesklo style, white on red and red on white. After Wace and Thompson (£).
59 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
usually named after the Thessalian site of Sesklo on the Gulf of Volo. In Thessaly and Central Greece the peasants found an environment that they could exploit from self-sufficing hamlets, continuously occupied. They lived in modest round or rectangular huts of wattle and daub or of mud-brick on stone foundations. A model from Sesklo shows a house with gabled roof. The repeated reconstruction of such dwellings has converted the settlements into little tells (toumba or magoula). Such mounds are very numerous but generally small: ioo by 75 m. is an average area for a Thessalian tell, but at Hagia Marina in Phocis the mound covered 300 by 200 m.
Now tell formation implies a rural economy advanced enough to maintain the fertility of the fields, if not orchard husbandry that ties the farmer to his fruit-trees. In phase A the villagers lived by culti- vating cereals, probably also vegetables and fruit-trees1 and breeding cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.2
Unspecialized potters built up by hand delicate vessels, imitating baskets or perhaps even metal vessels3 in an extremely fine burnished ware, generally red, in the Peloponnese sometimes black or mottled.4 The pots might be decorated with simple rectilinear patterns formed by wedge-shaped or round punctuations or by lines in white paint. In Northern Greece the vase surface was more often covered with a white slip on which designs were painted in red; in Central Greece and the Peloponnese the white slip is often omitted. The patterns, often very elaborate, are clearly derived from basketry originals, but each hamlet developed its own distinctive style of painting. Ring bases and genuine handles betoken an unusual degree of sophistication, while an imitation of a leather bottle from Nemea approximates to the Early Helladic askos (like Fig. 36, 2).
Simple stone vases too were found at Sesklo, but a bone spatula like Fig. 45 must come from an unrecognized Early Neolithic settlement.
Though self-sufficing communities, the neolithic hamlets were not mutually isolated; they exchanged pots5 and doubtless other com- modities. War is not attested; the only definite weapons found were sling-stones, probably used by hunters. Peaceful commerce outside the province is disclosed by the general use of obsidian. At Tsani a stone button seal bearing a cruciform design was found, and clay models of
1 Barley is attested for period A at Tsani, wheat, barley, figs, pears, and peas for period B at Sesklo and Dimini, vulgare wheat from Rakhmani IV (D). Triticum dwum from Servia I in Macedonia.
2 BRGK., 36 (1955), 1-50.
3 Forsdyke, British Museum, Catalogue of Greek and Etruscan Vases, I, pp. xvi and 23.
* The surface colour is determined by the firing, an oxidizing atmosphere yielding
red, a reducing black. See Blegen, Prosymna, 368-9; Hesperia, VI, 491-6.
5 Wace and Thompson, 241.
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seals are reported from Sesklo, Hagia Marina, and from Nemea in the Peloponnese. The type is certainly at home in Hither Asia1 and there generally occurs in a “chalcolithic” milieu, and copper may well have been known to the “neolithic” Greeks. Some of their pots seem to imitate the shape and even the rivets of metal vases, and at Hagia Marina Soteriadhes1 2 claims to have found riveted copper daggers on virgin soil in a Sesklo settlement. Still, no sustained effort was made to secure regular supplies of metal.
Surplus energies were devoted rather to domestic fertility cults.
i 24
3
Fig. 31. Neolithic figurines, Thessaly. After Wace and Thompson. (1, f;
3-4- 2, i-.)
For these figurines (Fig. 31) were modelled in clay, depicting, often with considerable verisimilitude, a female personage, standing or seated, or, in one example from Chaeroneia, nursing an infant (the “kourotrophos”). Model thrones or altars (Fig. 32) were also manu- factured. As ornaments and charms the peasants wore bracelets of stone or Spondylus shells (as on the Danube), and stone nose-plugs as in the al’Ubaid culture of Sumer.
In its rural economy and ideology and in more specific items of equipment—mud-brick architecture, use of the sling instead of the bow as well as the shape of the clay missiles, familiarity with stamp
1 Childe. NLMAE., 112, 120, 139, 195, 219, but at Byblos clay stamps are neolithic.
2 Mylonas, op. cit., fig. 64.
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seals, the decoration of kiln-fired pots with basketry designs in dark paint—the Sesklo culture reveals just the westernmost outpost of the South-West Asiatic province, extending from the Mediterranean coasts to Iran and Turkmenia. Peculiarities of the pottery alone connect it
Fig. 32. Miniature altar or throne. After Wace and Thompson (£).
more specifically with Syria than with the Anatolian plateau. Technic- ally the chalcolithic pottery of Cyprus1 is very like the red-on-white ware described above and may constitute a link with the Hassuna- Halaf complex farther east. At the same time connections with the cultures of the Lower and Middle Danube valley are already discernible; significant common elements are shoe-last adzes, triangular altars, and shell bracelets.1 2
The Sesklo culture endured for a long time: at Tsangli five out of ten metres of settlement debris are attributed to it, and four out of eight occupational levels at Zerelia. But eventually the continuity of tradition was interrupted. Changes in ceramic technique, in art, in architecture, and even in economy not only define a new period, the Late Neolithic, but also may betoken an infiltration of new colonists. Among these two groups at least may be distinguished—Dimini folk in Eastern Thessaly and Corinthia, and Larisa people in Western Macedonia and Thessaly, Central Greece, and Corinthia. But the break is nowhere complete. Thus female figurines were still modelled in clay; in Eastern Thessaly the kourotrophos survived, painted in Dimini style, and later a very schematized type emerged in which the head is a stumpy cylinder of stone or clay, fitted into a legless torso
1 Dikaios, Khirokitia (London, 1953), 314-24; Schaeffer, Missions en Chypre, no. The chalcolithic and proto-chalcolithic of Mersin in Cilicia provide even better analogies, Garstang, Prehistoric Mersin (Oxford, 1953), 54-124.
2 AM., LVII (1932).
62 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
Fig. 31, 4)—a type that recurs beyond the Danube in the Gumelnita culture.1 Hence it may be assumed that the old population absorbed, or was subjugated by, the new settlers. The latter’s cultural affinities seem to lie in the Balkans, but the manifestations of their advent differ in different regions.
Late Neolithic
At Dimini near the Gulf of Volo a completely new settlement was founded. In contrast to the earlier open hamlets it was defended by a complex of stone walls (Fig. 33). Sesklo was probably fortified at the
® 1 i« 10 M
Fig. 33. Plan of fortified village of Dimini. After Tsountas.
same time.2 In both citadels houses of the megaron type with porch and central hearth were erected. At Dimini and Sesklo the bevelled
1 Dacia, VTI-VIII (1940). 97-
2 It is possible that the fortifications and megara at both sites are Middle Helladic and so unconnected with the Dimini culture.
63 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
adze (D) went out of use, and axes (Fig. 29, C) were employed for the first time. Adzes were hafted at Dimini with the aid of perforated antler sleeves. Copper and gold were now imported; they are repre- sented respectively by two flat celts and a ring-pendant (Fig. 34, 2),
all from Dimini. In East Thessaly the vases were now decorated with spirals and mseanders normally combined with the older basketry patterns; the designs may be incised or painted in white or warm black on a buff, red, or brown ground, and may then be outlined with a second colour—black or white; the fruitstand—a dish on a high pedestal—is an important innovation. Similar pottery turns up in Corinthia and the Argolid, again in a Late Neolithic context.1
Technically Dimini pottery is inferior to that of Sesklo; ring-bases were abandoned, true handles give place to pierced lugs, though some of these are horned or elaborated into animal heads. So Dimini ware cannot be treated as an autochthonous development of the native Middle Neolithic tradition. It was surely introduced by a new people, come most probably from the Danube valley; for there spiral and mseander patterns were always popular and antler was extensively used in industry. Technically Dimini ware is identical with the painted ware of the Balkan Starcevo culture, where, however, it is associated with rusticated ware such as we have already met in Early Neolithic Greece. The patterns, however, whether painted or incised, can best be matched in the Tisza-Maros region.2
1 At Gonia and the Argive Heraeum.
2 Cf. Schachermeyr, MAGW., LXXXI-LXXXIII (1953-4). i-39.* below, p. ira.
64 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
In Thessaly the Dimini culture is confined to the east. To the west its place is taken by the Larisa culture, found also in Central Greece and Western Macedonia. In the latter region the Late Neolithic phase began with the violent destruction of the Sesklo village of Servia. The site was reoccupied by a new people whose Larisa culture is as different from that of Sesklo as is Dimini, at least judged by its pottery. The commonest ware is self-coloured, generally black and highly burnished, but sometimes at least in Macedonia parti-coloured—black inside and round the rim, elsewhere red like the grey and pink variegated pottery of the Early Neolithic. Vessels no longer stand on ring bases, handles are replaced by lugs that may be homed.1 Decoration is effected by stroke-burnishing, shallow fluting or channelling, incisions, or rarely by thin fines of white paint. (Crusted ware occurs in Eastern Thessaly, but in a later horizon.) The patterns are generally rectilinear, but include occasional spirals. Besides self-coloured wares a light fabric was made and covered all over with shiny brown or black paint. This ware, termed ” neolithic urfirnis”, looks like an attempt to reproduce the appearance of black burnished ware in kiln-fired vases, but is said to begin in Middle Neolithic times in Corinthia.1 2
As at Dimini, adzes were mounted in perforated antler sleeves, the sling was still preferred to the bow, but an arrow-head was found at Servia. Personal ornaments include bracelets of Spondylus shell and of marble and bone combs rather like those of the Danubian Vinca culture (Fig. 47).
Larisan ideology was still expressed in the production of female figurines, now very conventional, but one burial was found in the settlement at Servia.
All the new ceramic fabrics and shapes found at Servia (except white painted ware) recur in the Vinca culture on the Danube and Tisza, as do bone combs, shell bracelets, and other traits. Hence Frankfort,3 Grundmann,4 and Heurtley5 have deduced an invasion from beyond the Balkans. On the other hand, many of the ceramic innovations can be paralleled equally in Crete and in Hither Asia. Agreements between Cretan neolithic and Mainland Greek black-polished wares have already been noted. Stroke-burnishing decorated one E.M.I fabric (p. 32) but was also applied in the chalcolithic of Kum Tepe in the Troad (p. 36). White painting on polished black ware was also later popular at Yortan
1 True handles are attached to jugs at Olynthus and a few other Macedonian sites, but Heurtley believes they are influenced by Early JEgean models and not truly "neolithic”.
2 Hesperia, VI, b, c.; AJA., LI, 174.
3 Studies, II, 40-5.
4 AM., LVII (1932), X02 ft, LXII, 56-69.
E 65
6 PM., 115-20. DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
and in South-Western Asia Minor,1 while parti-coloured wares are characteristic of central Anatolia and Cyprus, but not before the time of Troy I. Finally, black polished wares, sometimes decorated by stroke-burnishing, in North Syria2 precede the painted fabric with which Sesklo pottery has been compared. If the inference drawn from this comparison be correct, it would be chronologically impossible to attribute this Syrian neolithic to any Danubian inspiration. Hence, as Milojcic has argued most cogently, the Larisa culture should mark not a transplantation of the Vinca culture from north of the Balkans but a stage in the spread of an Asiatic-JEgean culture thither or at least a parallel emanation of the latter. That would further accord with Weinberg’s3 equation of the Late Neolithic of Thessaly and Macedonia with Troy I and E.H.I. Nevertheless, these archaeological arguments are not so conclusive as to exclude absolutely the idea of an invasion from the Danube valley, should other, e.g. philological, considerations make that imperative.
The Early AEgean Bronze Age
The influx of new settlers in Late Neolithic times had not involved an immediate transformation of the economic structure of Hellas; despite its copper axes, the Dimini culture can be termed neolithic as legitimately as its Sesklo precursor. The succeeding period witnessed a real advance towards the Urban Revolution and the nuclei of the classical City States were founded in peninsular Greece.
Not only there, but also in Macedonia and even in Thrace (at least at Mikhalic4 on the Maritsa close to its junction with the Tundja), the Mainland Bronze Age is marked by innovations in domestic architec- ture and in pottery that find precise parallels on the eastern coast of the iEgean. Architectural tricks such as herring-bone masonry (in Boeotia and Attica, cf. p. 37) and bothroi in house floors (in Macedonia and, by E.H.III, in peninsular Greece) and ceramic novelties—“thrust handles”, pyxides, jugs with cut-away necks, bowls with tubular or trumpet lugs growing from the inverted rims—suggest a transfer of Anatolian culture across the .ZEgean and the Dardanelles. A closer study of the pottery, however, shows that no one known Anatolian culture was reproduced on the European shores. If a migration from Asia Minor be assumed, it will be necessary to postulate several streams
1 Anatolian Studies, IV. (1954), 202-5.
2 Childe, BSA., XXXVII (1936-37), 31-5.
3 AJA., LI (1947). *70-4-
4 Razkopki i Prou&vaniya, I, Naroden Arkh. Muzei (Sofia, 1948), 8-20; cf., Anatolian
tudies, VI (1956), 45-8.
66 FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
with different starting-points. Only the Early Aegean pottery from Thrace and Macedonia is explicitly Troadic, while the local post- neolithic Thessalian pottery seems derived from the Early Macednic. In Macedonia and Thrace stone battle-axes occur at the same time, but they are not distinctively Troadic. In the Peloponnese and Attica Cycladic features in pottery and burial rites are prominent, as if the islands had been at least stepping-stones on the way from Asia. At Asine the best analogy to one of the earliest E.H. pots is to be found in the Copper Age of Ali$ar in Central Anatolia.1 On the West Coast Ithaka seems to have been colonized from Corinthia.1 2 Even in Thrace and Macedonia horses’ bones occur on Early Aegean sites, while on the Troad that animal appears first in Troy VI.
Perhaps, then, the striking agreements could be explained as parallel adjustments of related cultures when visiting merchants and prospectors from the Levant and the Nile introduced metallurgical and other techniques and opened up opportunities for securing a share in the surplus accumulated in Sumerian and Egyptian cities.
All Early Helladic, Macednic, and Thracic societies of course still lived mainly by farming, though viticulture is now deducible from grape seeds at H. Kosmas in Attica, while in Thrace and Macedonia horses’ bones occur. The early ABgean settlements in Thrace and Macedonia indeed remained simple villages, as did those at most inland sites in Central Greece and the Peloponnese (e.g. Asea in Arcadia). Many had already been occupied by neolithic peasants. Both in Mace- donia and peninsular Greece Late Neolithic sherds are found on the oldest Bronze Age floors. But at least in peninsular Greece new settle- ments were established on sites chosen with a view to trade or piracy rather than agriculture. These, though often of no larger size physically, approximate to fenced cities in their location on naturally defencible sites and their protection by ramparts of stones, combined on iEgina with timber beams as at Troy.
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D DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
vases were used in Thermi I-III, and the bird pins of Thermi I recur on Syros; a pin with double spiral wire head like Fig. 27, 9, was found in an Early Helladic tomb at Zygouries; “frying-pans” with spiral decoration like Fig. 24 were found in the oldest Early Helladic town- ship at H. Kosmas in Attica, and in the E.H.III level at Asine; duck
vases (like Fig. 28, 2) were imported into iEgina in Early Helladic times though they continued to reach Eutresis in Boeotia during Middle Helladic I (pp. 70 ff.).
Finally, a zoomorphic vase of Parian marble was recovered from a predynastic grave in Egypt1 while a cylinder seal of Jemdet Nasr style2 had been buried in a tomb of the Pelos group on Amorgos.
The inference that the density of population on the islands was
1 Frankfort, Studies, II, 103.
2 Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London, 1939), 232, 301; the tomb group is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
50 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES
made possible by trade and manufacture is confirmed by the list of exports just given. And of course that list is by no means exhaustive. Obsidian was quarried on Melos and exported as nuclei or blades to Crete, Mainland Greece, and the other islands. The Cycladic grave goods comprise the products of specialized craftsmen—smiths, jewellers, lapidaries—and prove the use of copper, tin,1 lead, silver, and other materials which in some cases must have been imported. The role of maritime intercourse is further emphasized by the frequent repre- sentation of boats on the vases (Fig. 24) .1 2 But the islanders do not seem to have needed writing for their business transactions and did not even make regular use of seals like the Minoans. The prominence of weapons in the tombs (especially of Amorgos) and the fortification of the settle- ments may indicate that piracy was already combined with legitimate trade. In any case, being dependent on overseas trade, the prosperity of the islands might be expected to decline when that trade was “cornered” by monopolistic princes in Crete and the Troad. A real contraction of population during Middle Minoan II-III and Late Minoan I-II would be perfectly comprehensible. In that case the bulk of our material would really be Early Cycladic.
But this Early Cycladic culture was by no means homogeneous. Culturally the islands fall into a southern and a northern group over- lapping only on Naxos.3 To the former belong Melos, Amorgos, Des- potikon, Paros, and Antiparos; to the northern Syros, Siphnos, Andros, and also Euboea. The contrast is revealed in burial practices as well as in grave goods. In the southern group, though shaft graves and chamber tombs of uncertain age are plentiful near Phylakopi,4 the early graves were normally trapezoid cists. In the oldest cemeteries5 (the Pelos group), definitely antedating Phylakopi I, the cists served as ossuaries and contain several skeletons together with vases like Fig. 28, 1, and “fiddle idols” like Fig. 8, 10-12. The later tombs were individual graves; they contain idols like Fig. 23, 2, marble vases and weapons. On Syros6 in the northern group rectangular or oval tombs were built in excavations in the hillside and roofed by corbelling (Fig. 25). But these too served as individual graves, and the single body was intro- duced through the roof. As at Krazi in Crete, the door (only *50 m. square) was merely a ritual element. In Euboea7 the tomb was a pit-
1 One dagger from Amorgos was of unalloyed copper, but a ring contained I3'5 per cent tin.
2 On iEgean ships see Marinatos in BCH., LVII (1933), 170 ff.
3 Aberg, Chronologie, IV, 59 f.
4 Phylakopi, 234-8.
8 Pelos in Melos, BSA., Ill, 40; Antiparos, JHS., V, 48.
6 ’E0. 'Apx. (1899); cf. p. 23, above.
7 Papavasileiou, TleplrQ/v ev WijSolq. ipxtuwv ratpQv (Athens, 1910).
51 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
cave, excavated in the ground and containing only a single corpse (Fig. 25). The earliest vases of the Pelos group are mud-coloured, imitat- ing the shape of marble vessels and are decorated with simple basketry patterns (Fig. 28, 1). Late pottery from the northern isles includes dark-faced fabrics often decorated with running spirals and excised triangles (Fig. 24). Technically it corresponds to the Early Helladic I of the Mainland, though Cycladic imports at Eutresis1 prove that on
Fig. 25. Tombs on Syros and Euboea.
the islands this fabric remained current in Middle Helladic times. Favourite forms are the so-called frying-pans and globular or cylindrical pyxides with lids. In some graves on Syros pottery of this class is associated with marble idols like Fig. 23, 2, which are common to both groups of islands.2 Other graves on Syros and Naxos3 contain sauce- boats, jugs with cut-away necks and other vessels decorated in lustrous glaze paint in the style of Early Helladic III (p. 69). Finally, Anatolian forms are common in the northern isles, and one tomb group on Euboea contained exclusively Troadic vases (like Fig. 19, 3-4) and daggers (like Fig. 20, 2).
The fish emblem carried by (Northern) Cycladic boats had been the standard of a predynastic parish in the Delta that did not survive into historic times in Egypt.4 So Fish-folk from the Nile may have fled to
1 Goldman, Eutresis, 182.
3 Aberg, Chron., IV, 102, nos. 13, 15; in both graves the "frying-pans" were decorated with concentric circles so that those with running spirals may be earlier.
3 Aberg, Chron., IV, 86; Congris Int. Arch. Athens (1905), 221.
* Evans, P. of M.t II, 26.
52 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES
the Cyclades when Menes conquered the Delta. Other Cycladic traits —the tweezers (Fig. 26, 2), the popularity of stone amulets and par- ticularly the type represented in Fig. 27, 4; the use of palettes (though the Cycladic specimens are generally more trough-like than the Egyptian and Minoan1) and the preference for stone vases may also be Nilotic traits.
Metal-work, pottery, and dress, on the contrary, are rather Asiatic
Fig. 26. Slotted spear-head (showing method of mounting), halberd and tweezers. Amorgos (?§?).
than African. Broad flat celts were used as axe-heads. Shaft-hole axes are represented only by an axe-hammer and an axe-adze from a hoard on Cythnos.1 2 Daggers with a stout midrib and rivets, sometimes of silver as in Crete, are common chiefly on Amorgos. Spear-heads were slotted for mounting as shown in Fig. 26; the type with hooked-tang, shown in Fig. 23, 1, has already been connected with Asiatic models on p. 44.
At least in the northern islands clothing had to be fastened with pins, as in Anatolia, and the types with double-spiral and bird heads have already been encountered in that area. Rings, bracelets, and diadems of copper or silver were also worn as in Asia. The silver diadems resemble gold ornaments from an E.M.II tomb at Mochlos in Crete
1 These palettes, perforated at the four comers, resemble, but only superficially, the wrist-guards of the Beaker complex; cf. BSA., Ill, 67.
2 B.M., Bronze, fig. 174.
53 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
and from the Royal Tombs of Ur.1 Some of the beads and amulets may be Asiatic, notably the dove-pendants that are found even in the early tombs of the Pelos class.2 The so-called phallic (or winged) beads (Fig. 27, 3) might be compared with the fly-amulets of Egypt and Mesopotamia,3 but probably derive from a form fashioned of deers’ teeth by the mesolithic Natufians of Palestine.4 A speciality of the northern isles was the decorated bone tube designed to contain pigments (Fig. 27, 1). But similar tubes have been found in Troy IV and Va, and at Byblos in Syria5 as well as on Levkas in Western Greece.
Fig. 27. Early Cycladic ornaments: 2-8 Paros; 1, 9, Syros (f).
The self-coloured sepulchral pottery belongs in a general way to the same Anatolian tradition as the early Cretan, and some vase forms such as the pyxides are in the same vague way Anatolian. Even the curious frying-pan form so common in the northern graves recurs, in copper, in a “royal tomb” at Alaca Hoyiik in Central Anatolia.6 (The excised decoration and the form of the handles show that these odd utensils are copied from wooden originals.) On the other hand, the running spiral design on North Cycladic pottery has generally been considered a Danubian motive. Weinberg,7 however, suspects inspira-
1 Evans, P. of M., I, 97; Woolley, Ur Excavations: The Royal Tombs, p. 139.
2 Aberg, Ckron., IV, 62-3.
3 Cf. Childe, NLMAE., fig. 36 (Gerzean).
1 Garrod, Stone Age of Mt. Carmel, I, p. XV, 2.
5 Aberg, Chron., IV, 13, 87; AJA., XXXVIII (1934), 229, 231.
6 Hfimit Ziibeyr Kosay, Ausgrabungen von Alaca Hdytik (Ankara, 1944). pi. LXXXIII, 60.
7 In Ehrich, Relative Chronologies in Old World Archceology (1954), 95*
54 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES
tion from the disconnected impressions of spiral shells such as appear on the early Ghassulian pottery of the Jordan valley while Kaschnitz-
Fig. 28. Cycladic pottery: i, Pelos; 2, Phylakopi I; 3, Phylakopi II (L.C.).
Weinberg1 considers that the incised spirals on the pots copy the wire spirals of early Sumerian and Anatolian gold-work.
As already indicated, Cycladic culture declined when Minoan palaces indicate a Cretan grip on maritime trade and the warlike “Minyans'’
1 pz., xxxiv (1950), 196.
55 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
occupied the Helladic townships. On most islands only a few graves are dated by long rapiers or imported Minyan vases to Middle or Late Cycladic I—II. The “halberd" of Fig. 26, 3, comes from a M.C. shaft grave at Akesine on Amorgos.1 Its interpretation as a halberd, imported or copied from the West, is indeed uncertain, but M.C. pottery like that from the tomb, turning up in the Western Mediterranean (Fig. 41), does at least suggest Cycladic enterprise in that direction. But her resources in obsidian secured to Melos a share in Minoan commerce, and Thera2 too benefited from her neighbours’ wealth until a volcanic convulsion overwhelmed her inhabitants. Phylakopi II was a fenced city with regular streets. Imported M.M.I-II polychrome pottery and Minyan vases from Greece found together on the earliest house floors show how close was the island’s connection both with Crete and with the Mainland. Conversely, the matt-painted Middle Cycladic I pottery of Melos is significantly like the Early Bronze Age or Cappadocian ware of Alisar, in Central Anatolia, as if the island had also connections with the East. At a later stage in Phylakopi II a large building equipped with pillar-rooms like a Cretan palace and decorated with a frescoe of flying fishes in M.M.III technique might be the residence of a Minoan governor or consul. The potters’ craft was industrialized, but the wheel- made vases were decorated with lovely naturalistic patterns in matt paint imitating the Minoan style of M.M.III-L.M.I (Fig. 28, 3). But though ceramic technique and style changed, there is no break in the tradition; matt paint had replaced the glaze medium at the beginning of Phylakopi II or even earlier though the patterns at first were geometric, as in Early Cycladic. In Late Mycensean-L.M.III times the fortifications of Phylakopi were strengthened; the walls were now 20 feet thick, and near the gate a staircase led up to a tower or rampart- walk. Most of the other islands have yielded traces of occupation at this time, but their culture now was just a variant of the Mycenaean “koine” described on p. 81.
1 Festschrift P. Goessler (Stuttgart, 1954), 26-34.
2 See Aberg, Chron., IV, 127-37.
56 CHAPTER V
FROM VILLAGE TO CITY IN GREECE
The southern extremity of the Balkan peninsula, though intersected by jagged mountain ranges, chasms, and gulfs, yet displayed as much cultural unity during the prehistoric Bronze Age as it did during the historical Iron Age. In the Stone Age, though peninsular Greece fell for a time into two divisions, Macedonia and even Southern Thrace belonged to the same cultural province. Hence the stratigraphy, observed at citadels, continuously occupied, and in rural tells, provides a chronological frame applicable to the whole region with certain reservations. In Classical times Thessaly, Arcadia, and the mountainous country of North-West Greece and still more Macedonia were cultur- ally backward as compared with Bceotia, Attica, and Laconia, while Thrace was frankly barbarian. A similar retardation can be observed in the Bronze Age. Then from the beginning of the Bronze Age Mace- donian culture diverged so far from that of peninsular Greece as to deserve a different name—Macednic—that may be applied to Thessaly too.
Subject to these limitations, the Mainland Bronze Age has been divided into three main periods termed, on the analogy of the Cretan, "Early”, "Middle”, and “Late Helladic”, and each subdivided. The preceding Neolithic is similarly subdivided; but Early Neolithic is still very shadowy, and Middle corresponds to the first or “A” phase in the old sequence. Absolute dates can confidently be assigned to the Late Helladic or Mycenaean period by interchanges of goods with Crete and the literate countries of the East Mediterranean: L.H.I began no later than 1500 b.c., L.H.IIIb ended just after 1200. The beginning of Middle Helladic about 1800 b.c. is deduced from the association of M.H. and M.M.II pottery at Phylakopi on Melos (p. 48). Finally, Minoan seals and sealings from E.H.III layers demonstrate a parallelism with E.M.III Crete and Egypt between Dynasties VI-XI. For estimating the antiquity of earlier periods the relative depths of deposits are at least suggestive: at Eutresis 4 m. out of 6*5 are composed of E.H. ruins, at Korakou 2 m. out of 4-5 m. But in the Thessalian tell at Tsangli, occupied in Early and perhaps Middle TEgean times, 5 m. out of a total height of 10 m. is attributable to Middle Neolithic debris. In conclusion, it must be recalled that the Helladic and Neolithic
57 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
periods are generally defined by pottery styles and are in fact usually treated as the period when pottery of the distinctive style was being manufactured at a particular site. Now on Levkas, in the backward north-west, rapiers of L.H. or at least M.M.III type were apparently associated with good E.H. pottery.1 Hence the absolute dates for Early and Middle Helladic given above are valid only for the ZBgean coasts and their immediate hinterland. In peripheral regions a retardation of several centuries must be allowed for! Moreover, the distinction between Late Neolithic and Early Helladic I is nowhere very sharp. In fact, a substantial overlap between some Late Neolithic and E.H.I is generally admitted. Weinberg2 equates Late Neolithic in Thessaly with E.H.I in the Peloponnese.
Early and Middle Neolithic
While palaeolithic food-gatherers had reached peninsular Greece, no remains have yet been found of any mesolithic successors, perhaps merely because no systematic search for such remains has been made. In 1956 the archaeological record begins with mature neolithic cultures characterized by well-made pottery and little else. From Corinthia to Thessaly “variegated ware”, part pink, part grey,3 seems to character- ize the earliest levels. But from the next level at Otzaki magoula4 in Thessaly as from the cave of Khirospilia on Levkas5 come sherds ornamented with the edge of a Cardium shell or by rustication that we shall find are the symbols of the earliest neolithic farmer-colonists throughout the Balkans and round the Western Mediterranean too. With them are associated distinctive female figurines. From the figurines and from the incipient tell formation it may be inferred that the rural economy and ideology of these early colonists coincided with those of still earlier cultivators in South-Western Asia, some of whom did decorate their pottery with Cardium impressions,6 as of their better-known kinsmen farther north (p. 86) and of their successors in the Middle Neolithic phase.7
By the latter a rich culture already ruled throughout the mountain- ridged peninsula from Servia in Western Macedonia to Asea in Arcadia and from Levkas on the west to the coasts of Attica. It is best illus- trated in the fertile valleys of Thessaly and Central Greece and is
1 Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, R. 7 and R. 24.
2 AJA., LI (1947), 172; Miloj&c, Chron., 39.
3 Hesperia, VI (1937). 487-97*
4 Jhb. d. Inst., LXIX. (AA„ 1954), n-23* 5 Dorpfeld, Alt-Ithaka, 335.
8 Childe, NLMAE., 218; Godman, Tarsus, II (1956), 66.
7 Mylonas, 'H veokiducy ’Ettoxv tv 'EM dSi (Athens, 1928). Cf. Weinberg, A JA., LI (1947), 167-85, and Schacherxneyr, Die altesten Kulturen Griechenlands (1955).
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ing in hue from deep black to brick red and often copying gourd or leather vessels, are representative of a tradition common to the whole of Anatolia. A conspicuous peculiarity throughout the province is the popularity of genuine handles in addition to simple lugs. The handles are often of the “thrust” type—the lower ends being inserted into a hole at the side of the vessels1—a trick popular in later periods too and in other parts of Anatolia. Forms distinctive of West Anatolia are bowls with lugs growing from the inverted rims (Fig. 17, column 1), jugs with cut-
Fig. 17. Pottery from Thermi I-II (A) and III-IV (B). After W. Lamb, BSA., XXX.
away necks (Fig. 17, columns 2-3), tripod vessels, and collared pyxides with string-hole lugs and lids (Fig. 17, column 4). Significant changes in form, documented by the stratigraphy of Thermi, are the expansion of the ends of the tubular lugs on the bowls to “trumpet lugs” in town III and the contemporary transformation of tripod legs into model human feet. At Troy the trumpet lugs grew into regular handles, flanged and angled, quite reminiscent of Cretan neolithic types. Decoration was effected by bosses, ribs, corrugations, and incisions forming rectilinear patterns. White paint on the dark ground, quite exceptional at Thermi and Troy, was very popular at Yortan. The patterns were always recti- linear.
Spinning and weaving would be domestic arts too. Their importance is attested by the numbers of spindle-whorls, and clay spools. The
1 Blegen, Troy, I, 65; cf. Frankfort, Studies, ii. 86, n. x.
39 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
weaver may have used, perforated arcs of clay up to 9 cm. in length, represented in Thermi III, that seem to be forerunners of the narrower crescentic loom-weights so common in the Hittite levels of Kusura and Alisar.1
The domestic fertility cults of a superstitious peasantry may be illustrated by numerous female figurines of stone and clay, the former
Fig. 18. "Megaron” palace, Troy II.
always highly conventionalized in the manner of Fig. 8, 13-162; clay figurines begin later at Thermi and sometimes indicate the division between the legs. But at Troy itself the “Mother Goddess” (if such she be) was represented on a more monumental scale: an owl-like visage had been carved in low relief on a stone slab, 1*27 m. high, that was found standing just outside the city gate. But to domestic cult again
1 Arch., LXXXVI, 35, fig. 15; Alishar, fig. 30.
2 Very similar figurines turn up sporadically as if imported in Mesopotamia about 2750 b.c.; Speiser, Tepe Gawra, pi. LIII, b. Frankfort, “Iraq Excavations”, OIC. Communication, 19, fig. 24.
40 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN
belong clay phalli from Thermi and perhaps a homed clay spit-support (? altar) rather like Cretan horns of consecration. The dead were apparently buried, if adults, outside the town in regular cemeteries— enclosed in jars, judging by the case of Yortan.
After the long period of relatively peaceful development repre- sented by the 4 metres of “Troy I” and the four successive townships at Thermi, unrest led to a concentration of power and wealth. Though its population was already dwindling, Thermi V was fortified with a stout stone wall supplemented by complicated outworks. Even so, the site was soon deserted; it has yielded vases imported from Troy Ila, but none of those proper to the later phases of that city. Poliochni in Lemnos likewise declined. But at Troy potent chieftains had arisen who exploited to the full the strategic advantages of their site and concentrated in the city West Anatolian trade to the ruin of their rivals. Troy II was now encircled with a new stone wall, surmounted with a parapet of mud-brick. But, though larger than Troy I, the circuit of Troy II still enclosed only some 7850 sq. metres, or less than two acres. Its ruler built himself a palace of the f< megaron” plan—a hall with central hearth, 66 feet long by 33 feet, preceded by a porch 33 feet long and wide (Fig. 18). The citadel had reached the apex of its glory in phase lie, but underwent four further reconstructions before it was taken by hostile assault and burnt. But before the final catastrophe the defenders had hidden many of their valuables. Our knowledge of Trojan metal-work and jewellery is mainly derived from these hoards that the plunderers had missed.
Ere its destruction Troy II had become economically, if not physic- ally, a city. Through its monopoly of Hellespontine trade, its citizens amassed wealth to support an industrial population and pay for imported goods. Tin was obtainable in such abundance that bronze containing the standard proportion of 10 per cent tin and 90 per cent copper was in general use. Gold, silver, lead, obsidian were also im- ported; lapis lazuli from Iran and amber from the Baltic are also represented in hoard L, the date of which is not, however, quite certain. Specialist jewellers, potters, and other craftsmen, trained in Asiatic schools, settled in the rich city. The jewellers introduced solder, filagree work, and the trick of making beads from two discs of gold soldered together or from two folded tubes each ending in spirals— all devices employed by Mesopotamian goldsmiths in the third millennium.1
The potters’ wheel, indicating a further advance in urbanization, was introduced in the time of Troy lie, but the products, turned out 1 Childe, NLMAE,, 162; cf. Iraq, IX (1947), 171-6.
41 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
3 4
Fig. 19. Pottery from Troy IX (i)- ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN
en masse by the new specialist craftsmen, carry on the native traditions in form and surface treatment and did not replace hand-made vessels. Shapes easily recognized as emerging during the lifetime of Troy II are anthropomorphic lids and jars (“face-urns”, Fig. 19, 2 and 6), jugs with flaring mouths (Fig. 19, 4), and curious two-handled depas (Fig. 19, 5). But these appear already hand-made in phase lie and are merely exaggerated expressions of tendencies inherent in the earlier
Fig. 21. Battle-axe (£), gold-capped bead (J), and crystal pommel (£)_from Treasure L, and stray axe-adze (£). Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin.
and more generalized Anatolian tradition. The representation of the “Mother Goddess” on the face-urns is significantly like that on the handles of early Sumerian funerary jars1; but the convention is already foreshadowed in the stele from Troy I. Side-spouted jugs, multiple vessels, jugs with double necks, zoomorphic vases are essentially Anatolian and not confined to Troy II. Improvements in the prepara- tion of the clay and firing, probably introduced at the same time as the wheel, allowed the potter to produce harder, paler, and less porous vessels. But to preserve the effect of the old-self-coloured vases, their
1 Childe, NLMAE., fig. 98.
43 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
surfaces were normally covered with a ferruginous wash that turns red on firing (red wash ware)—a device popular at Alisar and farther east, and employed even in the Middle Danube basin.
Despite the abundance of metal, stone, flint, obsidian, bone, and antler were still freely and almost predominantly employed for axes, battle-axes, agricultural implements, knives, awls, pins, and combs. The battle-axes carry on the tradition of Troy I, but include some superbly polished weapons of semi-precious stones (Fig. 21, 1) (from Treasure L) that must be ceremonial.
The jewellery from the hoards not only demonstrates the wealth of Troy but the divergent ramifications of its commerce. Many items are specifically Eastern; the earrings and lock-rings with flattened ends, the spiral filagree work (Fig. 22, 3), the gold disc beads, etc., may be regarded as Sumerian and the technique of the knot-headed pin1 was known there as in predynastic Egypt. Pins with double spiral heads (of which Fig. 22, 3, is a glorified version) are found all across Anatolia and Iran to India and Anau.2 A "spear-head” identical with the Cycladic specimen of Fig. 23, 1, from Treasure A, belongs to a family represented also in Central Anatolia, Cyprus, and Iran.3 Earrings like Fig. 22,1, are worn by foreign dancing girls depicted in an Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-painting.4 A gold hammer pin from 2g5 is ultimately a South Russian type, but was familiar also at Alaca. At the same time, so many types common at Troy recur in Central Europe as to prompt the suspicion that Trojan tin came from Bohemia, copper from Tran- sylvania or the Balkans. On the other hand, bossed bone plaques, like Fig. 115, indicate connections westward as far as Sicily and Malta, but their stratigraphical position at Hissarlik is a little doubtful and they have gold analogues to the east at Alaca.6 Ring pendants of stone, paralleled in gold in Wallachia and Transylvania, might disclose one source of Trojan gold while copies in Sweden and Sammland may be counterparts of the amber beads from Treasure L. If Troadic trade were founded on Oriental demand for metal, Troy II was itself a centre of accumulated wealth, providing capital for development of industry and trade in our Continent.
Yet Trojan merchants seem to have managed without writing. They did not even, like the Minoans, engrave stone seals. Two cylinders were found at Troy,7 but their attribution is uncertain. But the Trojans did
1 Childe, NLMAE., 63, 196.
2 Ibid., 196; LAAA., XXIII, 119; Alaca (1951), pi. CXII.
3 Alaca (1937), pl* CCLXXV; Schaeffer, Stratigraphie, 38.
4 Aberg, Chron., IV, 11.
s Blegen, Troy, I, 376, and fig. 357, 37.528.
9 Antiquity, XXX, 80-93.
7 Schliemann, IHon, figs. 500-3; cf. PPS., XXI, pl. XVII.
44 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE iEGEAN
Fig. 22. 1-2, Gold earring and T: ?, ? sure A, 3, pin from Treasure jD,
4 bracelet from Treasure F, : \ ; .. pins (f). Museum f. Vorge-
schichte, Berlin.
45 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
copy Asiatic seals in clay while an imported sherd from lib bears the imprint of an Early Minoan seal.
The old native fertility cult continued without any notable changes, but the figurines, now predominantly of stone, are all highly conven- tionalized (Fig. 8, 15), and the phalli are made of stone.
After the sack of Troy II a reoccupation of Hissarlik on a smaller scale is represented by the ruins of towns III, IV, and V,1 each fortified and each reconstructed several times. All were urban in the sense that they comprised specialized potters and smiths and relied upon trade, though a marked increase in the proportion of game bones in the food refuse from town III may denote a temporary decline in farming. Throughout the pottery attests unbroken continuity of tradition. But face-urns are commoner in Troy III than in II. Pots found on Euboea and at Orchomenos look like exports from Troy III, while a copper pin from that town is taken for a Cycladic manufacture.2 Domed ovens,3 taller than those from Thermi, appear at Troy for the first time in IV. In town V iEgean imports are rare. But bowls adorned with a red cross in the interior that are characteristic of Troy V have close parallels on E.H.III sites in Greece, while analogous vessels are found at Gozlii Kale, Tarsus, together with Cappadocian tablets.4
With the sixth settlement5 Troy approximates more closely than ever before to the dignity of a city. It was girt with a new and more formidable stone rampart enclosing an area of over five acres. But revival seems due to the advent of a new people who introduced pottery foreign to the native tradition, novel domestic architecture, the practice of cremation and probably the horse, whose presence is osteologically attested first in Troy VI. The new pottery is termed Minyan ware— a fine grey ware, owing its colour to the reduction of the iron oxides in well-selected clay by controlled firing in a kiln—and accompanied by a red oxidized variant. These are the characteristic native wares of Troy VII too. The houses no longer conform to the megaron plan, but are entered through doors in their long sides. No cemeteries of Troy I to V, nor even of Early and Middle VI, have been located, but that of Late VI was an umfield in which the cremated bones were enclosed in cinerary urns. The first Indo-European Hittites at Bogaz K5y had likewise laid out an umfield and deposited remains of horses with the urns, while burial in umfields was characteristic of Period VI in Central Europe and began in Hungary even in Period IV.
Under the new rulers trade and industry flourished luxuriantly once more. Middle III, Late Helladic I, II, and Ilia—but hardly any Illb—
1 Blegen et al., Troy, II. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Ibid., 107.
* Ibid., 229. ’ 5 Blegen et al., Troy, III.
46 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN
vases were imported from the JEgean, white-slipped ware from Cyprus, ivory from Syria or Egypt through the iEgean, but not a single Hittite manufacture. Bronze sickles, of Asiatic looped type,1 show that metal was now cheap enough for use in rough agricultural work. Smiths produced a chisel provided with a socket formed not by casting but by hammering a projecting tang of metal round a mandril as in Hittite cities.2
Judged by the imported iEgean vases, Troy VI should have lasted from about 1700 to 1300 b.c. Then it fell, overthrown perhaps by an earthquake, perhaps by the Homeric Achseans under Agamemnon. In any case the site was reoccupied and Troy Vila—a rather poorer city—survived for another century, only to be destroyed with obvious violence. For the last twenty years it has been held that Troy Vila was Homer’s Ilion, but that view was plausibly challenged in 1955. In any case, after its destruction barbarians settled at Hissarlik and introduced a coarse wart-omamented pottery without, however, exterminating the older population or suppressing the old ceramic tradition; for grey wares, like Minyan, were still manufactured in Troy Vllb. On the other hand, socketed bronze celts cast on the spot by the usual Central European method leave no doubt as to the origin of these invaders.
1 Childe, “The Balanced Sickle”, in Aspects of Archeology (ed. Grimes; London, 1951), 145-6.
8 OJP., XXIX, fig. 289; this was, of course, the method used for providing spear-heads with sockets in Crete earlier (p. 30) and in Sumer in the third millennium.
47 CHAPTER IV
MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES
The Cyclades are scattered across the iEgean, remnants of a land-bridge between Anatolia and Greece affording a passage for cultural ideas from Asia to Europe. To mere food-gatherers or self-sufficing peasants, the islands, often small and barren, offered no attractions. But to mariners crossing from Asia to Europe they offer convenient halting places and lairs to any pirates who might wish to prey on more peaceful voyagers. Moreover, they contain raw materials of the sort needed by urban civilizations—copper (Paros and Siphnos), obsidian (Melos), marble (Paros and others), emery (Naxos). Accordingly, while larger islands like Chios and Samos seem to have been settled by neolithic peasants, the little Cyclades were at first passed by, but early colonized by communities that could find a livelihood in commerce and perhaps in piracy too. Such communities must have lived near the shore and presumably in townships. But only at Phylakopi in Melos1 has a Cycladic settlement been fully explored. There, three consecutive town- ships could be distinguished, preceded by some earlier occupation represented by sherds collected beneath the oldest house-floors. The city has been partially engulfed by the sea, but must have extended well over four acres. The first town was apparently unfortified, the second and third girt with strong stone walls, 20 feet thick in the latest phase. Fortified settlements are also known at Chalandriani2 on Syros, on Paros,3 and elsewhere. But these fortifications seem relatively late. Soon after the foundation of Phylakopi II, M.M.Ib polychrome vases were imported from Crete; the city is accordingly hardly older than the twentieth century b.c.; it is frankly Middle Cycladic.
For the remaining islands and for earlier periods we are reduced to estimating the size and stability of the settlements from the ceme- teries. Few have been fully explored, but they were admittedly extensive. Three on Despotikon comprised 50 to 60 graves each; on Syros one cemetery at Chalandriani was composed of nearly 500 graves, a second of more than 50; on Paros, Tsountas mentions nine cemeteries
1 For Phylakopi see Excavations at Phylakopi in Melos (Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies, Supplementary Volume, IV, 1904)
2 For tombs on Amorgos and Paros, see Tsountas, KvaXaStKa, in ’E<f>. ’Apx-, 1898; for Syros and Siphnos, ibid., 1899.
» AM., XLIII (1917), 10 ff.
48 MARITIME CIVILIZATION IN THE CYCLADES
of from xo to 60 graves. Of course, all these burials are not contempor- ary. While it has been customary to assign most cemeteries to the Early Cycladic period (before 2000 b.c.), Aberg1 has shown that some graves must be Middle or even Late Cycladic. Fortunately Cycladic
Fig. 23. Tomb-group. Amorgos (|).
imports in Egypt, in Crete, at Thermi and Troy, and on Mainland Greece suffice to show that the islands’ culture reached its zenith in the third millennium. Marble idols like Fig. 23, 2, were imported into Crete chiefly during E.M.III, a blade like 23, 1, from the same tomb on Amorgos, was included in Treasure A of Troy II; Cycladic marble
1 Chronologie, IV, 71, 84.
49
744
« on: March 24, 2018, 08:59:42 PM »
Some Early Minoan dagger-blades might really have been mounted as spear-heads—that must be the case with a two-pronged weapon2 from Mochlos. But the classical Minoan spear-head, going back to M.M.III, was provided with a socket, once formed by folding a wide, flat tang into a tube (Fig. 15). This device had been employed by the Sumerians from the middle of the third millennium, but was replaced by a cast socket, sometimes split to reproduce the effect of the fold, even in M.M.III.
Minoan warriors carried armour too. Helmets,3 consisting of rows of boars’ tushes sewn round a leather cap as described in Homer, were worn from M.M.III on. In L.M.II a bronze bell helmet, sur- mounted by a knob carrying a plume, was in use.4 The type was popular in Central Europe from the Unetician phase on throughout the Bronze Age; it may have originated there or been inspired from Crete.
1 Arch., LIX, 105 ff.
2 P. of M., I, fig. 72.
3 Evans, P. of M., IV, 867 ff.; cf. Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (1950), 211 ff.; BCH. (1953). 57-
4 Hood, BSA., XLVII (1952), 256-61; infra, p. 132.
30 THE ORIENT AND CRETE
31 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
For removing facial hair Minoans used, in addition to tweezers, razors, generally leaf-shaped in Late Minoan times.1
Minoan pottery is too rich and varied to be described here in detail. During Early Minoan times self-coloured burnished wares like the local neolithic and Early Anatolian and. Cycladic fabrics were current. They might be decorated by stroke-burnishing1 2 or with channelled lines that may compose concentric semicircles.3 In E.M.II the potters of Vasiliki in East Crete covered their vessels with a red ferruginous wash which they relieved with dark blotches deliberately produced by the reducing agency of a glowing piece of charcoal.4 But from the first the Minoan potter could produce a clear buff ware, probably
Fig. 15. Late Mycenaean short sword (Mycenae) and Middle Minoan spear-head (£).
fired in a kiln. By coating the vessel with a lustrous glaze paint he obtained a surface resembling that of the self-coloured burnished fabrics upon which patterns were drawn in white paint. Alternatively the paint was used as medium for producing dark patterns on a light ground. During Middle Minoan times red and yellow were combined with white, but the light on dark system was predominant. In Late Minoan on the contrary this style was abandoned altogether in favour of dark on light. Spiral patterns appear first in E.M.III under Cycladic influence (cf. p. 54). Some main forms of Early Minoan pottery have already been mentioned on p. 19.
Throughout the Minoan epoch vessels of stone, metal, and wood competed with the potters’ products and reacted upon their forms and decorations. Indeed, from its inception a wealth of stone vases distinguishes the Minoan civilization from contemporary Helladic and Anatolian cultures. Though the Egyptians excelled in transforming hard stones into vessels, stone vases had been used in Mesopotamia and Syria too since the fourth millennium and were made in Cyprus
1 Evans, Arch., LIX, 117; Hood, loc. cit., 262.
2 Evans, P. of M., I, 59.
3 Ibid., fig. 22. 4 Frankfort, Studies, II, 90.
32 THE ORIENT AND CRETE
before the oldest pots.1 Of importance for comparison are the block- vases already mentioned that may have been copied in clay in the Danube valley and the birds’-nest vases that might be the prototypes for certain Almerian pots; both forms are Early Minoan.
Metal vessels may have been in use even in Early Minoan times and were undoubtedly quite common in later periods. But the competition of plate on the tables of the rich did not involve any degradation of the ceramic art in Crete as it did in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Two shapes are noteworthy—a two-handled tankard or cantharos with quatrefoil lip (represented by a silver specimen from Mochlos allegedly M.M.I)2 which is known in pottery from Hittite times in Anatolia
Fig. 16. Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups.
and the Middle Bronze Age of Hungary and in alabaster from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae, and the so-called Vapheio cup of M.M.III to L.M.II (Fig. 16),3 the curious handle of which may after all be inspired by a wooden model; a clay cup with a rather similar handle turned up at Nienhagen in Saxo-Thuringia apparently in an Early Bronze Age cemetery.
Minoan costume, like the Egyptian, did not require fastening with pins, so that, apart from a few hairpins, these toilet accessories, so common in Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Central European graves, are missing in Bronze Age Crete. On the other hand, the Minoans, like the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Indians, were skilled at shaping and perforating hard stones for beads. Rock crystal and carnelian were used from Early Minoan times as well as ivory and fayence. Two amorphous lumps from the tholos of Porti have been identified as amber, but Evans has questioned this diagnosis.4 By L.M.I amber was certainly reaching Crete regularly from the Baltic, and a gold- bound amber disc from the cemetery of Knossos (L.M.II)5 is almost
1 Dikaios, Khirokitia (London, 1953); so also at Jarmo, Kurdistan.
2 P. of M., I, fig. 139a; cf. van der Osten, The Alishar Hiiyiih (1928-29), Chicago O.I.C. Publication XIX), pi. XI.
2 P. of M., II, 175.
4 Xanthudides and Droop, 69. 8 Arch., LXY, 42.
C
33 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
identical with six found in Early Bronze Age II graves in Wiltshire. Segmented beads of fayence, copying stone beads that go back to E.M.II1 (Fig. 12, 2 (top)), were being manufactured in Crete from M.M.III. Similar beads have turned up as imports in the Danube valley, Spain, Poland, and England (p. 336, below). Stone hammer-beads occur even in the E.M. ossuaries of the Mesara.2
1 U. of Penns., Anthrop. Pubis,, III, 3, 184.
2 Xanthudides and Droop, pi. XXXII, 548.
34 CHAPTER III
ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN
In the fifth century the Royal Road from Mesopotamia to the Aegean led not to the Levantine coasts alone but on across the plateau of Anatolia—a promontory of Asia thrust out towards Europe. Here ran the route along which Persian armies marched to impose Oriental culture on Greece, along which diplomatists, scientists, and merchants travelled to transmit more peacefully and successfully Babylonian ideas to the young Ionian states. More than a millennium earlier the plateau was a bridge along which merchant caravans could travel to transport westward a share of Mesopotamian capital. Between 2000 and 1800 b.c. the region’s wealth in ores had induced a colony1 of Assyrian merchants to settle at Kanes (Kultepe) in Cappadocia; they maintained continuous intercourse with the cities on the Tigris and Euphrates, illustrated by their business archives, the so-called Cappa- docian tablets. They may have had earlier precursors. In any case they found, if not a literate civilization, at least some degree of urbanization and an incipient state organization. Rich “royal tombs” at Alaca Huyiik2 illustrate the wealth amassed by local princes, several special- ized crafts, and trade that secured a variety of raw materials. Un- fortunately these tombs contain no undoubted imports nor even types that can be dated by reference to Mesopotamian literature. The culture of the princes’ subjects is reduplicated in many little huyuks (tells), too small to represent anything but modest villages. In them, copper was already competing with stone and bone as an industrial material but without in the least replacing them. This “Copper Age” culture, as Turkish archaeologists label it, is fairly uniform all over the plateau; judged by its pottery—self-coloured dark-faced wares, jugs and cups with true handles and side spouts, corrugated ornament—its prefer- ence for the sling, the multiplicity of female figurines—it is allied to the Early Troadic to be described below. It differs sharply from the latter in burial practice; the dead were regularly interred under the house floors as in Syria, Assyria, and Iran, and not in distinct cemeteries.
Many of these peculiarities seem to have been inherited from a
1 Tahsim Ozgii?, Kultepe Hafriyati (Ankara), 19; id., Belleten, passim.
2 Remzi Ogiz Arik, Lesfouilles d'Alaca Hoytih (Istanbul, 1937); H. Z. Kosay, Ausgra- bungen von A. H. (Ankara, 1944); id. Alaca Hoyiih Kazisi (Ankara, 1951).
35 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
previous phase, termed by Turkish archaeologists Chalcolithic because copper was already in use if mainly for ornaments. It is very imper- fectly known from the deeper levels of Alisar in the Halys1 basin, and perhaps from Buyiik Gulliicek2 and Maltepe near Sivas3 farther north.
As compared to the Early iEgean Bronze Age, the Anatolian Copper Age does not seem early, though the discrepancy may be due to the more modest guesses of its investigators.4 A seal of Jemdet Nasr type from the Copper Age strata and a radio carbon date of 2500^250 b.c.5 for layer 14 at Alisar might justify more generous estimates. It does not seem an apt vehicle for the transmission westward of the cultural achievements of the Tigris-Euphrates at an early date. Nor does the so-called Chalcolithic disclose earlier Oriental advances on their way westward. There are indeed stamp seals and figurines, but painted sherds are exceptional, the pottery being mostly self-coloured though comprising fruitstands. Nothing approaching the precocious neolithic of Kurdistan and Palestine nor yet mesolithic remains have been found on the plateau so far, but though unrepresented in the tells, they may still come to light on other sites. Until they do, no recogniz- able archaeological milestones mark an ancient route across Anatolia from the Orient to Europe. Nor do the available data disclose there an ancient cultural centre nor yet a human reservoir from which the J£gean coastlands could have been populated.
On the other hand, at least in the north-western extremity of Asia Minor, a vigorous and original culture is documented quite early. The first settlement in the area is represented by pottery found in the lowest levels of Rum Tepe, a tell in the Troad.6 Notable are fruitstands with profiled pedestals, as in Fig. 86, and stroke-burnished ware which recurs on Samos as well as in Europe.
In the sequel develops a culture which may conveniently be called Early Troadic, though it is not strictly confined to the Troad. The same culture is represented at Poliochni on Lemnos,7 Thermi on Lesbos,8 at Yortan in Mysia and elsewhere. But the classic site remains Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, a key position on the Hellespont commanding at once sea-traffic up the straits and a land route’s crossing to Europe. There Heinrich Schliemann last century distinguished seven super-
1 van der Osten, Alishar Httyiik (1930-3), OIP, XXIX. Chicago.
2 Belleten, XII (1948), 475-6.
3 Belleten, XI (1947), 659 ff.
* Gotze, Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., XCVII (1953), 215-20.
6 Libby, Radio Carbon Dating (Chicago, 1950), 71.
6 AJA., XXXIX, 33.
7 Jahrb. d. Inst., LII; Arch. Anz. (1937), 167-70; Bemabo Brea, PPS. XXI (1955), 144-55-
8 Lamb, W., Excavations at Thermi (Cambridge, 1936).
36 ANATOLIA THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE AEGEAN
imposed prehistoric cities, but left a multitude of crucial issues. Re- excavation of the site by an expedition under C. W. Blegen,1 supple- mented by the stratigraphy of Thermi and Poliochni, has yielded the following scheme as the standard for the culture sequence in North- Western Anatolia:
Troad Greece Lesbos Lemnos Absolute Dates Troy Vila L.H.IIIb Thermi Poliochni 1275-1200 fLate L.H.IIIa and b — — 1400-1300 Troy VI 1 Middle L.H.I and II = ) VII f1550-1400 (Early M.M.III, M.H. l ? -1550 Troy V Troy IV E.H.III VI Troy III E.H. — [ V Troy Ilg to E.H. — J a 'Late E.H.] Thermi V \ f Thermi / IV Troy I - Middle E.H.V i 1 to | II-III Early “ J l iv / All " cities" can be dated in terms of Aegean chronology by sherds
of actually imported TEgean vases found in the several levels at Troy.
Troy I and the contemporary settlements on Lesbos and Lemnos consisted of clusters of two-roomed houses (often of the long rectangular plan), closely juxtaposed along well-defined but crooked and narrow streets. The mud-brick walls rested on foundations of stones, some- times (in Thermi I and IV and Troy I) laid not horizontally but obliquely in herring-bone formation, an arrangement often employed in the brick architecture of Early Dynastic Sumer. And as in Meso- potamia the doors were pivoted on stone sockets. Some houses in Thermi were provided with low domed ovens of clay only 3 ft. high. Especially in Thermi III pits (bothroi) were often dug in the house floors and carefully lined with clay.2
But Troy I comprised also a "palace"—a rectangular hall 12*8 m. long by 5*4 m. wide, entered through a porch at the west end. So Troy was already ruled by a chief, an institution not yet attested in other Early Troadic settlements. Moreover, Troy I, at least by the Middle phase, was girt with a massive stone rampart enclosing some i| acres; Poliochni was probably fortified at the same time.
Anatolian economy rested on the cultivation of wheats,3 barley, millet, and presumably vegetables, perhaps also of vines and fruit-trees, the breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and fishing with hook and line or with nets. Axes and rare adzes were made from pebbles
1 Blegen, Caskey, etc., Troy, I (1950); II (1951); III (1953), Princeton.
2 On bothroi in general, see JHS., LV (1935), 1-19,
s One-corn is attested, though perhaps later at Troy and Kusura (Arch., LXXXVT, 10), emmer only at Thermi, where there are some traces of vines.
37 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
ground and polished and also from stags' antlers pierced for a shaft- hole, knives, and sickle-teeth from flint blades simply trimmed. But stone battle-axes with drooping blade, precursors of ceremonial weapons like Fig. 21,1, must immediately be copies of metal weapons. In fact, copper battle-axes of the same pattern have been found at Yortan as at Polatli on the plateau and in the Royal Tombs of Alaca.1 Bone splinters, pointed at both ends, served as arrow-heads, while the armoury comprised also sling-stones and maces with spheroid stone heads.
But trade already brought metal even to Lesbos, and at Thermi I and Troy I there were specialized smiths available to work it. A crucible was found on virgin soil at Thermi, and small metal pins and trinkets were comparatively common at all levels. Most were made from unalloyed copper, but a pin from Thermi II contained as much as 13 per cent of tin, and a bracelet of this rare metal was found in town IV. Indeed, by the time of Thermi II and III metal was common enough for large implements to be left lying about for modern ex- vators to find, while at Troy lead rivets were employed for repairing pots. The smiths produced flat chisels with rounded butts, as in Egypt and protoliterate Sumer, flat axes and axes with the sides hammered up to produce low flanges2—implying that celts were mounted as axes in knee-shafts as in Central Europe—and as weapons flat-tanged daggers like Fig. 20, 2-4, cast in two-piece valve moulds of stone.
The types of metal daggers and pins suffice to show that Troadic metal-workers followed Asiatic rather than Egyptian traditions. Though shaft-hole axes of the normal Mesopotamian pattern were not manufactured, the earliest dated battle-axes are represented by clay models from al’Ubaid levels in Babylonia.3
But the most distinctive types and actual imports point explicitly to intercourse with Greece, the Cyclades, and the Levant coasts. Emery and marble vases were imported from the Cyclades; bird-headed pins are common to Thermi I and Syros; polished bone tubes like Fig. 27, 1, from Thermi III-IV and Troy I recur not only on the iEgean islands but also in Syria and Palestine—in the last-named area in an E.B.III context (after 2500 B.c.).4
Despite the specialization of the metallurgical industry and the ramifications of commerce, pot-making was not sufficiently industrial- ized for the use of the wheel. The self-coloured, burnished vases, vary-
1 Prausnitz, Inst. Arch. AR., XI (1955), 20
8 The same device is seen in the Copper Age township of Ahlatlibel near Ankara, Turk Tarih Arkeologya ve Etnografya Dergisi, II (Ankara), 1934.
3 Childe, NLMAE., fig. 60.
* Prausnitz, Inst. Arch. AR., XI (1955), 23 and 28; cf. Childe, NLMAE., 231-7.
38
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THE ORIENT AND CRETE
Minoan burial practice at all periods was collective interment in a family or communal ossuary used for many generations. This practice, foreign to Egypt, Sumer, and the Anatolian plateau, was current all round the Mediterranean, going back to "Mesolithic” times among the troglodyte Natufians of Palestine.1 In the Minoan ossuaries the bones are generally lying in the utmost disorder. The dislocated con- dition of the skeletons, which has been observed in collective tombs farther west too, has been taken as evidence of secondary burial; the remains would have been deposited in a temporary resting-place until the flesh had decayed. Xanthudides’1 2 careful studies of the Mesara burials have, however, shown that the disordered condition of the bones was due in the main to disturbances by those undertaking later interments who showed little respect to the former occupants of the tomb in making room for a fresh interment. The bodies had generally been placed on the floor of the tomb in the contracted attitude. Simi- larly traces of fire, sometimes noted on the bones, are due to ritual or purificatory fires kindled within the ossuary rather than to cremation.
The ossuaries themselves may be natural caves (E.M.I to M.M.I), rectangular stone chambers, imitating two-roomed houses, or circular enclosures commonly termed tholoi. In the Mesara the tholoi vary in internal diameter from 4-10 to 13 m., and are entered through a low doorway, formed of two megalithic uprights supporting a massive lintel and often entered from a small walled enclosure. The walls are from i*8 to 2-5 m. thick and the inner courses oversail one another as if the whole had been roofed with a corbelled vault on the principle employed in the Cycladic tomb illustrated in Fig. 25, 1. While it is hard to believe that a space 30 or 40 feet across could really have been spanned by a false dome, the smaller chambers certainly do deserve the name of tholoi, or “vaulted tombs”. In an early example at Krazi3 in East Crete, 4*2 m. in diameter, the corpses must, as in the Cyclades and Attica (pp. 51, 72), have been introduced through the roof, since the door, only 0-5 m. high, was completely blocked by an accumulation of bones and offerings; the “door” would in fact be purely symbolic as in Egyptian mastabas and some British long barrows.
Evans has compared the Cretan tholoi to Libyan and Nubian closed tombs of later date, but Mallowan, followed by Peake, would find the prototypes of the Minoan tholoi in circular brick constructions of unknown, but certainly non-sepulchral, use which he had discovered in the chalcolithic Tel Halaf township at Arpachiya in Assyria that
1 Garrod, The Stone Age of Mount Carmel, I, 14.
2 Xanthudides and Droop, Vaulted Tombs of the Mesard.
3 AA (1929), 103.
23 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
goes back at least far into the fourth millennium b.c.1 By that date the device of corbelling was certainly well understood in Hither Asia, but it is not attested in Egypt before the Second or Third Dynasty. In fact, the Minoan tholoi, like the contemporary rectangular ossuaries, may be just imitations in permanent material of dwellings for the living, since round houses are attested by a model from Phaestos. As the tholos tomb was current also in the Cyclades, pottery and ornaments of Cycladic character were abundant in the early tholos at Krazi, and Cycladic idols occur even in the Mesara tombs, Marinatos seems inclined to think that the type of sepulchre may have been introduced by families from the small islands.
In East Crete (for instance at Mochlos) the house-tombs may be grouped to form small cemeteries such as' should correspond to a township where several lineages lived together. Tholoi are more often isolated as if the territorial unit corresponded to a single clan or lineage. But in the Mesara small cemeteries are known—three tholoi and a rectangular ossuary at Koumasa, three tholoi at Platanos, etc. Such aggregations imply the association of several kinship groups in a single village, but no actual settlements anterior to Middle Minoan have been yet identified in the vicinity. Both in the Mesara and at Krasi, when the tholoi had become congested, accessory chambers were built on to the original mausoleum to receive subsequent interments, mostly of Middle Minoan date. And by M.M.II there developed the practice of excavating in the soft rock sepulchres designed for a single small family—irregular chambers entered by a short passage or antechamber —as attested by the Mavro Speleo cemetery near Knossos.2 Cases of cremation occur among the latest interments in an adjacent cemetery.3 A small tholos seems to have been built in an excavation in a hillside in the same period. Subterranean chambers became the standard form of tomb in Late Minoan times in Crete as in Mycenaean Greece. But even before the end of Early Minoan, individual burial in small stone cists, in clay coffins (lamakes), and in jars (pithoi) grouped in cemeteries as contrasted with ossuaries was beginning to compete with ossuary practice, and steadily increased in popularity during later periods. The clay coffins4 have early parallels both in Mesopotamia and Egypt, whereas jar burial is a specifically Anatolian-Syrian rite.
The variety of burial practices coexistent in Early Minoan times, like the variety of ceramic traditions, suggests that the island had been colonized by distinct communities which had not yet fused to form a
1 Iraq, II, 20, figs. 13-14.
a BSA., XXVIII (1926-27), 263-96.
3 “Archaeology in Greece”, Supplement to JHS. (1955).
4 Man, XXIX (1929), 18.
24 THE ORIENT AND CRETE
single people with an homogeneous culture. But they seem to have lived together peaceably, as no fortifications have been found, and as members of a single economic system in view of the uniformities in types of metal tools, stone vases, jewellery, and seals. This system secured and distributed foreign materials, gold, silver, lead, obsidian, marble, and perhaps amber (from the tholos of Porti), Egyptian and Asiatic manufactures such as fayence beads and stone vases that were copied locally, and perhaps Cycladic figurines. Individual artisans needed seals (buttons, beads, and prisms) that might bear scenes symbolic of their craft; merchants stamped therewith bales of goods exported to Asine and other mainland ports. But no regular system of writing and ciphering was yet needed nor publicly sanctioned for correspondence or accounts. Though sepulchral furniture discloses considerable personal wealth, neither monumental private tombs, palaces, nor temples indicate concentration of wealth in the hands of capitalists human or divine. Cult was conducted in rustic sanctuaries and grottoes. Its symbols—stone figurines imported from the Cyclades or imitating predynastic Egyptian block figures, phalli1 and model
Fig. io. The Minoan “Mother Goddess” and (left) Homs of Consecration, from a sealing. After Evans.
horns of consecration2 as in Anatolia, dove-pendants3 as in the Cyclades and Assyria, and votive double-axes4 of copper and lead—while fore- shadowing the distinctive apparatus of later Minoan ritual, still appear in forms appropriate to domestic worship.
1 Koumisa, tholos X.
2 Mochlos, E.M.I. (P. of M., I, 57).
3 Mochlos (ibid., 102); cf. Iraq, II, fig. 51, 7.
25
Mochlos (P. of M., I, 101). DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
In Middle Minoan times power and wealth began to be concentrated in the hands of dynasts residing in Central Crete and combining political and religious authority. Palaces that were also temples, factories, and warehouses were erected at Mallia, Knossos, and other sites. Special- ization invades the domain of domestic industry. The potters’ wheel, symbolizing the industrialization of the ceramic art, is attested from M.M.I. The wheel itself was a large clay disc which itinerant potters could carry about with them as they do to-day.1 Wheeled vehicles are first represented at the same period by a model four-wheeled cart from Palaikastro.2 They could hardly be serviceable without roads maintained by some authority with more than local jurisdiction. And in fact during Middle Minoan times the divergent local traditions that had persisted throughout the preceding period were gradually fused until Crete came to enjoy a single civilization. But the dis- tinction between province and metropolis becomes prominent. The provincial potters of Eastern Crete could not compete with the experts employed in the palaces of Knossos or Phaestos in turning out poly- chrome ware of eggshell thinness.
The priest-kings organized more effectively trade with Egypt, Melos, peninsular Greece, and other foreign lands where even the eggshell pottery has been discovered—in Egypt in a Twelfth Dynasty tomb sealed some time after 1850 b.c. And this commerce must have sub- stantially augmented their real wealth. For its administration a civil service would be required. And the perpetual corporation thus insti- tuted needed a socially sanctioned system of keeping records and accounts. In fact a conventional script of an ideographic type was developed during M.M.I and used for accountancy. The idea was presumably borrowed from the Minoans’ correspondents in Egypt or Syria, where writing had been in use for a thousand years. The actual conventions were local, though several signs have Egyptian analogues and the numeral forms are reminiscent of early Sumerian, while the use of a clay tablet as a vehicle of writing is an Asiatic habit.
Increase of wealth is usually accompanied by increase of population. The palace of Knossos was surrounded with an extensive town of two- storeyed houses, known not from actual excavation so much as from a mosaic attributed to M.M.IIb. The native population would be swelled by the immigration of craftsmen attracted by the wealth of Minoan courts and towns. So professional potters from Asia may have introduced the potters’ wheel and trained native apprentices in its use. And other specialists such as fresco-painters may have arrived to
1 Essays in Mgean Archeology, presented to Sir Arthur Evans (Oxford, 1927), 111-2S.
2 BSA., Supplementary Volume, Palaikastro (1923), 17.
26 THE ORIENT AND CRETE
minister to courtly desires for refinement. But if new arts were intro- duced by immigrants, the Minoan schools these founded were original and creative both in devising fresh techniques and in creating a new naturalistic style that owed little to Oriental models. In beholding the charming scenes of games and processions, animals and fishes, flowers, and trees that adorned the Middle Minoan II and III palaces and houses we breathe already a European atmosphere.
The development of Minoan civilization was interrupted by catas- trophes which may be taken to mark the end of the phases termed M.M.II, M.M.III, and L.M.I. The disasters are usually attributed to earthquakes and were followed by reconstructions of the ruined palaces without any break in the continuity of architectural, artistic, and technical traditions. But after the last a new and simplified script— Linear B—was introduced at Knossos, and with it apparently a new language; for while the older, Linear A writings still defy decipherment in 1956, Ventris and Chadwick have read the L.M.II tablets as docu- ments in an early Greek dialect identical with that current in Mycen- aean Greece. Thus it looks as if Knossos had become the capital of a conquering dynast from the Mainland who established over the whole island a regular empire of the Oriental pattern. His empire did not last. About 1400 b.c. hostile forces razed the palace of Minos to the ground. The hegemony in the iEgean had passed to Mycenae on the Mainland (p. 81). But urban civilization still flourished in Crete for two centuries. Goumia, for instance, in East Crete, now covered six acres and com- prised some sixty houses. And the richly furnished Late Minoan cemeteries comprising corbelled tombs (partially subterranean), rock- hewn chamber tombs, pit-caves, and shaft graves as well as larnax burials, remained in use in places even into the Iron Age.1
This inadequate sketch must be supplemented by a brief reference to certain industrial products that will be cited in later chapters dealing with less progressive parts of Europe. Tools and weapons are particu- larly relevant in this context. Obsidian was used for knives, sickle- teeth, and arrow-heads (including the transverse type). Fine hollow- based specimens are found even in Late Minoan tombs. At least in Early Minoan times stone was used even for axe-heads; notable is a “jadeite” celt from the tholos of Kalathiana in the Mesara. But copper was being used for celts even in the latest ‘'neolithic” phase1 2 and soon ousted stone. Copper ore exists in East Crete3 and may have been exploited in Early Minoan times. The addition of tin to copper to
1 Arch., LIX, and LXV, 1-94; Pendlebury, Crete, 195, 242, 306.
2 P. of M., II, 14.
3 Mosso, Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization (1910), 290.
27 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
facilitate casting is attested as early as M.M.I, though the standard alloy containing 10 per cent of tin was not firmly established till M.M.III. Bronze was known to the Sumerians before 2500 b.c. and knowledge of its qualities was probably transmitted thence to the iEgean via Anatolia (p. 38). But the Minoans’ demand for tin may ultimately have been supplied from lodes in Etruria, Cornwall, or Bohemia, since in each country we shall encounter ambiguous hints of contact with the iEgean world (pp. 128, 241,336). Iron is represented by a ring from a Middle Minoan tomb in the Mavro Speleo cemetery, but was not used industrially before 1200 b.c.
Fig. 11. Minoan axes, axe-adzes and double axe ($), and seal impressions (|). After Evans and M. A.
For axes the flat celt of the copper age did not lead, as in Cis-alpine Europe, to flanged and socketed forms, but was superseded by the shaft-hole axe (Fig. 11,1) that had been current from prehistoric times in Mesopotamia. After Middle Minoan III the single-bladed axe was ousted in Crete by the two-edged variety—the Double Axe—known also to the Sumerians and elevated to become a fetish or symbol of divine power by E.M.II. Double adzes too were used by the Knossian workmen by the beginning of L.M.I.1 Finally, the axe-adze that may be regarded as a combination of two types of axe used by the Sumerians is represented by a gold model attributed to E.M.II2 and actual specimens from the farmhouse at Chamaizi (Fig. 11, 3) attributed to M.M.I and then the standard Minoan form (Fig. 11,4) from M.M.II on.
1 P. of M., II, 619, fig. 392. 2 P. of M., I, 193, n. 3.
28 THE ORIENT AND CRETE
Heavy perforated hammers of metal rectangular in cross-section are reported as early as M.M.II1 and carpenters’ saws are attested as early as wheeled vehicles, by M.M.I.1 2 But elongated flat celts served as chisels and no sickles older than L.M.III3 survive.
Early Minoan daggers are triangular or provided with a very short wide tang (Fig. 12, 1), and sometimes given longitudinal rigidity by means of a midrib cast on both faces. They were attached with small rivets, sometimes of silver, to their bone or wooden hilts that were surmounted by globular or hemispherical pommels4 of stone or ivory,
Fig, 12. 1, Early Minoan daggers (J); 2, Stone beads (f). After Evans.
laterally perforated for transverse rivets to hold them in position. During Middle Minoan times the blades, still either flat or strengthened with a midrib, were elongated and assume an ogival form (Fig. 13). Some have a flat tang, like Asiatic daggers, and the rivets are large. But the palace of Mallia has yielded a genuine rapier, attributed to M.M.I,5 which is shown by its elongated pommel and its attachment to the hilt to be a development of the Sumerian series illustrated in the Royal Tombs of Ur. And in M.M.III the great rapiers from the Shaft Graves of Mycenae (Fig. 14, 1-3) are clearly elongations, to the
1 From Hagia Triada and Prisos.
2 P. of M., IV, 2, 797.
3 BSA, Palaikastro, pi. XXV; JRAI., LXXIV, 17.
* Xanthudides and Droop, pis. XXIII, LIV.
8 P. of M., II, 272; cf. Childe, NLMAE., pi. XXVIa.
29 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
surprising length of 93 cm., of the native types of Fig. 13. The pommels are improvements on the Early Minoan form approximating to Fig. 21,3, while the hilt-plate of type 1 preserves a reminiscence of the distinc-
Fig. 13. Middle Minoan I—II daggers (£). After Evans.
tively Egyptian crescentic gap. In L.M.Ib type 2 develops into the rapier with horned guards (Fig. 14, 4), and then in L.M.III into a short sword with flanges carried right round the hilt (Fig. 15, i).1 But towards the close of the period a new type, adapted for cutting as well as thrusting and apparently evolved beyond the Balkans, appears to herald the collapse of jEgean civilization.
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DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION any one of which might, like Erech, measure two square miles in area, and in which secondary industry and trade offered an outlet for the surplus rural population. In New Light on the Most Ancient East I have tried to sketch in some details in that prehistoric background of Oriental history. And I have tried to show too how the first revolution that precedes it had to spread, and how the growing demands of the new urban centres of population and wealth must involve the propagation both of the arts and crafts on which the second revolution rested and of the economy that sus- tained it. To find food for rising generations, the simplest step was to bring fresh land under cultivation and annex new pastures. That meant a continuous expansion of colonization and the progressive multiplication of farming villages. But the surplus accumulated in Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities could serve as capital for the promotion of trading expeditions through which the villages thus founded could share in the surplus and use it in their turn for the development of secondary industries. To obtain this share by supplying the effective demands of civilized societies, the Anatolian or Syrian villages must turn themselves into towns producing a surplus of farm- produce to support industrial workers and traders. And villages, thus urbanized, must become secondary centres of demand and for diffusion; they must in turn repeat the process of propagation, generating thereby tertiary centres to carry on the work. We should thus expect a hier- archy of urban or semi-urban communities, zoned, not only in space but also in time and in cultural level around the metropoles of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. How far does prehistoric Europe confirm such anticipation? Farming must of course have started in South-West Asia. But in tracing its primary expansion thence, it must now be remembered that the first farmers were not necessarily also potters; the first peasant colonists to reach Europe may not have left a trail of potsherds to mark their tracks! And those tracks were not necessarily on land. Fishing communities along the Levant coasts could perfectly well have learned to supplement the produce of food-gathering by cultivating cereals and breeding stock. Such incipient food-producers, forced to colonize fresh territories, might perfectly well have taken to their boats and paddled or sailed on the alluring waters of the Mediterranean to the next landfall—and then the next. By its spatial position and by special favours of the winds and currents the great island of Crete is easily accessible from the Nile, from Syria, from Anatolia, and from peninsular Greece. Its fertile 16 THE ORIENT AND CRETE lowlands guarantee a living to farmers and orchardists; its resources in timber, copper, and other raw materials can supply the needs of secondary industry; its natural harbours are not only bases for fisher- men but havens for merchants who can transport Cretan produce to urban centres and bring back in return the manufactures and also the science of older cities. The ruins of neolithic villages have formed a tell, 6-5 m. high, beneath the oldest Minoan levels at Knossos in Central Crete, where the Minoan civilization was first identified. But trial pits have revealed but little of the neolithic culture.1 It was formally neolithic in that pebbles were ground and polished to make plump celts (axes and chisels). But obsidian was imported from Melos and from Yali so that the farmers were hardly self-sufficing. For the later levels indeed the term neolithic is not even formally correct, since a copper flat axe was found on a house floor with stone celts. Stone was also drilled to make spheroid and pear-shaped mace-heads and worked into studs and even vases. The latest houses consisted of agglomerations of small chambers with fixed hearths and stone foundations for their walls. Pottery,1 2 though hand made, was of fine quality, self-coloured grey- black or red-brown according as to whether it were fired in a reducing or an oxidizing atmosphere; the surface was often burnished, sometimes so as to produce a decorative rippled effect. The forms cannot be called primitive: the vases may be provided with genuine handles (including wish-bone, nose-bridge, and flanged ribbon handles) as well as simple and trumpet lugs; some vases have short spouts, most flat bases. Goblets on tall half-hollow pedestals and fruit-stands with hollow feet appear before the period ends. Ladles are common, as in neolithic Egypt and Western Europe. Some middle neolithic vessels have club rims, as in Portugal and Britain. The potter decorated her products with incised patterns, including triangles and ribbons filled with punctuations. In the transitional pottery of the Trapeza cave3 in the mountainous interior a schematized human face was modelled on the vase rim. For their fertility rituals the farmers modelled in clay or carved in soft stone highly conventionalized figurines of the "Mother Goddess’*, seated or squatting (Fig. . As amulets they wore miniature stone axes pierced for suspension (axe-amulets). Caves were used for burials but for individual interments, not as ossuaries.4 Since palaeolithic food-gatherers have left no relics on the island, we 1 Pendlebury, Archeology of Crete (London, 1939), 35-41. 2 BSA., XLVIII (1953). 94-134- 8 BSA., XXXVI, 30. BSA., XXXVIII, 15. B 17 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION may assume that the earliest Cretan farmers were immigrants who brought their neolithic equipment with them. “Neolithic Crete”, writes Evans, “may be regarded as an insular offshoot of an extensive Ana- tolian province.” His table (Fig. shows many Asiatic relatives to the squatting figurines. The self-coloured pots, with handles and spouts, have a general Anatolian aspect, the fine grey wares can be paralleled in the “Chalcolithic levels” of Megiddo1 and in the deepest layers of Engberg and Shipton, "The Chalcolithic Pottery of Megiddo” (O.I.C. Studies, xo), 6x. 18 THE ORIENT AND CRETE many Asiatic tells.1 The mace-heads too belong to an Asiatic family but recur, like the axe-amulet, in the neolithic village of Merimde2 in Lower Egypt, which also yielded plump axes and clay ladles. But punctured ribbon decoration and pedestalled goblets have analogies also in the Balkans (p. 91), and the wish-bone handle is typical of the Macedonian Bronze Age, while Trapeza ware is still more reminiscent of Balkan and Apennine fabrics. The “neolithic" phase was ended by a “quickening impulse from the Nile, which permeated the rude island culture and transformed it” into the Minoan civilization. Evans suspects an actual immigration of predynastic Egyptians, perhaps refugees from the Delta fleeing from Menes’ conquest. At least on the Mesara, the great plain of Southern Crete facing Africa, Minoan Crete’s indebtedness to the Nile is disclosed in the most intimate aspects of its culture. Not only do the forms of Early Minoan stone vases, the precision of the lapidaries’ technique and the aesthetic selection of variegated stones as his materials carry on the predynastic tradition: but also Nilotic religious customs such as the use of the sistrum, the wearing of amulets in the forms of legs, mummies and monkeys, and statuettes plainly derived from Gerzean "block figures”,3 and personal habits revealed by depilatory tweezers of Egyptian shape, and stone unguent palettes from the early tombs and, later, details of costume such as the penis-sheath and the loin- cloth betoken something deeper than the external relations of commerce. At the same time even more explicitly Asiatic traits can be detected among the innovations distinguishing the "Metal Age” from the “Neolithic” civilization. Some might indeed have been transmitted via Egypt: block-vases—paint-pots consisting of two or more com- partments hollowed out of a stone parallelepiped with perforated corners—which were especially favoured in the Mesara, are common to Sumer and Egypt in Early Dynastic times.4 But Minoan metallurgy is based entirely on Asiatic traditions; the coppersmith cast axe-heads with a hole through the head for shafting in the Mesopotamian manner, the artists treated rosettes and similar figures in the Asiatic, not the Egyptian style.5 The most striking Minoan pot-forms—the pyxis with cylindrical neck and string-hole lid, the jug with cut-away neck and the side-spouted jar have parallels on the Anatolian, not on the African side; the so-called teapot with curious spout (Fig. 9) recurs without 1 Childe, NLMAE., 218. 2 Childe, NLMAE., 39. 3 Childe. NLMAE., fig. 36. 4 Evans, P. of M., II, fig. 20; cf. Childe, NLMAE., 94, 142, 163. 5 Matz, Friihhretische Siegel, 88. T9 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION the handle—as far away as Tepe Hissar near Damghan1 and even Anau in Turkestan. The technique of glaze paint that distinguishes Minoan pottery had been earlier employed by the Tel Halaf potters of North Syria. So in religion the cult of the Double-Axe is foreshadowed by Tel Halaf amulets.1 2 The use of engraved bead and button seals as contrasted with carved amulets is a very ancient North Syrian-Iranian practice later adopted in Egypt as in Crete. Fig. 9. Early Minoan III ‘‘teapots ” and button seal. After Evans. How far fresh Anatolian or Syrian colonists—merchants or artisans —joined with Egyptian refugees in founding the Minoan cities is for us a secondary question. Minoan civilization was not brought ready made from Asia nor from Africa, but was an original native creation wherein Sumerian and Egyptian techniques and ideas were blended to form a novel and essentially European whole. The admittedly Nilotic and Oriental elements that we see superadded to the Cretan neolithic culture may be treated as concrete expressions of the transformation of the island’s economy with the support of capital accumulated in the great consuming centres that arose, round about 3000 b.c., on the Nile 1 Schmidt, Excavations at Tipi Hissar (1931-3), and MusJ., XXIII, p. CXVI; cf. Frankfort, "Archaeology and the Sumerian Problem” (O.I.C. Studies, 4), 57-64. In Anatolia ldndred forms were popular under the Hittite Empires (1950-1200 B.c.); MDOG., 75 (1937), 38- Cf. Gordon, Iraq, XIII (1951), 40-46. 2 Childe, NLMAE., fig. 105, 3. 20 THE ORIENT AND CRETE and the Euphrates. In supplying their needs the Cretan farmer’s sons might find a livelihood in trade and industry; their self-sufficing villages would become commercial cities. On the basis of the stratigraphies! sequence, best preserved at Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans divided the Cretan Bronze Age into the famous "nine Minoan periods” to which he attributed absolute dates on the strength of contacts with the literate centres of civilization. His scheme, columns I and II below, needs some revision after fifty- five years. Firstly, the chronologies of Egypt and Mesopotamia1 have been deflated since then. Secondly, Evans’ division was based mainly on the sequence of ceramic styles observed at Knossos. This turns out to be applicable to other parts of the island only with drastic modi- fications. The ceramic art, defining Evans’ L.M.II, was a “ palace style”, in vogue only at Knossos. The same thing had happened before. Once it looked as if East Crete had been deserted in M.M.II, since the eggshell- fine polychrone pottery defining that phase was lacking. In reality this style too was confined to the palaces of Knossos and Phaestos in Central Crete.1 2 Even in the Mesara, a fortiori in East Crete, the M.M.I style was still in fashion as late as 1790 b.c.3 Moreover, at Knossos the Early Minoan period is poorly represented owing to the levelling carried out by later builders; Evans’ account had to be filled out by large drafts on material from East Crete and the Mesara. But during E.M. Minoan culture was by no means uniform so that there is a real danger of inflat- ing the sequence by using local styles to represent chronological periods. Thirdly, the first reliable synchronisms based on an actual and dated interchange of products are afforded by M.M.II vases in Middle King- dom Egypt securely dated about 1850 b.c. We have no Early Minoan imports in dated contexts in Egypt or Hither Asia, and, though actual Egyptian manufactures of Old Kingdom and even predynastic type were imported into the island, hardly any come from closed finds. One Egyptian jar from a Late Neolithic deposit is considered by Reisner to be no earlier than Dynasty I. If he be right, E.M.I must begin after 2830 or 3188 b.c. whichever date for that dynasty’s begin- ning be accepted. Another imported vase from an E.M.I context, however, cannot be later than Dynasty III, some four centuries later. Further Egyptian imports imply an overlap between E.M.III—in the Mesara and East Crete—and the rise of Dynasty XII about 2000 b.c.4 We thus have the following scheme: 1 E.g. by Sidney Smith, Alalakh and Chronology (London, 1940). 2 Aberg, Chron., IV, 201 ff.; Pendlebury, Crete, XXXI, 300-2; Demargne, Fouilles & Mallia: Nicropoles (Etudes Cretoises, VII, Paris, 1945), 65-9. 2 Smith, AJA., XLIX (1945). 23-4. 4 Hutchinson, Antiquity, XXII (1948), 61-3. 21 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION Period Abbreviation and Subdivision Absolute Date Knossos East Crete B.C. Early Minoan E.M.I E.M.II E.M.III E.M.III ? ? 2000 Middle Minoan M.M.I I85O M.M.II M.M.I M.M.III M.M.III I7OO Late Minoan L.M.I 1550 L.M.I. L.M.II1 1450 L.M.III(A) L.M.III(A) I4OO L.H.III(B) 1300 L.H.III(C) 1200 No attempt can be made here to evoke in a few pages an adequate picture of Minoan civilization. We must content ourselves with a brief outline of the economic development and some reference to the indus- trial products that are relevant for comparative purposes. As in neolithic times the foundations of Minoan economy were fishing, the breeding of cattle, goats, and pigs (sheep are not osteologic- ally attested till Late Minoan times)2 and the cultivation of unidentified cereals together with olives and other fruits. But now specialized craftsmen—jewellers, coppersmiths, lapidaries—must have been sup- ported by the surplus produce of the peasantry. And so in addition to rural hamlets, larger agglomerations of population must be assumed though no Early Minoan township has been fully excavated. Soundings at Vasilild3 in East Crete and beneath the palace of Knossos give hints of the existence of complexes of rectangular houses of brick and timber on stone foundations, like the contemporary towns of Anatolia and Mainland Greece. But even as late as M.M.I we find the rural population living in isolated house-complexes more reminiscent of a big farm than even a village. A dwelling of that period at Chamaizi4 was an oval walled enclosure, measuring 20 m. by 12 m. and divided by radial walls into eleven compartments—exactly like the Iron Age courtyard houses and wheel dwellings of Western Britain! Similar conclusions might be drawn from the graves. The standard 1 A diorite amphora, bearing the cartouche of Thothmes III (1500-1447) from a L.M.II tomb near Herakleion, gives new precision to this dating; Kretika Chronika, VI (i953)* ii- 3 Hazzadakis, Tylissc• .$? /’' ^ - r:--: r-'lroenne (1921), 77. 3 Described in Boyd :. v. >. =, :..: ? ;. 4 Evans, P. of M., I, 147. 22
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SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS Stellmoor was just a temporary camp where the Ahrensburg hunters spent summer and autumn, retreating presumably farther south to winter. Their ancestors should doubtless be sought among the Eastern Gravettians; "Lyngby axes" had in fact been used in late pleistocene times in Moravia,1 Hungary, and Romania.1 2 At the same time flint axes were already being used in South Russia.3 The Ahrensburg folk were, however, not the direct or sole ancestors of the Forest tribes who did develop an effective wood-working equip- ment. These can most clearly be recognized at Star Carr in Yorkshire near Scarborough.4 There in Pre-Boreal times about 7500 b.c. (accord- ing to a radio-carbon estimate) used to winter a band of four "house- holds” of hunter-fishers on the banks of an extinct lake. They fished from a rough platform of birch trunks sloping down into the mere. They had felled the trees with chipped flint celts, edged by a tranchet blow—i.e. a blow at right angles to the main axis of the flint; both the celts and the flakes detached in resharpening them were found lying between the logs. Game—elk, red deer, and wild ox—and the birds were slain with arrows or darts tipped with geometric microliths; fish speared with leisters. The barbed prongs of the latter, usually called harpoons, were fashioned on strips neatly carved from stags’ antlers by the groove- and-splinter technique inherited from the Aurignacian,5 but in form foreshadow the classical Maglemosian bone points of the Boreal period. To aid them in the chase as disguises or to ensure an ampler supply of game in magic ceremonies the hunters wore frontlets carrying the antlers cut from stags’ skulls. Similar Forest folk must have been spread all over Northsealand and perhaps farther east, but are directly attested only in Denmark by distinctive flints. Certainly by Boreal times the Forest folk had spread all over the still unbroken North European plain from Southern England to Fin- land, and had achieved a very nice adjustment to their environment of pine woods, interrupted only by lakes and rivers. While hunting expeditions brought the widely scattered groups into contact from time to time, fishing beside streams and meres encouraged more per- manent encampment so that equipment was already being differen- tiated locally to meet divergent conditions. Within the larger con- tinuum local facies or cultures can be distinguished in England, 1 In the Magdalenian levels of the Pekarna cave and in the contemporary camp of Pavlovce near Dolni VSstonice. 2 Dacia, V-VI (1934-35), 12, pi. Ill; cf., Antiquity, XVI (1942), 259. 3 At Kostienki I; KS , XXXI (1950), 168. 4 Clark, G., Star Carr (Cambridge, 1954). 3 APL., IV (1955), 195 f- 9 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION Denmark, North Germany,1 the East Baltic2 (Kunda), and perhaps the Norwegian coast. But the Maglemose near Mullerup and other classic sites in Zealand supply material for an adequate picture, applic- able with modifications to the rest. These were summer-camps, submerged each winter, whither men repaired for hunting, fowling, fishing, and nut-gathering. To secure I 5 6 8 Fig. 6. Maglemosian types from Zealand. 1-3, 7-8 (£); 4 (§); 5-6 ($). food they had devised or perfected a highly efficient equipment— for hunting, bows3 of elm wood reinforced with sinews from which were shot wooden arrows armed with geometric microliths inserted into grooves on the shaft or merely gummed on with birch-pitch,4 slotted bone points, also armed with small flints (Fig. 6, 3), and clubs with spheroid or spiked stone heads perforated by percussion. Their still more specialized fishing tackle5: leisters with several kinds of barbed bone prongs (Fig. 6, 1-2; cf. Fig. 105, 6), bone fish-hooks, nets 1 Clark, Northern Europe (1936); cf. Childe, PCBL, 26-8. 2 Indreko, "Die mittlere Steinzeit in Estland”, K. V. H. A. Akademiens, Handlingar, LXVI (Stockholm, 1948); SMYA., LVII (1956) (the Askola culture). 3 FNA. (1945), 63-5. 1 Arsberattelse (1951), 123-36. 8 Clark, Preh. Eur., 42-8. 10 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS of lime bast with pine bark floats and ingenious wicker weels (traps). For killing fur-bearing animals with minimum damage to the pelts they employed conical wooden arrow-heads which east of the Baltic were translated into bone (Fig. 105); there an antler pick had been specialized for breaking the ice. Bone needles were made for netting, flint gravers for cutting bone, small disc scrapers (Fig. 6, 4) for dressing skins, and split boars’ tusks for knives. The wood-worker was now provided with chisels of antler, socketed chisels made from marrow bones of large game (Fig. 6, , perforated antler adzes, and flint core- axes (Fig. 6, 5) or exceptionally flake-axes (Fig. 6, 6) mounted as adze-blades in perforated antler sleeves (Fig. 6, 7). East of the Baltic, where flint was scarce, the adze-blades were pebbles sharpened, like the antler tools, by grinding. In England the flake-axe was still un- known. Communications were maintained most easily by water in boats, presumably of skins, which have not survived, though the paddles that propelled them are extant. For land transport over the winter snows sledges were available east of the Baltic.1 Dogs of a wolfish type were everywhere domesticated and may be the ancestors of modem sledge- dog breeds. The electrical properties of amber had already been recog- nized as a magic virtue so that the substance was collected in Den- mark. .Esthetic satisfaction was obtained by decorating bone imple- ments with geometric patterns, generally outlined by a series of points in the so-called drill-technique. Remarkably exact replicas of the Maglemosian bone equipment have been recovered from undated levels of peat bogs in the Urals, but these can hardly be used to document an eastern origin for the Maglemosians; Briusov2 suggests that a common southern origin for both the Baltic and Uralian groups would adequately explain the agreements. An eastward spread would seem more likely; for the Magle- mosian is a natural development of the Pre-Boreal cultures of North- sealand. So too the Komsa and Fosna cultures, represented by assem- blages of stone tools (including tranchet celts) from high strands on the Norwegian coasts,3 must be due to a simultaneous coastwise spread from the same region.4 The marine transgression that ushered in the Atlantic phase broke up the unity of the Forest cultures and offered new opportunities to 1 A runner was recovered from a Boreal peat in Finland, SM., XXXVTII-XXXIX (1931-2), 60; XLI, 121; XLII, 22. 2 OUerM, 146-8, 168-9; he would derive the Kunda culture from the east but not the west Baltic Maglemosian. 8 Bee and Nummedal, Le FinnmarMen (Oslo, 1936). 4 Freundt, “Komsa, Fosna, Sandarna”, Acta Arch., XIX (1948), 4-55, but cf. SMYA., LVII. II DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION certain groups. Rich oyster banks combined with sealing and sea- fishing allowed communities to settle down at sheltered spots along the Danish and South Swedish coasts. The Ertebslle culture represents an appropriate adjustment.1 The sites are marked by huge shell-heaps (that may be 100 yards long and 30 yards wide), the refuse of a more sedentary population. The exposure of new deposits of superior flint resulted in an increasing substitution of flint for bone in making heavy tools. Flake-axes were preferred to picks, plump green-stone axes were sometimes made by grinding, as earlier in the East Baltic, but perfor- ated antler axes2—no longer adzes—and sleeves for axes were still Fig. 7. Ertebolle pot, antler axes and bone combs, Denmark (£). made. The only microliths manufactured were transverse arrow-heads. Fish were not speared with harpoons but caught with hook and line. The sedentary life permitted the manufacture of pottery in the form of large jars with pointed bases and troughs that may have been used as blubber lamps. A taste for personal adornment is indicated by bone combs and armlets. The dead were buried extended in the middens,3 generally without grave goods, occasionally wrapped in a birch-bark shroud4 and laid upon a bier, or once apparently cremated.5 On the other hand, human bones, broken up just like those of game, afford good evidence for cannibalism.6 1 Clark, Northern Europe, 138-56, but cf. now Acta Arch., VIII (1937), 278-94; Mathiassen, “Bopladsen Dyrholmen”, K. Dansk. Videns. Selskabs, Ark.-Kunsthist. Skrifter, I, 1 (1942); Bagge and Kjellmark, Siretorp.; "Aamose”, 136-44; and Althin, Scania. 2 These “axes” and the earlier "adzes” would not be much good for chopping, since the shafts actually preserved are hazel stems not over 2 cm. thick though as much as 50 cm. long; Mathiassen, “Dyrholmen”, 24. a Brondsted, Danmarks, i, 115; round heads exceeded long heads in the ratio of 3 to 2, ibid., 123. 4 FNA. (1945), 6. 5 Sellerod Bogen (1946), 33. Degerbol, in Mathiassen, "Dyrholmen”, 118-20. 12 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS Now a local invention of pottery cannot be a priori ruled out and ground stone adzes had been made in Boreal times (p. n). So the Erteb0lle culture as just described could be regarded as an auto- chthonous adjustment of the native culture of the Boreal phase—if not of the classical Maglemosian as illustrated in the lakeside camps, at least of its hypothetical counterpart as developed on the now sub- merged coasts of Northsealand. However, in 1953 Troels-Smith1 showed that bones of domestic cattle and sheep or goats, and sherds bearing imprints of naked barley and of emmer and hexaploid wheats, do occur in several Ertebplle middens in Denmark that are dated by pollen- analysis to the Atlantic phase, while weeds of cultivation were already growing in their vicinity. Accordingly some Ertebplle folk were not mere food-gatherers, but farmers cultivating the soil and keeping domestic animals, tethered and stalled and not allowed to graze freely. Moreover, the earliest “neolithic” pots—Becker's A funnel-beakers— were made by the same technique and found on the same sites as the coarse “mesolithic” jars and troughs. As there were no wild sheep or goats to tame in Denmark nor wild cereals to cultivate, an actual infiltration of neolithic farmers must be admitted in Denmark already. Their stock and grains point unam- biguously to the south-east, their diffusion forms a major theme in subsequent chapters. Meanwhile a pure continuation of the old gather- ing economy can be traced round the North Sea and the Baltic. While the coastal populations thus took advantage of a new environ- ment, the communities inhabiting Norway, Central Sweden, the East Baltic lands and even the interior of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein remained true to the Boreal way of life and preserved much of the old equipment—particularly harpoons or, as in the Gudenaa culture of Jutland,1 2 geometric microliths—throughout the greater part of the Atlantic phase. Similar survivals to the south and east maybe inferred from geometric microliths collected in Southern Sweden3 and Poland.4 To the West the culture of Lower Halstow on the Thames estuary,5 dated botanically to Atlantic times, with its flake-axes provides a good parallel to Danish Erteb0lle in its mesolithic aspect. The Horsham culture of Southern England6 characterized by core-axes and many microliths should be partly contemporary though the absence of flake- axes and the archaism of the microliths might suggest an earlier date. 1 Aarbsger (1953)- 5-62. 2 Mathiassen, Aarbeger (1937). 8 Althin, Scania, 159; Fv. (1944). 257-79- 4 WA., XX (1954), 23-66; at Janislavice (Skierniewice Dist.) a sitting skeleton showing Lapponoid features is assigned to this phase. 5 Clark, Northern Europe, 158. 8 Childe, PCBI., 28. 13 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION In Scotland an antler axe found with a stranded whale in the Atlantic estuary of the Forth above Stirling1 and similar implements from Obanian sites farther west are in good Erteb0lle traditions. How far to the south-west the Forest culture had spread in Atlantic times before it was overlaid or transformed by immigrant neolithic farmers cannot yet be determined. The famous site of Le Campigny, Seine Inferieure, once the patent station for a mesolithic culture, now proves to be the hilltop settlement of fully neolithic Western farmers (p. 305).1 2 The mesolithic cultures just described prove the continued occupation of large tracts of Europe from the glorious days of mammoth-hunting and the existence there of sparse but vigorous populations that could expand when the introduction of cereals and domestic stock offered an enlarged food supply. They may, moreover, be credited with positive contributions to later cultures that must be adapted to a like environ- ment. Most conspicuously had the Forest folk perfected an apparatus for exploiting the natural resources of their habitat, items of which survive to the present day where the environment has persisted. Fish-traps and leisters, structurally identical with those devised in Boreal times, are still used by fishermen round the Baltic—a striking example of a craft tradition persisting locally for some eight thousand years. So they had discovered the process of making birch-pitch, an artificial material still used by the peasants of the region.3 Forest folk had perfected an efficient kit of wood-working tools and in particular the ingenious tranchet technique for edging flint chopping-tools. That is not to say that this technique was diffused from Northern Europe to Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and the Solomon Islands, where it was certainly applied. It had in fact been anticipated in the late Acheulian cleavers of the Lower Palaeolithic and in the rare Moustierian coupons of the last Ice Age.4 The positive contributions made by Swiderians, Azilians, Asturians, and the diverse groups here termed Tardenoisian are less well documented, but surely not altogether negligible. But by themselves none of the food-gatherers of temperate Europe could turn into food-producers. Is it not significant that mesolithic cultures are most richly represented in regions remote from the oldest historical centres of civilization and the native habitat of wild cereals and wild sheep? Whatever part mesolithic folk may have formed in neolithic populations, the flocks of sheep and the seeds of grain on which the new economy was based were not carried by wind or intertribal barter, but brought by actual immigrant shepherds and cultivators. 1 Clark, Preh. Eur., 65. 2 But cf. Nougier, Les Civilisations campigniennes (Paris, 1950). 3 Clark, Preh. Eur., 208-9. 4 Peyrony, Prehist., Ill, 17. 14 CHAPTER II THE ORIENT AND CRETE The now desiccated zone of North Africa and Hither Asia had been grassy prairie when Northern Europe was tundra or ice-sheet. On the upland steppes of South-West Asia grew wild grasses which under cultivation became barleys and wheats—the ancestor of one-corn wheat (Triticum monococcum) from the southern Balkans to Armenia and wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoides) from Palestine to Iran.1 Sheep and cattle fit for domestication were roving there too. In such an environment human societies could successfully adopt an aggressive attitude to surrounding nature and proceed to the active exploitation of the organic world. At Jarmo in Kurdistan2 the inhabitants of a little hilltop village were cultivating emmer and barley that already exhibit some effects of domestication as early as 4750 B.c. In Palestine where the meso- lithic Natufians had been reaping annual grasses,3 farming may have started before 6000 b.c. at Jericho.4 But neither at Jarmo nor at Jericho did the first farmers make pottery. Stock-breeding and the cultivation of cereals were revolutionary steps in man’s emancipation from dependence on the external environ- ment. They put man in control of his own food-supply so far that population could—and did—expand beyond the narrow limits imposed by the naturally available supply of wild fruits and game. But the expansion of population led by its very conditions to the expansion of the revolutionaries themselves—the primitive half-sedentary farmers —or their transmutation by a second revolution into a settled peasantry producing surplus food-stuffs for its own surplus offspring who had become artisans and traders, priests and kings, officials and soldiers in an urban population. The second revolution was accomplished first in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. There irrigation cultivation had produced a surplus vast enough to support the whole superstructure of literate civilization. By 3000 b.c. archaeology and written history reveal Mesopotamians and Egyptians already grouped in vast cities 1 On the cereals see Helbaek, Inst. Arch. All., IX (1953), 44-52. a Braidwood, R. Antiquity, XXIV (1950), 190-6. 3 Childe, NLMAE., 28-30. i Antiquity, XXX (1956), 196. 15
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CHAPTER I
SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
Despite a startling refinement of industrial equipment and a masterly graphic art, Pleistocene Europe altogether lacked civilization in the economic sense. During the last Ice Age collective hunts on open steppes and tundras in South Russia, Moravia, and France yielded such plenteous and reliable supplies of mammoth, reindeer, bison, and horse flesh, that the hunters could establish relatively permanent camps and enjoy leisure to cultivate art. But they remained, none the less, pure food-gatherers, dependent on what the environment offered them. With the passing of glacial conditions, the old herds vanished; forest, invading the open lands, rendered obsolete the familiar tech- nique of communal hunting, and so the culture based thereon shrivelled and decayed. Indeed, last century it appeared that Europe, abandoned by reindeer- and mammoth-hunters, was left an empty wilderness for neolithic immigrants to subdue to pasturage and tillage.
Forty years’ researches have erased the last outlines of that picture. Archaeologists have discovered the remains left by various communities occupying Europe continuously since the close of the Ice Age, but still lacking the hall-marks of neolithic civilization. Their remains consti- tute cultures that are termed mesolithic, because in time—but only in time—they occupy a place between the latest palaeolithic and the oldest neolithic cultures. At the same time botanists and geologists have defined more precisely the changes in environment to which the meso- lithic cultures were adaptations. Modern vegetation was only slowly established in the glacial landscape; a temperate climate did not abruptly replace an arctic one.
In Northern Europe phases in the colonization of the once frozen plains by forest trees have been determined with great precision by pollen-analysis (i.e. a quantitative study of the pollen grains preserved principally in peat mosses).1 The first immigrants were birches and willows, then come pines, later the hazel, soon followed by elms, limes, and oaks—the mixed oak woods—lastly, in Denmark, the beech. But of course the composition of a forest is profoundly affected by topo- graphical and geological as well as climatic factors so that even on the North European plain itself the local variations are large and significant.
1 Zeuner, F. E., Dating the Past (London, 1954), summarizes the evidence conveniently.
A I DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
Stages in the gradual amelioration of climate can also be distinguished, largely on the basis of the same botanical evidence. In North Europe the long late glacial phase passed over eventually into a cold conti- nental “Pre-Boreal phase” when birches and a few pines began to colonize the tundra. This in turn gave place to a Boreal period, still continental but characterized by summers longer and warmer than to-day, but severe snowy winters. Next a relatively abrupt increase of rainfall and westerly winds affected North-Western Europe without reducing the average annual temperature, so that the climate of Denmark was really Atlantic, and mixed oak woods attained a maxi- mum extension at the cost of pine woods. In Britain, on the contrary, excessive rain and wind caused deforestation in exposed areas. Gradu- ally the course of the Atlantic storms shifted again, allowing a second period of forest growth in England but inducing some contraction on the Continent. This phase, still warmer than to-day, is termed the Sub-Boreal. It ultimately ended with the onset of modem cold wet weather in an exaggerated form in the so-called Sub-Atlantic phase. Of course, the terms Boreal, Atlantic and so on are not strictly applic- able to Switzerland or South Germany and are meaningless in Mediter- ranean lands: they were devised in Denmark and Sweden, where alone they are accurately descriptive.
In the meanwhile the distribution of land and water was also changing. The release of the vast volumes of water locked up in glaciers during the Ice Age produced a general, if gradual, rise in sea-level or marine transgression, but this was offset in the north, where the accumulations of ice had been deepest and heaviest, by an “isostatic” re-elevation of the earth’s crust that had been depressed by their weight. While much of the North Sea basin was still dry land, or at least fen (Northsealand!), uniting England to the Continent, Scotland and Scandinavia were thus depressed by the weight of the Ice masses. The Baltic depression was occupied by a frozen sea, communicating with the Arctic Ocean and termed the Yoldia Sea. The rebound of the earth's crust on the melting of the superincumbent ice raised strips of the Scottish coast above their present relative level and isolated the Baltic depression; it was occupied by the Ancylus Lake, rendered slightly brackish by a small inflow of salt water across Central Sweden. At the end of Boreal times the continued rise of sea-level flooded the North Sea basin and salt water poured into the Baltic depression, forming the Litorina Sea, larger and salter than the modem Baltic. England was completely separated from the Continent, while in Scot- land whales could swim up the enlarged Forth estuary to above Stirling. The resultant extension of the area occupied by warm salt SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
water was perhaps the cause of the shift in storm tracks that brought about the Atlantic phase of climate in the North. But north of a line that runs through Southern Zealand and County Durham the isostatic re-elevation of the land has continued so that the shore line of Atlantic times is now represented by the “25 ft. raised beach” in North Britain and corresponding raised strands round the Baltic. Nevertheless some time elapsed before this local re-elevation of the land overtook the general rise in sea-level, so that in marginal areas like Denmark and East Anglia several local transgressions can be distinguished. In Denmark and Southern Sweden, in fact, four have to be admitted— the first at the beginning of the Atlantic phase, the last, and sometimes the greatest, during early Sub-Boreal times,1 coinciding with Northern Neolithic III a and b (p. 176).
This changing environment constitutes for the archaeologist a pro- visional chronological framework, but contemporary men had to adjust their cultures to it. To small groups of food-gatherers the temperate forests offered greater facilities for picking up a bare liveli- hood without intensive social co-operation or a highly specialized kit-bag than had the bleak hunting-grounds of the Ice Age. Mesolithic groups appear in general isolated and poorly equipped in contrast to Magdalenians or Pfedmostians. But all had acquired, or themselves domesticated, dogs whose co-operation would be of greatest assistance to man precisely in the pursuit of the smaller, less gregarious game of the new woodland. Everywhere the collection of nuts, snails, and shell-fish played a conspicuous part in the new economy. Several of the mesolithic cultures are clearly just the responses of palaeolithic survivors to the new environment.
The Swiderian culture,2 represented by assemblages of small flint tools collected from sand-dunes in Russia and Poland, sometimes under fossil turf-lines of Atlantic age, is characterized by small asymmetrically
Fig. i. Swiderian flint implements, Poland. After Kozlowski (£).
1 “Aamosen” (1943), 162; Arsberattelse (1937-38), 36-96; cf. New Phytologist, XL1V (1944), 64.
2 Confined effectively to the woodland zone; KS., XXXI (1950), 96-110; LIX, 7-9; cf. Clark (1936), 62.
3 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
tanged-points (Fig. i) used presumably as arrow-heads, but morpho- logically descended from the large dart-heads used by the South Russian mammoth-hunters. Such was their ultimate response to the extinction of the mammoth.
Descendants of the Franco-Cantabrian Magdalenians, who combined with hunting and collecting fishing with the harpoon in the ancestral manner, created the Azilian culture.1 The Azilians, like their ancestors, lived by preference in caves where they buried their dead too.2 The famous cave of Ofnet in Bavaria contained a nest of twenty-one skulls, buried without the trunks, but not belonging certainly to Azilians. Because eight of the skulls were brachycranial, anthropologists used to think that the burial indicated the immigration of a new race into Europe, but now admit that at least a tendency to round-headedness existed among Upper Palaeolithic Europeans.3 The Azilians’ equipment seems poor. The type fossil is the harpoon of red-deer’s antler (Fig. 2), flat and clumsy in comparison with the ancestral Magdalenian instru- ment of reindeer antler. Flint blades and gravers persist, but tend to be diminutive. The cores could be used for wood-working, but were not specialized into axes. However, some heavy wedge-like tools from the
Fig. 2. Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and Azilian harpoons and painted pebbles from Ari&ge (f).
cave of Bize (Aude) may denote responses to the needs of primitive carpentry. And in the Falkenstein cave, Hohenzollem, a ground stone celt was found mounted in an antler sleeve with seemingly typical Azilian harpoons.4 But now similar harpoons5 have turned up with geometric microliths in a Tardenoisian layer in the Birsmatten cave in the Swiss Jura so that all the Alpine-Jura “Azilian” may really be Tardenoisian and so at best “late mesolithic”. The only reminiscences
1 Obermaier, Fossil Man in Spain (1925), 340!; PPS., XX (1954), 193-210.
2 E.g. in Axtege, L’Anfhr., XXXVIII (1928), 235.
3 See C. S. Coon, Races of Europe (1939), 35-6, 67-8.
4 Germania, XVIII (1934), 81-8.
5 Jb. Bernischen Hist. Mus., XXXIV (1954), 197-8.
4 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
of Magdalenian art are highly conventionalized figures painted on pebbles.
The cave deposits suggest that the Azilians lived in very small and generally isolated communities; their isolation was not, however, complete, since shells of Columbella rusticana, imported from the Medi- terranean, reached the Falkenstein cave. Some sort of boat must have been available, since Azilians encamped on small islands. Azilian encampments are found on the slopes of the Cantabrian mountains and the Pyrenees, of the Massif Central, the Jura, Vosges, Black Forest, and Alpine foothills, and finally on the south-west coast of Scotland. But the industry here is distinctive enough to be regarded as a new culture, "the Obanian",1 not certainly descended from the French Azilian. In South France the Azilian succeeds the Magdalenian almost immediately, presumably in Boreal times; the Scottish sites are situated above the 25-ft. beach and must be Atlantic in age. The discrepancy might indicate the slow rate of migration by short stages presumably along tracts of coast now submerged.
Descendants of the local Aurignacians created a very similar culture in early post-glacial times in the Crimea1 2 and Transcaucasia. They too lived in caves and buried the dead therein either in the contracted position or extended. They had tamed a local wolf or jackal to help them in the chase. In the Crimea harpoons of bone, but of Azilian form, and slotted points armed with flints as in the Forest cultures, appear late. Geometric microliths, at first triangles and lunates, later also trapezes, were made and that even in layers that contain pottery and polished celts and so look formally neolithic.3
The Tardenoisian culture survives in the archaeological record almost entirely in the form of pigmy flints or microliths, ingeniously worked into regular geometrical shapes—triangles, rhombs, trapezes, and crescents—or into microgravers (Fig. 3) that may be a by-product in their manufacture.4 These do not really define a single culture, but represent several disparate industries.5 As the latter can only be dis- tinguished statistically, all will here be grouped together under the rather misleading term Tardenoisian. All microliths were presumably parts of composite tools of wood or bone, but no one knows why the little blades should be so carefully trimmed. Their makers camped exclusively on sandy soils6 that would be lightly wooded, and sheltered at first
1 Movius, H., The Irish Stone Age (Cambridge, 1942), 180 ft.
2 HanSar, Kaukasiens, 116-26, 148-50, 194-206; SA., I, 195-212; V, 160-75, 299; for the fauna MIA., XXXIX (1953). 460-2.
8 SA., V, 97-100; KS., IV (1940), 29.
4 Clark, Meso. Britain, 97-103.
5 PPS., XXI (1955). 14-19. 8 Clark (1936), 190-4.
5 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
often in caves, but also in flimsy huts1 partly sunk into the sandy soil. At Muge1 2 on the Tagus and on Teviec and Hoedic, two tiny islets off the coast of Morbihan,3 Tardenoisians settled on the open shore, hunting and collecting shell-fish and leaving mounds composed of the
Fig. 3. Geometric microliths (2-5) and microgravers (1) from Franconia. After Gumpert (f).
debris of their repasts. Skeletons, some brachycranial, were buried in these midden heaps in the contracted attitude. On Teviec and Hoedic a little cairn was heaped over each of the corpses, which were sprinkled with ochre; some were covered with a sort of crown of stags’ antlers. In the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide,4 too, was a mesolithic —perhaps more Azilian than Tardenoisian—cemetery of ten graves, each containing an extended adult, twice accompanied by an infant, lying on a bed of ochre.
A tendency to reduce the size of flint blades was common to most Upper Palaeolithic industries. It led to the production of geometric forms already in the Gravettian of France and Italy,5 while at Parpallo in Eastern Spain6 even microburins occur from the Solutrian layers upward. This tendency was perhaps more marked in the Mediterranean environment than on the steppes and tundras of periglacial Europe and strongest in North Africa. There a profusion of geometric micro-
1 Clark (1936), 198; Antiquity, XI (1937), 477; Gumpert, Frank. Mesolithikum (Mannus Bibliothek, 40), 14-27.
2 Obermaier, op. cit., p. 324; Breuil and Zbyszewski, "Revision des industries de Muge”, Communicagoes dos Servicios geologicos, XXVIII (Lisbon, 1947); Roche, J., L'lndustrie du Cabego d'Amoreira {Muge) (Porto, 1951).
3 Pequart, Boule and Vallois, Teviec, IPH., Mem. 18 (1937), with important section on mesolithic races; Pequart, M. and St. J., Hoedic (Anvers, 1954).
4 Riv. St. Lig., XII (1946), 36-7.
6 L’Anthr., XLIX (1939-40), 702; Riv. St. Lig. XIV (1948). 16-19.
* Pericot, La Cueva del Parpalld (Madrid, 1942), 67, 92.
6 SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS
liths characterizes the middens and other deposits of the later Capsian culture. Moreover, these Capsians buried their dead in the middens. Some Tardenoisians may then be immigrants, driven north by the incipient desiccation of the Sahara at the close of the European Ice
Fig. 4. Microliths from Muge, Portugal, and transverse arrow-head shafted from Denmark (f).
Age. The flints from such sites as the cave of La Cocina in Eastern Spain are indeed virtually identical with the late Capsian.1 The top- most layers of this cave yielded “Almerian” pottery which we shall see (p. 268) represents a neolithic of Capsian tradition. It does not follow that all makers of “Tardenoisian microliths” were recent immigrants from Africa. Such microliths are found in most parts of France, Britain, Belgium, South Germany, Poland, and the Pontic Steppes; most are derivatives of local Upper Palaeolithic industries, and had emerged in Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany by Boreal times.2 But in both Britain3 and France,4 and probably too in south- west Germany5 and Portugal,6 Tardenoisians still survived, retaining their primitive economy and microlithic traditions in industry, when a neolithic or even a Bronze Age economy had already been established among neighbouring groups. And certain Tardenoisian types—trapezes and lunates—used by later communities in the Peninsula, France, and South Russia, may denote the absorption of Tardenoisian hunters by food-producing peoples. Microlithic must not be mistaken for mesolithic. On the other hand, isolated bones of sheep, reported exceptionally from pure Tardenoisian layers, otherwise pre-neolithic,7 suggest the possibility that the term Tardenoisian may include some
1 Vaufrey, L’Afrique, 413.
2 Clark (1936), 211-13.
3 Ibid., 217; 1932, 51.
4 E.g. at Sauveterre (Lot-et-Garonne) Tardenoisian microliths were associated with finger-tipped cordoned pottery and tanged and barbed arrowheads, Conlanges, IPH. Mem. 14 (1935), 26.
6 Chile, Danube, 18.
6 Sherds of decorated “cave” pottery were found at least in the upper levels of the midden.
7 Lacam, et al., Le Gisement misolithique du Cuzoul, IPH .Mem. 21 (1944), 11; Pequart, et al., Teviec, IPH .Mem. 18 (1937), 101 • At Mas d’Azil even un tas de bU was once mentioned.
7 DAWN OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION
early immigrant sheep-breeders who made no pots nor ground stone celts.
Asturian1 is the term applied to the culture of strandloopers who succeeded the Azilians on the coasts of North Spain and appear in Portugal too. They lived very largely on shell-fish during a period of greater rainfall than the present and are characterized in the archaeo- logical record by a pick-like tool formed by chipping a beach pebble to a rough point.
Though inhabiting wooded countries, none of the communities so far described give any sign of a sustained effort to master this element in their environment by the elaboration of specialized carpenter’s tools. Peoples occupying the forested plain of North Europe, on the contrary, did develop adzes and axes for dealing with timber. To emphasize this adaptation to their environment they may be grouped together as the Forest folk. Their ancestors had advanced as far north as Jutland before the end of Pre-Boreal times. The pioneers in the colonization were known down till 1936 only by stray discoveries of “ Lyngby axes”—reindeer antlers on which the brow tine has been trimmed to form an adze or an axe edge, or the socket for a flint blade (Fig. 5),
Fig. 5. "Lyngby axe” of reindeer antler, Holstein (£).
which, however, are ill-adapted for chopping and were doubtless used as clubs. In 1936 a camp of reindeer-hunters who used them was located on the banks of a shallow mere at Stellmoor near Hamburg and revealed the content of the Ahrensburg culture.2 The reindeer were killed with wooden arrows smoothed on grooved stone straighteners (like Fig. 113) and tipped with asymmetrically tanged flint points; game or fish were speared with barbed harpoons made on strips roughly wrenched from reindeers’ antlers.
A reindeer’s skull, mounted on a post, was planted on the shore like a totem pole.
1 Obermaier, op. tit., 349-58; Pericot, Hist. Espaiia.
z Rust, A., Die alt- and miUtlsteinzeitliche Funde von Stellmoor (Neumunster, 1943).
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The Dawn of European Civilization By V. GORDON CHILDE https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.4614311923 By V. GORDON CHILDE D.Litt., D.Sc. Professor of Prehistoric European Archeology, University of London LONDON ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD BROADWAY HOUSE: 6S-74 CARTER LANE. E.C.4 First Edition 1925 Second Edition 1927 CONTENTS Chapter I. SURVIVALS OF FOOD-GATHERERS .... i II. The Orient and Crete ..... 15 III. Anatolia the Royal Road to the Aegean 35 IV. Maritime Civilization in the Cyclades . 48 V. From Village to City in Greece 57 VI. Farming Villages in the Balkans . 84 VII. Danubian Civilization ..... 105 VIII. The Peasants of the Black Earth 136 IX. Culture Transmission over the Eurasian Plain? 148 X. The Northern Cultures ..... 175 XI. Survivals of the Forest Culture . 203 XII. Megalith Builders and Beaker-folk 213 XIII. Farmers and Traders in Italy and Sicily 229 XIV. Island Civilizations in the Western Mediterranean 252 XV. The Iberian Peninsula . . . . 265 XVI. Western Culture in the Alpine Zone . 287 XVII. Megalith Builders in Atlantic Europe . 303 XVIII. The British Isles ...... 322 XIX. Retrospect: The Prehistory of European Society 341 Notes on Terminology ..... 353 Abbreviations ....... • 354 Books ........ • 358 FIG. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SWIDERIAN FLINT IMPLEMENTS, POLAND {after KoztOWSki) Magdalenian harpoon from Cantabria and Azilian harpoons AND PAINTED PEBBLES FROM ArI^GE ..... Geometric microliths and microgravers from Franconia {after Gumpert) ......... Microliths from Muge, Portugal, and transverse arrow- head SHAFTED FROM DENMARK .............. "Lyngby axe” of reindeer antler, Holstein Maglemosian types from Zealand ...... ERTEB0LLE POT, ANTLER AXES AND BONE COMBS, DENMARK . Neolithic figurines from Crete and their relatives {after Evans) .......... Early Minoan III "teapots” and button seal {after Evans) . The Minoan "Mother Goddess” and {left) Horns of Consecra- tion, from a sealing {after Evans) ..... Minoan axes, axe-adzes and double axe, and seal impressions {after Evans and Mon. Ant.) ....... (1) Early Minoan daggers, (2) Stone beads {after Evans) . Middle Minoan I-II daggers {after Evans) .... M.M.III RAPIERS (MyCENJE) AND L.M.I. HORNED HILT (CRETE) {after Evans) . ........ (1) Late Mycenzean short sword, (2) Middle Minoan spear- head .......... Egyptian representations of Vapheio cups .... Pottery from Thermi I-II(A) and III-IY(B) {after Lamb, BSA., XXX).................................... "Megaron” palace, Troy II . ............ Pottery from Troy II ....... Knife and daggers and gold vessels, Troy II {Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) ........ Battle-axe, gold-capped bead, and crystal pommel from Treasure L, and stray axe-adze {Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) .......... Gold earring and pendant from Treasure A, pin from Treasure D, bracelet from Treasure F, and knot-headed pins {Museum f. Vorgeschichte, Berlin) Tomb-group. Amorgos ...... Cycladic "frying-pan” and sherd showing boat . Tombs on Syros and Eubcea , page 3 4 6 7 8 10 12 18 20 25 28 29 30 31 32 33 39 40 42 42 43 45 49 50 52 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PAGE 26. Slotted spear-head (showing method of mounting), halberd AND TWEEZERS. AMORGOS ....... 53 27. Early Cycladic ornaments: Paros; Syros .... 54 28. Cycladic pottery: (i) Pelos; (2) Phylakopi I; (3) Phylakopi II (L.C.).................................................55 29. Thessalian stone axes and adzes (after Tsountas) ... 59 30. Pottery of Sesklo style, white on red and red on white (after Wace and Thompson) ....... 59 31. Neolithic figurines, Thessaly (after Wace and Thompson) . 61 32. Miniature altar or throne (after Wace and Thompson) . . 62 33. Plan of fortified village of Dimini (after Tsountas) . . 63 34. Dimini bowl and gold-ring pendant (after Tsountas) . . 64 35. Axe and battle-axes from H. Mamas (after Heurtley, BSA., XXIX).....................................................68 36. Early Helladic sauce-boat, askos, tankard, and jar . . 70 37. Early Macednic pot-forms (after Heurtley, B.S.A., XXVIII) . 71 38. Anchor Ornament, Kritsana................................... 71 39. Spear-head, knives, and dagger from M.H. graves in Thessaly (after Tsountas) ....... 73 40. Minyan pottery from Thessaly, and imitations from Thermon, JJtolia .......... 74 41. Matt-painted bowl and pithos from J£gina; and M.C. jugs from Marseilles harbour and Phylakopi .... 75 42. Matt-painted jar, Lianokladhi III (after Wace and Thompson). 76 43. Terminal and pattern-bored spacer-bead from amber neck- lace: Shaft Grave at Mycenze ...... 79 44. Mycenzean tholos tomb on Eubcea (after Papavasileiou) . . 81 45. Clay loom-weights and bone spatula of Kor6s culture . 86 46. Cruciform-footed bowl in fine Starcevo ware, and jar of rusticated Koros style . . . . . . . 87 47. Bone combs and ring-pendant, Tordos, and ‘‘harpoon’’, Vinca 89 48. "Face urn” lid from Vinca (after Vassits) .... go 49. Mug, tripod bowl, and “altar” decorated by excision, Banyata II ......... 95 50. Peg-footed vase from Denev ...... 97 51. Copper axe and adze from Gaborevo ..... 99 52. Gumelnija pottery: (i) Czernavoda; (2) Tel Metchkur; (3-4) Tel Ratchev; (5-6) Kodja Berman .... 100 53. Painted clay head, Vin£a . . . . . . .101 54. Squatting figure, bone figurines and clay phallus, Bul- garia ........... 102 55. Models of houses, Denev . . . . . . .102 56. Small Danubian I house from Saxony; the walls are marked by a double row of posts (after Sangmeister) . . .107 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. 57- 58. 59- 60. 61. 62. 63- 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 7°. 7i- 72. 73- 74. 75- 76. 77- 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85- 86. 87. 88. PAGE “Shoe-last celts” (after Seger) ...... 107 DANUBIAN I POTTERY . . . . . . . . 108 Clay block vase, Moravia . . . . . . .114 Copper trinkets and triangular axe, Jordanova (after Seger) 114 DANUBIAN II POTTERY, LENGYEL . . . . . . II5 Stroke-ornamented vases, Bohemia; Rossen vases, Central Germany .......... 117 Copper battle-axes, Hungary . . . . . .120 Copper axe-adzes and axes, Hungary . . . . .121 Knobbed mace-head, Maros Decse . . . . .122 Bodrogkeresztur pyxis and milk-jug (after Tompa) . . 122 Pins and earrings from Unetician graves (after Schrdnil) . 129 Daggers from Unetician graves (after Schrdnil) . . . 131 Hoard of Sobochleby (after Schrdnil) . . . . .131 Bronze-hilted dagger (after Schrdnil) . . . . .131 Bulb, disc, trilobate, and crutch-headed pins from later Unetician graves (after Schrdnil) ..... 133 Marschwitz and early Unetician pottery, Silesia and Bohemia (after Stockf) ......... 134 Model hut from Popudnia . . . . . . .138 Potters’ oven and model, Ariu^d (after Laszlo) . . . 140 Tripolye types (after Passeh) .....................141 Stone sceptre-head, Fedele$eni, and clay stamp, Ariu^d . 143 Usatova types (after Passek) . ...................146 Copper battle-axe, Vozdvizhenskaya, copper beads, copper spear-head, copper and bone hammer-pins . . . .151 Vases: (i) from Catacomb grave, Donetz; (2-3) from pit-graves, Yatskovice, near Kiev; (4) from Yamno grave, Donetz; (5) B FUNNEL BEAKER, DENMARK.....................I52 Transverse axe, axe-adze, knife, and gold and silver vases, CARNELIAN BEAD AND FLINT ARROW-HEADS, FROM MAIKOP barrow .......... 133 (1) Megalithic cist, Novosvobodnaya; (2) Catacomb grave, Donetz .......... 153 Pottery, weapons, tools, and pins from tomb at Novosvo- bodnaya .......... 155 Pottery and battle-axes from the Single Graves of Jutland and Sweden (after Fv, 1922) . . . . . .161 Saxo-Thuringian corded ware .......................163 Thuringian faceted battle-axe and Silesian battle-axe . 164 Zlota pottery (after Kozlowski) . . . . . .166 Fatyanovo battle-axe and Finnish boat-axe . . . 169 Fatyanovo pottery of the Moscow, Yaroslav, and CuvaS groups i 70 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PAGE 89. The Gali£ hoard . ........ 171 90. Northern flint axes arranged according to Montelius’ typology {by permission of Trustees of British Museum) . . 175 91. A-type funnel-beakers, amphora, “baking plate” {after Becker) 178 92. Tongued club-head, Denmark; polygonal battle-axe, Jordan- ova; and flint axe of Eastern type . . . . .179 93. Pottery from Danish dysser ...... 181 94. Grave 28 at Jordanova {after Seger) . . . . .182 95. Danish Passage Grave pottery of phases B and C; battle-axe AND ARROW-HEAD . . . . . . . . 184 96. Furniture of a grave at Zastow; and collared flask from GRAVE AT NaLENCZOW . . . . . . . . 188 97. Kuyavish grave, Swierczyn {after Kozlowski) . 189 98. Walternienburg vases, Latdorf drum, and Baalburg jug . 193 99. Globular amphorae from Saxo-Thuringia and Podolia, and BONE GIRDLE-CLASP FROM PODOLIA ..... I94 100. Flint daggers and Swedish cists of Montelius' IV . .197 101. Section of the Leubingen barrow............................ 200 102. Bronze-shafted halberd and halberd-blade from Leubingen barrow .......... 201 103. (1) Pit-comb ware from Karelia; (2) vase of East Swedish style from Aland Islands; (3) flint sculptures from Volosovo .......... 204 104. No ST vet and Suomusjarvi celts, and polished chisel and adze . 205 105. Maglemosian types which survive: (1-4) Esthonia {after Clark)', (5) Ukraine; (6) leister from Ural peat bog . . . 206 106. Slate knives and dart-head, Sweden, stone mace-heads, Finland, and slate pendant ...... 207 107. Knives and axe from Seim a hoard . . . . .211 108. Rock-cut tomb, Castelluccio, and corbelled tomb, Los Millares ...................................................214 109. Rock-cut tomb and naveta, Balearic Islands . . .216 no. Segmented cist, North Ireland, and Giants’ Tomb, Sardinia 217 in. Beakers: (1-2) Palmella, Portugal; (3) La Halliade, South France; (4) Villafrati, Sicily . . . . . .222 112. Beaker, wrist-guard, and associated vases, Silesia {after Seger) ........... 225 113. West European dagger (Bohemia) and flint copy (Silesia); arrow-straightener (Wiltshire); gold-leaf from wrist- guard AND COPPER AWL, BOHEMIA ..... 225 114. South Italian painted pottery: (i) and (2) black on buff, Serra d’Alto ware; (3) red and black on buff, Middle Neolithic I, Megara Hyblzea ...... 232 x FIG. ii5- 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 13°. I3I* 132- 133- 134* 135- 136. 137- 138. 139- 140. 141. 142. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Bossed bone plaque, Castelluccio (after Evans) Copper and Early Bronze Age pottery: (1-2) pit-cave, Otranto; (3) KEELED VASE WITH AXE HANDLE, “DOLMEN” OF BlSCEGLIE; (4-5) Castelluccio ware ....... View into chamber tomb, Castelluccio ..... Knife and razor, Pantalica ....... ApENNINE VASE-HANDLES AND WINGED AXE, RAZOR, PESCHIERA DAGGER, ANGLED SICKLE FROM PUNTO DEL TONNO (1) Vase of North Italian Polada type; (2) square-mouthed NEOLITHIC POT FROM ArENE CaNDIDE ..... Copper daggers and flint copies, Remedello Peschiera safety-pin (fibula)................ Plan of “temples” at Mnaidra, Malta ..... Tripod bowl, San Bartolomeo, and vase-handle of nose- bridge TYPE, ANGHELU B.UJU ...... Plan and elevation of tomb XXbis at Anghelu Ruju . Necklace from Anghelu Ruju ...... (1) Gouge, El Garcel; (2) schist adze, Portugal; (3) jar, El Garcel .......... page 235 236 237 240 243 245 246 250 253 258 259 261 268 Stages in conventionalization of parietal art in Spain {after Obermaier)) A, Maimon; B, Figuras; C, La Pileta . . . 269 Flint arrow-heads: (i) Alcala; (5) Los Millares. Halberd blades; (3) Casa da Moura; (4) Los Millares; (2) Palmella points .......... 271 “Late Neolithic” vase from Tres Cabezos, and symbol vases from Los Millares . . . . . . . .272 Ritual objects: (i) Almeria; (2 and 4) Portugal; (3) Granada 273 Copper daggers and adze, AlcalA, and bone pin, Cabeqo da Ministra. .......... 275 Plan of “neolithic” passage grave and part of the furniture, S.E. Portugal [after Leisner) ...... 277 Argaric burial-jar showing diadem, funerary vases, halberd, dagger-blades, and sword {by permission of Trustees of British Museum) .......... 283 Antler harpoon and bone arrow-head, Switzerland . . 289 Cortaillod pottery {after ‘Antiquity’) ..... 290 Plan of a house at Aichbuhl ...... 292 Michelsberg pottery ........ 294 Types of antler sleeves for axes: A-B, Lower; C, first in Middle; D, first in Upper Neolithic; Lake NeuchAtel . 296 Bone copies of Unetician pins ...... 297 Mondsee pottery ......... 300 Vase-supports in Chassey style: (i) Le Moustoir, Carnac; (2) Motte de la Garde, Charente........304 xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIG. PAGE 143. Late Chalcolithic types from Cevennian cists: (a-e) Liquisse; (f~i) Grotte d’en Quisse, Gard; (j-o) “dolmens” of Aveyron 308 144. Polypod bowl, La Halliade ....... 310 145. Statue-menhirs from Gard and sculptured tomb, Petit Morin (Marne) ......... 312 146. Horgen pot from Paris cist, and channelled pot from Conguel, Morbihan . *313 147. Arc-pendant of stone . 313 148. Passage grave, Kercado, Morbihan ..... 316 149. Breton Bronze Age vase ....... 320 150. Lop-sided, tanged-and-barbed and leaf-shaped arrow-heads 323 151. Windmill Hill pot-forms (after Piggott) ..... 324 152. Passage grave in horned cairn, 240 ft. long, Yarrows, Caithness ............................................. 327 153. Long stalled cairn, Midhowe, Rousay ..... 327 154. Gold earring ......... 330 135. Peterborough bowl from Thames, and sherds from West Kennet Long Barrow (by permission of Trustees of British Museum) .......... 333 156. Evolution of a socketed spear-head in Britain (after Green- well): (1) Hintlesham, Suffolk; (2) Snowshill, Glos.; (3) Arreton Down, Isle of Wight . . . . . -335 157. Segmented Fayence beads, Wilts (by permission of Trustees of British Museum) ......... 336 158. Food Vessels from Argyll and East Lothian . . . 337 159. Gold lunula, Ireland {by permission of Trustees of British Museum) 338 Map I—Europe in Period I ...... 348 Map II—Europe in Period II ...... 349 Map Ilia—Period III: Megalithic Tombs .... 350 Map III6—Period III: Beakers and Battle-axes . . . 351 Map IV—Period IV : Early Bronze Age Cultures and Trade Routes................................................. 352 Xll PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION When the First Edition was written as a pioneer attempt at a com- prehensive survey of European prehistory, the archaeological record was so fragmentary that a pattern could only he extracted by filling up the gaps with undemonstrable guesses. A spate of excavations, investigations and publications in the next twenty years rendered obsolete some of those speculations, enriched the record with a wealth of often quite unexpected facts, but actually complicated the picture. Since 1945 still more intense activity has doubled the available data, but in some points has simplified the scene; several formerly discrete assemblages now appear as aspects of a very few widespread cultures. Moreover, the new technique of radio-carbon dating, though still very much in the experimental stage, offers at least the hope of an inde- pendent time-scale against which archaeological events in several regions can be compared chronologically. These advances allow and demand drastic revision and re-arrangement of my text. At the same time the fresh data, as much as Mongait’s pertinent criticisms in his Introduction to the Russian translation, have induced a less dog- matically “Orientalist” attitude than I adopted in 1925. In particular the discovery that not all farmers were potters has entailed a complete revaluation of the ceramic evidence! Radio-carbon dating has indeed vindicated the Orient’s priority over Europe in farming and metallurgy. But the speed and originality of Europe’s adaptation of Oriental traditions can now be better appreciated; it should be clear why, as well as that, a distinctively European culture had dawned by our Bronze Age! Two more points should be noted. The radio-carbon dates here given, many of them unofficial, axe all subject to a margin of error of several centuries and must be regarded as tentative and provisional! Secondly, to me the Near East still means what it meant in English before 1940 and still means in American, Dutch, French and Russian. For opportunities of studying at first hand the latest finds from Eastern Europe I wish to thank the Academies of Sciences of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Roumania, the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia, and to colleagues in those countries as well as in Austria, Belgium, the British Isles, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the U.S.A. I am grateful for information on un- published finds, for reprints, drawings and photographs. Dr. Isobel Smith has very kindly read the proofs. March 1957. . V. G. C. xiii
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23
Sheep, occurrence of, 23; domesti- cated, 58-62, Pl. 6; at Anau, 85-6
Ships, rock engravings of, 224, 230 Shoe last tool, 116,118, Pl. 13. 2 and 21. 15, 132, 136, 140, 143 Sickle, criterion of, 43; Neolithic 54-6, PL 12. 5 and PL 30, 112; at Anau, 85; from the Camp de Chassey, 1595 180; Egyptian, 186; Bronze Age, 206, PL 26. 265 in Spanish art, 219 Sierra Morena, rock shelters in, 218, 219
Silver, occurrence of, 187, 190, 192, 196, 197 Siret, L., 194
Siwa oasis, sickle from, 112, Pl. 12.6 185 INDEX
242
Slate palettes, Egyptian, 187 Slugs, Neolithic implements, 112 Smith, R., 183, 184 Snail shells, evidence from, 10, 25, 26, 78
Sollas, W. J., 7
Spain, Azilian culture in, 12,13, 14; Tardenoisean culture in, 16, 18, 22, 23; Asturian culture in, 24-65 and the Beaker folk, 137, 180, 197; megaliths in, 150-2; 163; copper in, 185, 192-4; Bronze Age in, 197; rock shelter art in, 217-24; and Ireland, 228; art in prehistoric tombs in, 230-1, PI. 29 Sphagnum peat, 76 Spiennes, flint mine at, 72 Spiral, the, in Egypt, 187; in Malta, 191; in Spain, 195, 218; near San Dalmazo, 2235 at Gavr’inis, 226, PL 29. 1; in Ireland, 226, 230, PL 29. 2
Spiral-Meander pottery, 122, Pl. 15. x-4> 133
Stein, Sir Aurel, 82 Stickband9 pottery decoration, 122, PL 15. 9, 133 Stone, E. H., 184
Stonehenge, interpretation of, 177-9 Studer, T., 73 Sumerians, the, 189, 210-11 Susa, painted pottery from, 142,143,
2t6
Sussex, pigmy flints from, 19, 167 Svaerdborg, Maglemosean culture at, 31, 32, PL 4
Sweden, Mesolithic industry in, 45; celts from, 104; ‘‘comb” decora- tion in, 154; conquests by, 156-7; rock engraving in, 213, 224 Switzerland, Azilian culture in, 13; Neolithic husbandry in, 53, 93; Neolithic stock-raising in, 60-25 pile-dwellings,9r, 106,154, r6o-i; migrations into, 100; harpoons in, 119; and Danubian culture, 134 Swords, Bronze Age, 205, PL 26 Syria, Mesolithic industries in, 18
Tardenoisean culture, 10, 14-23, 132, Pl. 2; human origins, 20, 99; in England, 167-70, Pl. 23; in Africa, 185; in Spain, 192 Termini Imerese, Sicily, industries at, 18
Terremare settlements, 207 Textiles, Neolithic, 54, 935 Bronze Age, 210
Thessaly, painted pottery in, 138, 140
Thomas, H., 178 Thompson, M. S., 144 Thuringia, corded pottery in, 135, 156
Tin, occurrence of, at Anau, 86; at Troy, 190; in Brittany, 198; in Bohemia, 200; and bronze, 201 Tools, antler and bone, 6 5 Azilian, 10; Tardenoisean, 19, 235 Asturian, 24; Maglemosean, 30, 32, 36-9; Kitchen midden, 40, 42, 44, PL 5. d, e; at Anau, 85, ch. IV passim; from the Camp de Chassey, 159; Egyptian, 186; see also Har- poons
Tools, flint and stone, 6; Azilian, 10; Tardenoisean, 15-2 3; Asturian, 245 Maglemosean, 30, 32-65
Kitchen midden, 40-25 Cam- pignian, 46-7; Neolithic, 50, 67-72, ch. IV; from Central Asia, 82, 85; typology, ch. iv passim; of the Eastern Area, 132, 136; Butmir, 143; of the Northern and Western Areas, 153, 155, 158, 159; of the Swiss Lake Dwellings, 160, 1615 from Colne Valley, 164; from the River Bann, 172, Pl. 14. 3; of Long Barrows, 1735 Egyptian, 186-7; Cretan, 1885 Italian, 191; Spanish, 192, 194-6 Tools, metal, 202-6, Pl. 26, 217 Trade, prehistoric, 158, 161, 188, 191,192,198,199-200,201,206-7 Transport, 1; by water, 14,31,93~4> 224,230; by wheeled vehicles, 219, Pl. 27 3 243
index
Transylvania, painted pottery in,
Tras-os-Montes, paintings at, 230 Trephining, prehistoric, 10 r, 196 Tripolje culture, 89, 138 Trochus lineatus, evidence from, 25, 26
Troy (Hissarlik), discoveries at, 190- 1; trade with, 200; daggers at, 205 n,
“Turbary” sheep, 61, 85, 86 Typology, 99 j Neolithic, ch. rv$ Bronze Age, 202-6
Uley, “Hetty Peglers Tump,” 176
Undley, arrow-head from, 114, Pl. 11. 4
Urial, ancestor of domesticated sheep, 60-1, Pl. 6
Valle, cave of, 16 Vasconcellos, J. L. de, 232 Vassits, M. M., 144 Vega del Sella, Conde de la, 24, 49, 232
Velez Blanco, rock shelters at, 217, 219, 222
Victoria Cave, Settle, Azilian culture in, 13, 164-5, 166 Vinca, Danubian site, 134 Viollier, D., 72 Vouga, P., 160, 162
Wace, A. J. B., 144 Warcock Hill, Marsden (Yorks.), pigmy industries at, 168, Pl. 23
Warren, S. H., 73, 167, 170, 172, 184
Weber, on Sphagnum peat, 76 West Kennet, long barrow, 175 Western Area, described, 98; celts of the, 1035 pottery of the, 124, Pl. 16, 1265 culture of the, ch. Vi Wheat, Neolithic, 53, 54; at Anau,
85
Whitepark Bay, Neolithic tools at, 172
Whorl, stone, 119, Pl. 13. 5; at Anau, 855 terra-cotta, 1445 Scot- tish, 182
Wilburton hoard, the, 202 n. Wiltshire, long barrows in, 1755 beakers in, 182 Wosinski Mor, 144 Writing, invention of, 187, 189, 210
Yoldia Sea, the, 28 Yorkshire, microlithic industry in, 19, 167-705 Maglemosean culture in, 38
Zammit, T., 200
Zemljanka, the, in South Russia, 89 Zonhoven, Tardenoisean site, 14, 19 CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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